At the “Edge of the Woods,” visitors to an Iroquois community are greeted, ritually cleansed and healed, and escorted from the “forest” (the space of warfare, hunting, spirits, and danger) to the “village” (the space of residence, agriculture, security, and peace councils). Originating prior to European intrusion as a component of the Iroquois Condolence ceremony, the “Edge of the Woods” occurs when “clear-minded” people travel to towns mourning the death of a leader. There, after a formal reception from the mourning community’s representatives, the visitors initiate procedures of grieving and reviving the leader’s title in the person of a living...

On October 3, 1535, Dieppe navigator Jacques Cartier donned protective armor and departed from his ship anchored in the St. Lawrence River for a formal visit to the Laurentian Iroquois town of Hochelaga. After marching about four and one-half miles, Cartier’s party of twenty-five men met “one of the headmen of the village of Hochelaga, accompanied by several persons, who made signs” directing the French to stop at a “spot near a fire they had lighted on the path.” The French complied, and the Hochelagan leader then offered a “harangue,” which Cartier interpreted as a display of “joy and friendliness”...

On the morning of December 30, 1634, a Mohawk guide led Harmen Meyndertsz Van den Bogaert, the Dutch West India Company’s surgeon at Fort Orange, to the periphery of the Oneida town of Oneyuttehage. After firing a musket shot to announce their arrival, Van den Bogaert and his companions, Jeronimus de la Croix and Willem Thomassen, “confidently went to the castle where the Indians divided into two rows and let us pass in between them through their entrance.” The Oneidas provided food “immediately” for their “cold, wet, and tired” visitors, and lodged them in the home of their then-absent “chief.”...

On November 5, 1655, Onondaga headman Gonaterezon greeted Jesuits Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot and Claude Dablon three miles distant from the newly established principal Onondaga town. Gonaterezon escorted the missionaries to the edge of the town’s cleared fields, where the “Elders of the country awaited” their arrival. After a meal of “some Squashes cooked in the embers,” an Onondaga “Captain” named Okonchiarennen arose, imposed silence, and delivered a fifteen-minute “harangue” that welcomed the Jesuits and expressed the Onondagas’ desire for peace with New France. Then the Onondaga leaders “arose, gave the signal, and led us through a great crowd of people, some...

On September 13, 1667, Jesuits Jacques Frémin, Jean Pierron, and Jacques Bruyas approached “the Capital of this whole [Mohawk] country, called Tionnontogouen, which the Iroquois have rebuilt, at a quarter of a league from that which the French burned down last year.” Escorted by “two hundred men, who marched in good order,” the Jesuits “went last, immediately in front of the hoary Heads and the most considerable men of the country. This march was executed with an admirable gravity until, when we had arrived quite near the Village, every one halted, and we were complimented by the most eloquent man...

On January 16, 1694, Major Peter Schuyler of Albany headed an embassy of Albany officials to the westernmost Mohawk “Castle” of Canajoharie. Schuyler reported that upon his party’s arrival, “all the Sachims and young Indians” gathered to offer an Edge of the Woods welcome, “making a long speech of what had passed in former times.” Yet the Mohawks sounded forlorn about their contemporary circumstances. “We lye amazed and discomfited upon our knees,” they told Schuyler, “and know not what we shall do.”¹

Enactments of “Over the Forest,” the fifth stage of the Condolence ceremony, occur in two distinct phases. The...

On July 28, 1701, a group of Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga “ambassadors,” accompanied by some other members of their nations “who had come to trade their peltry,” arrived in the Laurentian Iroquois town of Kanatakwente (successor to Kahnawake) prior to their scheduled appearance at a multinational peace treaty hosted by Governor Callières at Montreal. Escorted to the longhouse of Laurentian Oneida headman Tatacouiceré, the visitors smoked tobacco offered by their hosts for “a good quarter of an hour” before a Kanatakwente Mohawk speaker named Ontonnionk (aka “The Eagle”) rose up and offered a formal welcome to the ambassadors. Ontonnionk reminded...

This account of the geography of solidarity constructed in Iroquoia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been written in the midst of numerous postcolonial struggles between contemporary Iroquois people and the settler governments of the United States and Canada—all of which stem from starkly contrasting ideas of Iroquois people’s relation to spatial mobility. Over the past decade, increasing public calls for cash-strapped New York State to collect taxes on the sale of cigarettes and gasoline to non-Native customers at Iroquoisowned reservation establishments have elicited retaliatory threats of Iroquois tolls and blockades on several of the state’s major highways....