Anthropology

and my grandfather had some Native ancestry from an unnamed Algonquin tribe, my Native ancestry is not obvious to most people in my physical appearance. My mother's parents were German immigrants. I grew up in a city (Erie, PA) with no Native contact other than my grandfather and my father's siblings, whose Native ancestry was very obvious in their appearance. (My grandmother passed away when I was just 18 months old.)

After my husband and I moved to western NY, where there are 3 Seneca territories, I started visiting the Seneca lands to learn more about them. They recognized that I had mixed ancestry before I mentioned it to anyone. My grandmother descended from a man who, along with his extended family, were well known leaders in the Seneca Nation. I have some features of that family which, despite my lighter skin tone, they recognized.

The Iroquois nations fared better than most Native nations in the East because of the strength of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Confederacy sent delegates to negotiate with the French and the English colonists (and played them against each other to get good trade deals). Their cultures and governing system were well known to Europeans in North America. There were Iroquois delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia who were consulted on how to balance the powers of the separate states with each other and with the central government. The Euro-Americans tweaked the Iroquois suggestions to fit their own culture. The bundled arrows on the US Great Seal and the eagle as national bird were borrowed symbols from the Iroquois.

I am using the word Iroquois because it's the name most people know, but they call themselves Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse). They suffered greatly from the American Revolution because the tribes of the Confederacy split in their loyalties to the British and Americans. They lost clan leaderships, crops, homes, and land. Several British supporters were exiled by the US to Canada. The Cayuga lost their land and live now with the Seneca. The rest of the Confederacy tribes had their lands greatly reduced. But unlike most western and southeastern tribes, they are still on lands that they always had, although much smaller. So they prefer to refer to them as territories instead of reservations.

There is a city, Salamanca, established originally by white Europeans, on one of the Seneca territories. It's where the tribal offices, library, cultural museum, and casino are located. It's also where the Senecas host a pow wow every summer in July. Pow wows were not part of traditional Seneca culture, but they host them now in order to preserve and share traditional dances, food, history, and culture with tribes across the nation. They are open to the general public. I've attended a few pow wows, but would never try to participate. I don't think I'd be permitted to. I don't know the dances or songs. Many of them are sacred.

There is so much more that explains Seneca comfort with anthropology and archaeology. It goes back to a prominent anthropologist who became good friends with a Seneca leader in the mid 1800s and helped collect and preserve items before all the old ways and traditions were completely gone. The grand nephew of the Seneca man who worked with the anthropologist became an a anthropologist and archaeologist himself. He did a great deal of work on publishing Seneca legends, preserving records and items, preserving the language, and writing down the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. His mother was white so he was not a tribal member until the Seneca adopted him into a clan because of his work on their behalf. (He was a distant cousin of my grandmother).