5 - “They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers”: The treaty of 1838, Seneca intellectuals, and literary genesis

Summary

When the Revolutionary War ended, both New York and Massachusetts claimed the Iroquois lands in New York. In 1786 New York was given jurisdiction over the land, but Massachusetts was granted the preemptive right to purchase it should the Iroquois decide to sell. This preemptive right was sold three times in the next few years, during which time its holders bought tracts of varying size from the Senecas, who under the Treaty of Big Tree (1797) were established on several small reservations in western New York (Abler and Tooker 508-9). Like the other Iroquois, the Senecas became demoralized; social structures broke down, and reservation life sapped the vitality from traditional rituals (Wallace, “Origins” 444-5). Also, like the other tribes, the Senecas were besieged by appeals from Christian missionaries to allow the establishment of mission stations on Seneca land, where there had been little mission work before the war. Although Quakers established a mission among the Allegany Senecas in 1798, other mission groups were not successful until the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. With the missions came schools as part of the machinery for “civilizing” the Senecas. Although there was a school on the Buffalo Reservation as early as 1811 and on the Cornplanter Grant by 1814, schools, like missions, did not gain a solid foothold in Seneca land until the 1820s (Abler and Tooker 509-10).

By that time, the Senecas were split into factions known as the “Christian party“ and the “Pagan party.”