Fathers, Mothers, and the Politics of Creation
It’s been a bit of a rough week, Best Beloved. A rough few weeks, actually. I’ve spent a lot of purgatorial time waiting to figure out this coming year, and since finding out that my funding options for SOAS were shot, last Friday, I’ve been a bit down. But, in the words of Caleb, ‘I have found and truly believe that there is nothing so bad it cannot be made better with a story.’ So. A story…
One gets the impression, reading Carl Resek’s biography of Lewis Henry Morgan, that the “Father of American Anthropology” was something of a distracted demi-dilettante, wandering between possible lives, cultivating, but never committing, to various interests. Morgan’s only ethnography, League of the Ho-De’-No-Sau-Nee, Iroquois was published several years after the research upon which it was based. And that research might never have occurred had it not been for the political possibilities that certain Iroquois saw in Morgan and his associates.
In the 1790s, the Ogden Land Company, formed by the brothers David, Aaron, Thomas Ludlow, and Gouverneur Ogden, became one of the most successful land speculation businesses in New York state. The Ogdens and their descendants worked themselves into positions of power in the state, and became some of the most influential men in early New York history. Though lawyers, attorney generals, Congressmen, and industrial capitalists, the basis of the familial wealth was the (questionably legitimate) purchasing of land from the Iroquois nations, and the reselling of that same land to White Americans and immigrants at phenomenal profits.
In 1838, the Ogdens made a move to buy up the last four Seneca reservations in the state. In January of that year, they reached a treaty with this section of the Iroquois, granting all lands to the Ogden Land Company, and guaranteeing the removal of all Indians within five years. According to a Quaker exposé, published in 1840, only 16 of 81 Seneca chiefs had been willing to sign this treaty. The company moved their meeting to a nearby tavern where new chiefs were illegally elected, soused up, and bribed with money and land. The lands, worth $2,000,000, were sold for $200,000. (Though, lest anyone call the Ogdens cheap, an additional 10% of that amount was spent on cash bribes alone.)
Appeals to the Senate were to no avail. A second 1842 treaty saved two of the four reservations, and moved the date of relocation for the people of the Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek back to April Fool’s Day, 1846, to allow time for surveys of improvements.
1844 saw a curious event in Seneca — specifically Tonawanda — approaches to the problem.
A boy whom history introduces to us as Ha-sa-no-an-da (Morgan would transcribe his name as Hä-sa-no-an’-da) had risen to an uncommonly prominent position among the Tonawanda. He was a of a famous line, and one that had held a special interest in White culture for generations. Ha-sa-no-an-da’s great great grandfather, Handsome Lake, had given this advice to his people: ‘Now let the Council appoint twelve people to study, two from each nation of the six. So many white people are about you that you must study to know their ways.’ This advice was taken to heart in the boy’s case, and he was sent to a Baptist school at an early age (where he acquired the name Ely Parker, by which he began to refer to himself). Before he was a teenager, Ely was already being called on to translate English to Seneca. Embarrassed under pressure on multiple occasions, Ely determined to continue his formal English education, and enrolled as a tuition-free student at Yates Academy, twenty miles North of the Tonawanda Reservation.
The chiefs of Tonawanda took an interest in Ely’s education, and by the age of fourteen, he was acting in an official capacity for the reservation, writing and signing documents for the chiefs. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, he accompanied his grandfather, Sose-ha-wa (or Jimmy [or Jemmy] Johnson) and several other leading members of the Tonawanda community to Albany to meet with Governor William C. Bouck.
An up-and-coming lawyer from Rochester happened to be in town at the same time. Lewis Henry Morgan was a fresh face in Rochester, just from his rural hometown of Aurora. It was difficult for an unknown lawyer to break in in a strange city, so Morgan had helped organise a branch of his hometown’s fraternal order, The Order of the Gordian Knot, in his new home. In 1843, prior to his move to Rochester, Morgan convinced his order brothers to change their name and fraternal myth, exchanging an Old World ethos for a new — henceforth, they would be the Grand Order of the Iroquois. The project was patently absurd, but Morgan was determined that the practises of the Grand Order would be as authentic as possible. Thus, when Morgan stumbled upon Parker in an Albany bookstore, he was predictably filled with boyish glee: ‘To sound the war whoop and seize the youth might have been dangerous, but to let him pass without a parley would have been inexcusable.’
As eager as Morgan was to put forth his questions, Parker was willing to answer. He introduced Morgan to Johnson and the other elders, and translated for several hours. For three consecutive days, Morgan would listen to these leaders of the Tonawanda while Parker translated. This would develop into a mutually advantageous, if, on one side, untrusting, relationship. Ely Parker became an honorary member of the organisation named after his people. Over the years, Morgan would be his educational patron, ensuring him a more than decent schooling. The Grand Order of the Iroquois put itself behind efforts to save the Tonawanda Reservation, and to support the Seneca in their efforts to remain in New York.
For his part, Morgan was permitted to visit Tonawanda on half a dozen occasions between 1844 and 1846. He stayed with Ely Parker’s family, and took copious notes. In October of 1846, Parker and two friends asked to be adopted into the tribe. Their request was met with some hostility, but eventually they were permitted to become honorary tribe members is they paid the costs of initiation.
Earlier that year, Morgan had travelled to Washington to deliver a memorial on behalf of the Seneca, but by this point his interest in the Seneca was waning. This was the end of his involvement in the Tonawanda cause. A year later, the Grand Order would disintegrate. The Tonawanda were, once again, on their own, with the few White friends who had supported them prior to Morgan’s romantic interest. In 1857, the Tonawanda would win their case, but like almost any American Indian victory, this was Pyrrhic: As of 2000, the population of the Tonawanda Reservation was ten individuals — all white. Parker’s education would serve him well, and he eventually became brigadier general under Grant for the Union in the Civil War.
Morgan ceased his involvement with the Tonawanda following his adoption by the tribe in 1846. At the same time, Ely Parker completed his studies, and Morgan became less involved in the life of that family. He conducted one more visit to Tonawanda in 1850, and in 1851 resolved to finish with the Iroquois business that had been nagging at him once and for all. He published Leave of the Ho-De’-No-Sau-Nee out of Rochester, and dedicated it to ‘Hä-sa-no-an’-da, (Ely S. Parker) a Seneca Indian. This work, the materials of which are the fruit of our joint researches, is inscribed: in acknowledgement of the obligation and in testimony of the friendship of the author.’ In the preface, Morgan enjoins his reader:
To encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indian, founded upon a truer knowledge of his civil and domestic institutions, and of his capabilities for future elevation, is the motive in which this work originated…
…The time has come in which it is befitting to cast away all ancient antipathies, all inherited opinions; and having taken a nearer view of [Iroquois] social life, condition and wants, to study anew our duty concerning them.
A just so story should end in verse. Poetry will be close enough:
The Ocean
I spent several months living next to the ocean. I awoke to the song of the waves. I fell asleep to the song of the waves. Every afternoon I would collect seashells and bring them home. By the end of my stay I had a little mountain of seashells. I promised myself that one day I would return all those seashells to the beach. They were no more mine to keep than is the air I breathe or the earth below my feet. But when it was time to pack up and go, I found that I couldn’t bear to give back a single seashell. Each was beautiful to me, each felt like a caress in my hands, each, I thought, would serve to remind me of the song of the waves. So I packed them all and took them with me.
Now I am far away from the ocean and those seashells are still packed. I haven’t looked at them or touched them again. They were not mine to keep, but I kept them anyway. Now I cannot return them to the beach. And all I want is to forget the song of the waves.
—Ruth Behar
Sources
Armstrong, William H. Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker: Union General and Seneca Chief. Syracuse: The Syracuse University Press, 1978.
Morgan, Lewis H. League of the Ho-De’-No-Sau-Nee, Iroquois. Rochester: Sage & Brother, Publishers, 1851.
Ogden family Papers. http://www.clements.umich.edu/Webguides/NP/OgdenF.html. Accessed 11 August 2005.
Resek, Carl. Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Tonawanda Reservation, Eerie County, New York ั Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonawanda_Reservation,_Erie_County,_New_York. Accessed 11 August 2005.
Tooker, Elisabeth. “Lewis H. Morgan and His Contemporaries.” American Anthropologist. 94:357-375, 1992.