Description
The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701-1754 by historian Richard Aquila explores the details of the Iroquois Confederacy's military and diplomatic polices as they related to the French, English, and other Native American Nations. Aquila depends upon the limited and biased historical record for his examination of the Iroquois approach to policy. The policies the Iroquois pursued are generalized into four options. The book then goes on to examine each policy within a specific chapter. The goal of neutrality with the French and English; the efforts to maintain peach with western and northern tribes; the policy of working with Pennsylvania to maintain control over Nations in that jurisdiction; and the war efforts against southern tribes, especially the Catawba are all detailed. The book begins with an overview of Iroquois in the seventeenth century, and then details the impact of the Twenty Years' War for the Iroquois. He states that by 1701 the Iroquois were almost a conquered people. The policies employed in the next century restore the Iroquois to positions of power militarily, economically, and politically. Using the limited historical record fails to illuminate the objectives of the Confederacy from a cultural perspective. The book fails to consider oral history and the importance of wampum as possible sources for understanding Iroquois motivations. From the Euro-western historical perspective this book is viewed as a valuable source for Iroquois historiography. This book was first published in 1983 and this edition contains a new ten-page introduction. An extensive bibliography and an index are included.