Content area
Full Text
In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to borders and borderlands as fluid sites of both national formation and local contestation. At their peripheries, nations and empires assert their power and define their identity with no certainty of success. Nation-making and border-making are inseparably intertwined. Nations and empires, however, often reap defiance from peoples uneasily bisected by the imposed boundaries. This process of border-making (and border-defiance) has been especially tangled in the Americas where empires and republics projected their ambitions onto a geography occupied and defined by Indians. Imperial or national visions ran up against the tangled complexities of interdependent peoples, both native and invader. Indeed, the contest of rival Euro-American regimes presented risky opportunities for native peoples to play-off the rivals to preserve native autonomy and enhance their circumstances.1
In a recent essay, Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron advance a helpful distinction between "borderlands" and "borders." They argue that, in North American history, native peoples tried to prolong broad and porous "borderlands," but eventually became confined within the "borders" of consolidated regimes imposed by invading Euro-Americans. This paper examines the transition of one borderland-the land of the Iroquois Indians-into two bordered lands: the State of New York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British empire.2
At Paris in 1783, British and American negotiators concluded the War of the American Revolution, recognizing the independence of the United States while reserving the Canadian provinces to the British empire. American independence and Canadian dependence required a new boundary between the young republic and the lingering empire. The negotiators ran that boundary through the Great Lakes and the rivers between them, including, most significantly, the thirty-six-mile-long Niagara River that emptied Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. Long a critical juncture for overland movement east-and-west, as well as water transport north-and-south, the Niagara River assumed a contradictory new role as an international boundary. A natural place of communication, passage, and mixing became redefined as a place of separation and distinction. Or, so it seemed, on paper to negotiators in distant Paris and their superiors in London and Philadelphia.3
Along the Niagara River, the Iroquois Six Nations clung to their position as autonomous keepers of a perpetual and open-ended borderland, a place of exchange...