University of Toronto

Graduate Student, O I S E - History in Education

Ph.D. candidate

University of Toronto

Thesis Title: "”Location of Exchange”: A History of Aboriginal People in the Adirondacks"

About

My work is a Microhistory that focuses on the history of Aboriginal people in the Adirondacks; a bordered lands region in northeastern New York State. To Iroquoian and Algonquian-speaking people, the area was a place of resources and labour prior to and post-contact and eventually a place of refuge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The current Metanarrative of the region tells a story of the Adirondacks as “just a hunting territory” with no occupation until Euroamerican settlers entered in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed by, or sometimes following, speculators who exploited the region’s mineral and timber resources. Rich Sports and tourists began to arrive mid-century and they saved the Adirondacks from capitalist greed by the end of the 1800s which kept the landscape in a wilderness-like state to this day.
I suggest there is a rich pre- and post- contact history of Iroquoian and Algonquian-speaking people in the Adirondacks which has been overlooked. Given the diversity of use and occupation by especially Mohawk, Oneida, Mahican, and Western Abenaki nations it is difficult to call the Adirondacks a wilderness within modern history. I more broadly argue that Westerners need to think of hunting territories in a different way to encompass the complexity of its uses including seasonal and refugee-type occupation, the latter brought on by warfare during the eighteenth century and reserve life during the nineteenth. Following the American Revolution the people of Akwesasne and Odanak used the region as a hunting territory and some stayed. Competition with Euroamerican hunters and trappers was sometimes brutal and not unlike the contemporary western frontier experience of violence and removal. I propose that Western Abenaki and Mohawks laboring and living in the area began to employ traditional forms of leadership that stressed influence and diplomacy to purposefully create a strategy of cooperation with incoming settlers to construct a more peaceful space. They became “safe Indians” to work and live with and eventually for upper-class Euroamerican urbanites who wanted to have a backwoods vacation in the Adirondacks to hire as guides.
My research then turns to the region’s wilderness tourism era (c. 1830s – 1920) where mostly Mohawk from Akwesasne in New York State, Ontario, and Québec and Western Abenaki from Odanak in Québec took advantage of the period to earn a living by guiding, becoming entrepreneurs, and performing their culture through art, modeling, informing, and acting. In addition, they earned wages in a variety of resource-driven industries such as lumbering, mining, and the rail road. I examine the relationship between these Indigenous people and rural working-class Euroamericans in nineteenth century up-state New York and argue Algonquian- and Iroquoian speaking people used this space to more easily adapt first to imperial changes after the American Revolution and then to modernity. During the course of this era instead of assimilation, we see a mixing of cultures and ideas in the region which allowed many Aboriginal Adirondackers to maintain and take advantage of their Western Abenaki and Mohawk identities. I also look at Algonquin and Iroquoian individuals and families competing and toiling with rural working-class Euroamericans and the relationship between them and well-to-do tourists. I conclude that while some ethnic prejudice existed, the wealthy tourist often treated both peoples about the same and thus rural versus urban and class had as much to do with their interactions as ethnicity. I suggest that the Native people who came to live and work in the Adirondacks did so in order to maintain more of their traditions and to control their own lives for a longer period of time. By doing so, they contributed to the history of wilderness tourism in the area and controlled how especially urban, well-to-do Euroamericans perceived them. Through these exchanges, Native people reminded Euroamericans and Eurocanadians they were capable of adapting to westernized economies while maintaining their unique identity even as Whites saw them as disappearing. As a result, some, especially tourists, campers, and seasonal residents began to "Play Indian" themselves resorting to the stereotypes of the day. Iroquoian and Abenaki people used their work to educate North Americans of European descent in a multitude of ways to contradict this notion, even if they had to play to the stereotypes to get their point across. It was only after this era ended that White Americans began to forget about Aboriginal peoples’ experiences and contributions in the region. As a result, tourism, even with its stereo-typing, often played an important role for Indigenous people to safeguard their identity and in the case of the Adirondacks delayed their disappearance in the region’s historical narrative compared to other areas of the northeast. Tourist occupations offered at least limited economic, social, and political benefits for Native people and early tourism records about the Adirondacks have provided important clues to retrieve this elusive history.