Description
Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America is an examination of the new worlds of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, the Dutch, and the French, who shared cultural frontiers in 17th-century North America. Matthew Dennis employs methods and materials from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, ethnology, folklore, literary criticism, and history, to reconstruct those worlds and analyze the consequences of their mingling with one another. Viewing early America from the different perspectives of the diverse people who coexisted uneasily during the colonial encounter between Europeans and Indians, he explains a long-standing paradox: the apparent belligerence of the Five Nations, a people who saw themselves as promoters of universal peace. In a radically new interpretation of the Iroquois, Dennis argues that the Five Nations sought to incorporate their new European neighbors as kinspeople into their Longhouse, the physical and symbolic embodiment of Iroquois domesticity and peace. His thesis was severely criticized by fellow ethnohistorians and anthropologists but this is an important work that takes the Haudenosaunee concepts of peace, power, and righteousness and examines early American history through this perspective.