The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization - Paperback

by Daniel K. Richter (Author)

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

Back Jacket

My primary audience is neither the scholarly specialists on the Five Nations nor the Iroquois themselves, although I trust each will find something worthwhile here. Instead, I hope to reach historians, students, and interested readers who still too often exclude native peoples from the narrative mainstream of North American development. This is a story of European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the frontier.