Native Americans of the Northeast
The northeastern tribes of the United States and Canada are well represented in the Native American Collection. Early manuscripts include a 1765 Treaty with the Delaware, and Joseph Brant’s 1799 letter to John Johnson. Much of the history of the Stockbridge Indians, who settled temporarily in Stockbridge, Massachusetts after they were driven from territory along the Hudson River, can be traced in the library’s collection of their papers. Similarly, the library’s Passamaquoddy records illuminate the issues faced by Maine Indians in the Revolutionary War era and beyond. Early published materials shown throughout this exhibition shed light on the history of many native northeastern groups.
Other papers document native groups living in the northeast in the twentieth century. The artist and politician Joseph Keppler, whose papers are in the Native American Collection, wrote regularly to a number of friends on the Tonawanda and Cattaraugus reservations in the first half of the century. Their surviving letters to him relate details of reservation life. Keppler also corresponded with noted Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker.
Native voices speak from the Native American Collection. The Pequot autobiographer William Apess, the native poet E. Pauline Johnson, and artist Jesse Cornplanter are represented in books and other documents. Newspapers such as Akwesasne Notes (1969-1996) and Cornell’s own magazine, Native Americas (1995 to present), inform the world of native issues, while writers such as novelist and poet Joseph Bruchac and poet Maurice Kenny claim space on the library’s shelves. Today’s eastern Native Americans, along with those from all over the hemisphere, will increasingly inform Cornell’s growing collection documenting America’s native peoples.
William Apess. A Son of the Forest. New York: The author; printed by G. F. Bunce, 1831.
William Apess (1798-1839), a Pequot, was an itinerant Methodist minister who preached to communities of Native and African Americans and poor whites in New York and Connecticut. He may have been the first Native American to write and publish his autobiography, first issued in 1829, in which he articulates issues of Indian identity. He played an instrumental role the Mashpee Indians’ struggle to self-govern their Massachusetts town in 1834, publishing his account of this crisis in Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts (1835).
Jeremy Belknap and Jedidiah Morse. Report on the Oneida, Stockbridge, and Brotherton Indians, 1796.
Belknap (1744-1798) and Morse (1761-1826) were clergymen commissioned by the Scots Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge to investigate allegations about the condition of the Indians and the work of the Society’s missionaries at Oneida and New Stockbridge in New York. Their report addresses a series of questions about the health and industriousness of those on the reservation, and especially about the missionaries’ success in converting them to Christianity. So discouraged was Belknap by the missionaries’ failure in this regard that he resigned from the Society after submitting his report.
Joseph Brant. Letter to Sir John Johnson. Beach, March 17, 1799.
Joseph Brant (1742-1807), an important Mohawk chief, was firmly allied with British causes through his sister’s marriage to William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indians. Educated at Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School in Connecticut, by the 1770s he was recognized as a prominent leader of the Iroquois Confederacy. His strong allegiance to the British contributed to the rift among Confederacy members at the onset of the American Revolution, when the Oneidas and Tuscaroras decided to support the Americans. After the Revolution Brant was eventually awarded a land grant by the British at Anaquaqua, on the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. This became the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, named after Brant. He also worked on translating the Bible into the Mohawk language.
Cadwallader Colden. The History of the Five Indian Nations. London: T. Osborne, 1747.
Colden’s book represents the first significant attempt in the colonial era to write in depth about the history of Iroquois Indians in New York and Canada. A colonial scholar and political leader in New York, Colden published the first edition of his History in 1727. He expanded it significantly in this and later editions, including several chapters on interactions of the Five Nations with the French. Neither the book nor the map includes the sixth member of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Tuscaroras, as they had not yet emigrated to the New York from their home in North Carolina.
Jesse Cornplanter. Letter to Joseph Keppler. December 20, 1937.
A Seneca artist and performer, Cornplanter (1889-1957) corresponded with Joseph Keppler for much of his life, starting as a young boy in 1899. He also served as an informant to scholars like William Fenton, and Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker. Impatient with simply narrating information about Iroquois ceremonies, religion, and mythology to others, he determined to write his own book of legends. He cast his book as a series of letters to Mrs. Walter A. Hendricks, who also found him a publisher. He complains in this letter to Keppler that this publisher planned to use western tipis as the background for the cover of “Legends of the Longhouse.” Cornplanter lost the argument. Stylized tipis adorn the dust jacket of his 1938 book.
The photographs show Cornplanter and Joseph Keppler at Elison Park in Rochester, New York on September 25, 1937, participating in a ceremony that awarded the Seneca Silver Star to Keppler for his years of service.
E. Pauline Johnson. “Tekahionwake.” Promotional Bill for the American Chautauqua Tour, June, 1907.
A Mohawk poet and performer, Johnson (1861-1913) was born on the Six Nations Reserve outside of Brantford, Ontario. While she had only seven years of formal schooling, she was well educated at home in both the English of Shakespeare and Indian legends narrated by her grandfather. To make a living, she wrote poems that were published in local newspapers, and in 1892 she began to appear in professional recitals, wearing both formal and Mohawk attire. Touring England, New England, and most of Canada for the next seventeen years, she became one of the best-known performers of her time. She also published several books of poetry, beginning with White Wampum in 1895. Tekahionwake was Johnson’s Mohawk name.
William Smith. An Historical Account of the Expedition against the Ohio Indians Under the Command of Henry Bouquet. London: T. Jefferies, 1766.
Colonel Henry Bouquet (1719-1765) defended Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania during the first year of Ottawa leader Pontiac’s uprising in 1763. In April of that year, Pontiac and his allies had coordinated successful attacks on several British forts, terrifying soldiers and settlers alike. They did not succeed in taking Fort Pitt. In 1764, the British mounted a successful campaign, under Bouquet’s leadership, against the Delawares (Lenni Lenape), Shawnees, and Senecas still holding out in Ohio. Smith served with Bouquet during his campaign.
The first illustration, after the work of noted artist Benjamin West, shows Bouquet and tribal representatives meeting to draw up the terms of disengagement. The belts of wampum in the delegate’s hand were customary parts of important occasions such as this one.
Pendleton Woolen Mills Turtle Pattern Blanket
Pendleton Woolen Mills re-created this blanket after a historic pattern from the company's archives. The turtle design celebrates a traditional Iroquois creation story, which holds that the world was created upon the stong shell of the Great Turtle.
Gift of C. Morton Bishop III, Class of 1974
President, Pendleton Woolen Mills