IAFS 1000

IAFS 1000

Permissible and Impermissible Use of Texts

By Prof. Fred Anderson

Only one of the examples below is an acceptable paraphrase of the original. Which one? Why are the others unacceptable?

Original

Between the 1640s and 1667, Five Nations warriors made war on no less than fifty-one other native peoples, conquering and depopulating large areas of the Great Lakes basin and the Ohio River Valley. In 1649-51, Iroquois warriors annihilated, scattered, or absorbed the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals living in an arc north and west of Lake Ontario, as well as the Algonquins of the Ottawa River Valley. By 1657, they had visited the same fate on the Eries, south of the lake whose name remains the only witness to their existence, while simultaneously attacking the Susquehannocks, a powerful Iroquoian people who lived in the Susquehanna Valley. All these groups were particularly inviting targets because they spoke languages and had cultures more or less closely related to that of the Five Nations. But the demand for captives was so great that the Iroquois attacked virtually any group they could reach, including the French, among whom they killed or captured nearly 300 colonists before 1666. They could surely have extirpated New France altogether, had they chosen to try.

–- Leslee Bontemps Roulay, The Great Big Book of American History (New York: Mendacity House Books, 2002), 52.

Example 1

Seventeenth-century wars among Indians were brutal and destructive. For example, between the 1640s and 1667, warriors from the Iroquois League made war on no less than fifty-one other native peoples, conquering and depopulating much of the Great Lakes basin and the Ohio River Valley. During these years, warriors from the Five Nations destroyed the Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, Eries, and Susquehannocks, all of which spoke languages and had cultures more or less closely related to those of the Five Nations. But the demand for captives was so great that the Iroquois attacked virtually any group they could reach, including the French, among whom they killed or captured nearly 300 colonists before 1666. They could surely have wiped out New France altogether, had they chosen to try it.

Example 2

Historian Leslee B. Roulay, in The Great Big Book of American History, notes that seventeenth-century wars among Indians were brutal and destructive. For example, between the 1640s and 1667, warriors from the Iroquois League made war on many other native peoples, conquering and depopulating much of the Great Lakes basin and the Ohio River Valley. During these years, warriors from the Five Nations destroyed the Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, Algonquins, Eries, and Susquehannocks, and attacked more than forty other tribes. They even made war on the French colonists of Canada, killing or capturing 300 before 1666. Had they chosen to destroy New France altogether, they surely could have done it.

Some of the most destructive wars in American history were fought among native peoples during the seventeenth century. As the historian Leslee B. Roulay points out in The Great Big Book of American History (New York: Mendacity House Press, 2002), “between the 1640s and 1667, warriors from the Iroquois League made war on no less than fifty-one other native peoples, conquering and depopulating much of the Great Lakes basin and the Ohio River Valley.” Among the peoples they utterly destroyed were several who “spoke languages and had culture . . . closely related to those of the Five Nations,” including the Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, Eries, and Susquehannocks.” Iroquois attacks on French settlers in Canada also took a heavy toll, resulting in the death or capture of “nearly 300 colonists before 1666.” Roulay believes that the Five Nations could have wiped out New France entirely, “had they chosen to try” (p. 52).

Indian peoples had made war on each other since time immemorial, but following the establishment of permanent European colonies on the North American mainland in the seventeenth century, wars among native peoples grew ever more devastating. The Five Nations of the Iroquois were particularly effective in destroying or absorbing their enemies. They “attacked virtually any group they could reach” in a relentless quest for captives, making “war on no less than fifty-one other native peoples” in the three decades before 1667.¹

1. Leslee Bontemps Roulay, The Great Big Book of American History (New York: Mendacity House, 2002), 52.

French colonists were by no means safe from the attacks of Iroquois warriors during the seventeenth century. In the years between 1608, when New France was founded, and 1666, almost 300 colonists died or became captives at the hands of raiders from the Five Nations. These losses threatened the very existence of the colony; yet they were negligible in comparison to the damage the Iroquois inflicted on other native peoples. From the 1640s to 1667, warriors of the Five Nations attacked more than fifty other native peoples in eastern North America, and utterly destroyed several groups that had lived in the Great Lakes basin and the Ohio River Valley. Ironically, tribes who most resembled the Iroquois in language and culture were the hardest hit, because captives taken from these could be most easily absorbed by adoption into Iroquois communities. In this way the Eries, Neutrals, Petuns, Hurons, and Susquehannocks all ceased to exist as independent peoples. Those who were not killed in raids either lost their identity as Iroquois adoptees or scattered as refugees, vanishing from the historical record.¹

1. Leslee Bontemps Roulay, The Great Big Book of American History (New York: Mendacity House, 2002), 52.