Institutional Dimensions of Northern Iroquoian Confederacies and Implications for Contact Period Geopolitics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Confederacies have been under-theorized in the social sciences in comparison to discourses focused on state development as per socio-evolutionary paradigms. Confederacies do not serve to govern so much as to coordinate. This paper explores the practices, institutions, and ideologies utilized by late premodern Northern Iroquoian confederacies to coordinate collective action while preserving local autonomy. The Wendat confederacy originated as an alliance between two nations in the 1400s but expanded as other communities and nations were forced to relocate north due to conflict with the Haudenosaunee. The origins of the Haudenosaunee confederacy included highly formalized diplomatic protocols that facilitated mutual non-aggression and the raising up of sachems. While the historical development of each confederacy took place within an entirely Indigenous world-system, the variable network structures of each impacted how these large-scale collectives navigated the collision of Indigenous and European world-systems during early colonialism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northeastern North America, particularly with respect to the integration of newcomers and responses to European encroachment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37818.0