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Reviews of Books
Sixty-five years after first going to lroquoia to study
Seneca ethnobotany, social organization, and ceremonialism, anthropologist William N. Fenton has finally
completed his magnum opus. Fenton, the dean of
Iroquois scholarship, has produced a work that should
be on the reference shelf of any serious student of the
Iroquois. His book is voluminous, containing over
seven hundred pages of text, three separate appendixes on the Iroquois Condolence Council, and an
extensive bibliography. Forty-six figures and eight tables also make the book impressive. Besides beautiful
illustrations, the figures include a floor plan for a
condolence rite (1945); a model for the kinship relations between a chief and his subjects; summary of
statuses, roles, and events in the Condolence Council
(1945); and relationships and groupings of Iroquois
chiefs into moieties of tribal phratries, as on the
condolence cane and seating arrangements of the
council of life chiefs of the Six Nations. Included in the
tables are proposed dates of the founding of the
Iroquois League, which Fenton now estimates as the
early years of the sixteenth century, the emergence of
League titles (1647-1803), and Timothy Pickering's
estimates of tribal populations and treaty attendance
at Canandaigua (1794).
The book largely focuses on the Iroquois up to 1794
but includes an analysis of Handsome Lake's visions of
1799-1800 and the founding of the Gaiwiio. Based
upon his decades of fieldwork experiences, Fenton
shows the amazing continuity of the Iroquois League
and its condolence ceremony into the twentieth century. Fenton begins with the distinction between the
Iroquois League and the Iroquois Confederacy, a point
previously written about by historian Daniel Richter.
At the heart of the great Iroquois League first encountered by Europeans was a symbolic system, not a
governmental state, whose center was the six rites of
the Condolence Council. The League was a confederacy of nations but should not be confused with the
later Iroquois Confederacy, an operating instrument of
government. The Condolence Council provided cultural continuity: "dead chiefs are mourned and successors requickened in the titles of the founders so that
the league may endure" (p. 6). Fenton clearly shows
that, by the eighteenth century, the Iroquois Confederacy, not the League, had become the effective
political institution.
To Fenton, a fiction grew up as a result of reading
back into history circumstances that never existed and
not differentiating between original League and evolving Confederacy. Although the Condolence Council
still raises up chiefs in the title of the founders, the
"grand council that meets today at Onondaga bears
small resemblance to the legendary league, whose
functions have largely disappeared. Its replica at Six
Nations on Grand River lacks an Oneida component,
but it proclaims the great tradition, it produces virtuoso ritualists, and it has survived by sharing assuming
responsibilities unrelated to its original purpose" (p.
713). More or less a homogeneous culture, the Five
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Nations came together for a limited purpose to settle
any and all differences that arose. To Fenton, they
accomplished this goal with an agreed-upon mechanism for ending conflict, namely the Condolence
Council. In the eighteenth century, however, the influence of outsiders such as Sir William Johnson helped
remake the Iroquois polity. These "headmen of
achieved status had succeeded to the roles of the
founders. These were the men who presided over
grand council, made embassies to Europeans and
signed treaties" (p. 494). As a result, the League of
tradition had become the Confederacy. Although the
Confederacy continued to appeal to the former institution, Fenton concluded that "the league became the
interior polity while the confederacy became a mechanism of external affairs" (p. 494).
Fenton, one of the editors of the Newberry Library's
Documentary History of the Iroquois, a fifty microfilm
reel collection of treaty documents, is especially effective in describing the historic negotiations at Lancaster
(1744), Albany (1754), Fort Stanwix (1768; 1784), and
Canandaigua (1794). He shows how, even at these
eighteenth-century treaty conferences, the Condolence Council was the fundamental protocol preliminary to each of the settlements. He is most effective in
analyzing, in a six-chapter sequence, the Pickering
Treaty at Canandaigua (1794). Perhaps as many as
1,890 Iroquois from nineteen communities attended
this historic conference. In the fullest analysis of the
treaty in print, Fenton shows that this was primarily a
Seneca affair with ten bands of Seneca attending.
Despite the performance of a condolence, the power
and control of this historic meeting among the Iroquois was with non-League representatives such as
Red Jacket, a Wolf clan band chief with no League
title. Although the convocation was less expensive than
war, the Pickering Treaty alone cost the federal government $1800, a mighty sum in 1794.
Fenton's masterpiece is directed at scholars in the
field, but it should be of great use to all Iroquois
people, as the author took the time to listen to the
voices of elders in the 1930s and 1940s who have long
passed from the scene. His book's dedication is revealing: "To the Old People Who Know Everything."
LAURENCE M. HAUPTMAN
State University of New York,
New Paltz
LELAND DONALD. Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest
Coast of North America. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 379.
$40.00.
This book is an informative and provocative contribution to the history and anthropology of the Native
Americans of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Leland
Donald analyzes in depth the role of slavery in Northwest Coast culture and economic life and argues that
our understandings of these peoples are flawed and
limited if we do not allow for the evident importance
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Canada and the United States
of slaves in indigenous life over many centuries, until
the irreversible changes of the late 1800s. Donald
presents his arguments clearly and carefully with extensive documentation. Parts one and two move from
an overview of the cultures considered, a review of
previous studies, and a useful discussion of definitional
problems, methods, and sources to a description of
slaves and their origins, labor, economic value, and
ritual roles and an assessment of the scale of slavery in
the region. In parts three and four, Donald examines
the antiquity of Northwest Coast slavery and how it
changed in the period 1780-1880, draws some comparisons to other Native American societies, and evaluates the place of slavery in Northwest Coast culture.
In the 1970s, Donald began research on fluctuations
in Native American salmon harvests. He soon noticed
the importance of slave labor in the historical record,
yet he found that most scholars had neglected the
topic. As Donald observes, slavery strikes most people
as incompatible with kinship-based, non-state hunting
and gathering societies, even in their elaborated
Northwest Coast form, and it is not a palatable subject
if one associates such societies with a high degree of
egalitarianism and reciprocity. As well, the emphasis
of Philip Drucker and others on rank rather than class
as the appropriate analytic frame for the region has led
to treatments of slavery as exceptional and marginal
rather than integrated into the overall social structure.
Donald argues for a class-based analysis, noting how
scholars' focus on rank seems to reflect a recurring bias
in their sources. Most major ethnographic informants
have been titleholders or holders of important names,
prerogatives, and other valuable properties. Emphasizing their leadership roles and their wide social
connections and followings, they spoke little of divisions between elites and commoners and the sharper,
pervasive division between free and slave. As Donald
explains, "Class divides and rank unites, so that the
advantage of emphasizing rank from a titleholder's
perspective is obvious" (p. 294). Most Northwest Coast
slaves were captive women and children taken as
by-products of war or sometimes in deliberate slave
raids; many were already slaves in the community from
which they were seized. They might also change residence by being traded or ceremonially given to a new
owner as a form of wealth. Their owners had permanent rights to their labor and its products, and control
over their lives, to the point of ending them, particularly in funeral ceremonies, just as other property
might be destroyed by a potlatch host to demonstrate
his power and privilege. Slaves were economically
significant, especially in the harvest of resources such
as salmon, which were abundant only in certain seasons and places. Slave women, and slave men consigned to women's work because of their status, undertook the intensive labor of preserving the catch.
They were also key producers of the economic surpluses that titleholders required for distribution in
ceremonies, as well as themselves being a form of
wealth, enhancing the standing of their master.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Linguistic evidence-the embeddedness of terms for
slaves in a number of Northwest Coast languages-and
the numbers of references to it in early-contact sources
suggest that slavery has a long history in the area. The
fur trade probably augmented the numbers and value
of slaves for some decades, just as great leaders
increased their holding of other forms of wealth in the
fur trade era. By the 1830s and 1840s, Hudson's Bay
Company traders and the first missionaries were commenting on the issue as European pressures for abolition of slavery grew. The decimation of Native communities by disease and, later, the growing campaigns
of missionaries and Indian agents against indigenous
observances brought disintegration to social systems
built in part on slavery as an institution, though the
stigma of slavery affected the standing of slave descendants long into the twentieth century.
Donald concludes with a comparative look at northern Iroquoian and southeastern Native societies. He
questions whether Iroquoian adopted captives can be
viewed as slaves as William Starna and Ralph Watkins
have recently suggested but finds some early southeastern evidence for slavery more convincing. Despite his
survey of over 800 sources, Donald leaves room for
further work by others; more remains to be done, for
example, in mission and Hudson's Bay Company
records and in other primary documents. This is an
exhaustive study, however, as it stands. Donald effectively supports his case for the longterm significance of
slavery on the Northwest Coast.
JENNIFER
s. H. BROWN
University of Winnipeg
PATRICIA U. BONOMI. The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The
Politics of Reputation in British America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, in association with
the Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1998. Pp. xiv, 290.
$29.95.
Parts of this book read like a detective story. But the
author, Patricia U. Bonomi, is more than a detective,
for she has taken a mystery, long thought to be solved,
and made of it an instrument for the examination of
politics in colonial New York during the opening years
of the eighteenth century. At its simplest, the mystery
revolved around the identity of the figure in a painting
hanging in the New York Historical Society. The
longstanding assumption has been (until recently) that
the painting is a portrait of Edward Hyde, Viscount
Cornbury, dressed in women's clothes. The identification was apparently made-and a label attached to the
painting-at the South Kensington Museum in London in 1867, where it was included in an exhibition of
national portraits.
Although the attribution had only the flimsiest basis
in evidence, it has stuck. Historians of this century
have not challenged the identification until Bonomi
began her study. Nor have they questioned the common belief that Lord Cornbury was a transvestite and
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