Tag Archives: Iroquois

Painted Post Monuments Follow Society’s Views of Native Americans

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The “Chief Montour” statue (originally set dead in the intersection of Water and Hamilton Streets) has become a symbol of Painted Post. This harks back to the original “Painted Post” which gave its name to the whole region.

According to Cornplanter it was a memorial to a Seneca leader of note, whose name he declined to divulge, in accordance with cultural conventions. The post weathered away with time, and white inhabitants of the early 1800s replaced it with a sheet-metal silhouette (for which they paid the maker one cow), theoretically depicting an Indian. This was replaced decades later by a more elaborate version, and then by a fully-rounded metal statue, which blew down and broke in 1948. (You can see all three of these in the Town of Erwin Museum at the Depot.)

The current fully-rounded model, executed by a local art teacher and erected around 1951, is the most artistically-impressive of the series. It incorporates a representation of the “painted post” itself, along with a respectful portrayal of Chief Montour, acknowledging the early owners of the land, muscled out in the 1790s. A large plaque on the base of the statue summarizes this history.

Two other nearby pieces are little more outdated, or at least one-sided. “Recording the Victory” is a New Deal mural in the post office, seeming to conflate the original painted post with the capture of Boyd and Parker, which took place about a hundred miles away.

That capture marked the westernmost penetration of the “Sullivan Expedition” (actually, the Sullivan INVASION), designed to demolish Iroquois life during the Revolutionary War. A tombstone-like monument on the east side of Hamilton, just north of the railroad track, is one of dozens that were scattered throughout the region in 1929 ( 150th anniversary), commemorating the “expedition.”

This was the largest independent command that George Washington ever authorized. SOME Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) sided with the British, raiding, burning, and killing down into the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Sullivan was to respond in kind, BUT with no attempt to sort out pro-British, neutral, or even pro-American. Everything was to be burned, everybody killed or expelled.

The invaders, of course, were considered heroes at the time. But the monument is an interesting relic of the early days of auto travel, when such markers were sort of checkpoints for tourists and drivers.

A 1966 marker, back near the statue, commemorates the 1791 Treaty of Painted Post… although as I understand it, the conference actually took place in today’s Elmira. Timothy Pickering represented the U.S., while Red Jacket and Cornplanter were among those negotiating for the Six Nations and others (1,800 of whom actually attended). The result, predictably, was a disappointment for the Haudenosaunee, but it did at least mark a general unenthusiastic acquiescence on both sides, normalizing arrangements at last.

The point where the Conhocton and Tuscarora form the Chemung… the point in which a town flourished, and on which the original painted post stood… was a key point for Native peoples and for the white invaders. The succession of markers and monuments here show a course beginning with Native life; then a 19th-century view of “the Indians” as exotic curios; then an early 20th-century age of growing concern for history, contaminated with white supremacy and flag-waving patriotism; and then a late 20th-century groping toward a more truthful and more respectful approach. We can find all of this with little more than a five-minute walk in Painted Post.

Going to Ganondagan

We used to visit Ganondagan State Park back in the mid-1990s, when we lived nearby in “the Bloomfields.” Walking the trails there we had one of our most cherished outdoor encounters, with a new-born fawn and its mother.

*In the small visitor’s center was a small exhibition relating to the history of the site. Ganondagan was a major Seneca town back in the 1600s, far bigger than almost any town in the English colonies. The little exhibition documented those days when the hilltop outside Victor was the metropolis for many miles around.

*We knew that a lot had been added to Ganondagan, but since we moved “way away” to Bath we hadn’t gotten back until our elder son came in for a few days on a visit from Houston. He and I finally decided to take the plunge.

*We were glad we did. The most significant change is the gleaming Seneca Art & Culture Center… a year-round museum, visitors center, and educational facility. “When you’re a native person, your story is often told by other people,” says Historic Site Manager G. Peter Jemison. “Here, we tell our own story.”

*And the story begins with creation, in a mixed live-action/C.G.A. film that runs about 15 minutes, retelling the myth so dear to centuries of Huadenosaunne (that being their own, proper name, rather than the French-derived “Iroquois.”

*The large new gallery space makes use of a hundred years of archaeology at Ganondagan and similar sites, so that we get some glimpse of long-ago life through the artifacts made or used by the people themselves. Many of these items were collected under the leadership of Arthur C. Parker, the Seneca-descended archaeologist who was director of Rochester Museum and Science Center, and before that had a lengthy tenure at the New York State Museum.

*On the height overlooking the Art & Culture Center is a recreated longhouse, fully decked out within as a longhouse might have been in the days when it was a crowded home to five or six families. Docents are on hand to help us get a feel for life in the longhouse days.

*Despite the development of the past 20 years or so, Ganondagan is still criss-crossed with trails (including interpretive signage), many of the trails cut through grass that at this time of year is now waist-high. Coltsfoot, Queen Anne’s lace, and brown-eyed Susan sparkle in the meadow, and the surface is alive with butterflies, including the monarch and the eastern tiger swallowtail. Small apples drop unremarked from the trees, and acorns are starting to fall.

*The Seneca evacuated and burned Ganondagan in 1687, during a French invasion, then resettled in the Canandiagua area… farther away from the Lake Ontario invasion route. Much of the original site still remained in Seneca hands in the 1900s, becoming a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a state park in 1987… in part as a way to combat “pothunters” who were digging and stealing artifacts.

*The place is worth a visit, even more now than it was 20 years ago! I do observe that acoustics for the film are poor. It can be captioned, but you need to ask ahead of time. Apart from that, a great visit!

The Farming Story, Part 1: Native Farmers

An otherwise excellent documentary on farming in the Finger Lakes said that Native people had been farming this land for a thousand generations. Charitably calculating a generation as 20 years, a thousand generations takes us back 20,000 years, at which time we were under a mile of ice. So crop yields were pretty thin.

But, once the ice receded and people moved in, farming did develop. The white people in the westward expansion are often called settlers… a very gentle noun… rather than invaders. They also make much of clearing the wilderness, or taming the wilderness. But this was NOT wilderness. One of the reasons the land was so attractive was that so much of it was cleared, there were towns, there were orchards, there were farm fields. Native people had been terraforming for hundreds of generations, as human beings always do.

Steuben County, though under Iroquois RULE, was home to groups of several ethnicities. It was sort of a military frontier, with small towns and large patrols. There’s a habit of dismissively calling any Indian settlement a village… the “village” Custer attacked at the Little Big Horn had as many people as Hornell… and the main Iroquois settlements at the north end of the lakes were honest-to-goodness cities, larger than most communities in the new United States.

But around here smaller towns were the rule. There was one at the Painted Post, and one at the Chimney Narrows (east end of Corning). There were two in today’s Canisteo… one at the mouth of Bennett’s Creek, one at the mouth of Colonel Bill’s Creek.

Much of Indian settlement was somewhat decentralized, which makes sense if you recognize that with no livestock animals in America, meat came from hunting, fishing, and clamming. A community needed a large geographic spread as its larder, to avoid overhunting or overfishing.

In Europe, farming was a he-man’s work, while hunting was a recreational activity, indulged in once or twice a year. To their ethno-centric eyes, Indian men were lazy sons-of-guns who made their wives do all the work on the farm while they went off hunting. They didn’t recognize that this required constant reconaissance, journeys sometimes of several days in all kinds of weather to reach a given hunting ground, processing the kills on the spot and then packing it all back.

In Europe after the Black Death chopped population almost in half, the legal doctrine of waste land arose. If land was NOT plowed, and if no one ran cattle on it, you could move in and take possession as long as you started doing one of those things. When Europeans arrived here, they said, “Look at all the waste land!” And started grabbing all they could. The Indians didn’t really USE it after all… they might just come through hunting one week a year. Roger Williams pointed out that the reason the Indians don’t run cattle is because THERE ARE NO CATTLE IN AMERICA – which is also why they don’t plow! In addition to the immorality of taking Indian land, Williams argued that the waste land doctrine had no meaning over here, but he, of course, was completely ignored. One of several reasons Rhode Island is so small!

Native American History Goes Very Deep in Our Region

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I recently saw an otherwise-excellent documentary, discussing Native American life in our area, which stated that Native peoples had farmed western New York for a thousand generations. Even conceding a generous rate of a new generation every twenty years, this would put that farming back 20,000 years. Since that was the middle of the Ice Age… the same Ice Age whose glaciers gouged out our Finger Lakes… farming must have been a little tricky.

It’s unlikely that human beings were in the New World at all 20,000 years ago, but by around 11,000 BCE it’s evident that Paleo-Indians were in New York, at least in small numbers. This was still a nomadic, hunting-and-gathering stone age lifestyle.

By 4000 BCE local people had settled communities, and were engaging in agriculture… although they still depended very heavily on what the forest and field brought forth on its own. (They had also, in classic human style, finished off the mammoths and mastodons.)

These folks engaged in extensive trade and travel, adopting and adapting elements of the moundbuilding culture that they visited in Ohio and points west. They brought up squash, beans, and corns of varieties that been developed in Mexico or further south.

By the tenth century CE the “Longhouse People” who later became the Iroquois were securely settled in New York, leaving their mountainous homeland in the American southeast. They had technology, social structure, and political organization that were all more sophisticated than those of their new neighbors, and quickly came to rule New York (where they lived roughly from Lake Champlain to the Genesee Valley), but also to dominate most of what’s now the northeastern United States and nearby Canada.

Around the same time that Columbus was invading the Caribbean the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) formalized a federation or league, making themselves into a superpower. In the 1600s European power began to eclipse theirs, but with skilled diplomacy and a considerable military they still kept themselves independent… despite European lust for Iroquois land… until after the American Revolution.

Our particular area was under Seneca rule, though the population was more mixed. The main Seneca cities were at the north end of the Finger Lakes, near what we today call Victor and Canandaigua. Refugees being driven from their homes by white aggression were allowed to settle in our area, forming a military frontier and a sort of “distant early warning” system for attacks from Pennsylvania.

This of course is only the sketchiest look at Native history in our area. But on Friday, December 5 Cornell Professor Kurt Jordan will be giving an illustrated presentation on the archaeology of Native American life in Central New York. It’s a free Steuben County Historical Society program, 1:30 in the hall of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Bath. We’d love to see you there.