The history of the United States government’s dealings with the First Nations is an appalling and some would even call it genocidal. Certainly the treaties that the US and, before that, the British colonial governments made with native groups were broken, abridged, and usually simply ignored. Promises were broken; lives and land destroyed and taken. So, it’s not surprising that there are instances of native groups rising up to reclaim land taken from them by either unfair or broken treaties.
Take the instance of a piece of land the native people refer to as Geniekeh, a small area that once belonged to the Iroquois Nation people near what is now the Canadian border. We forget that, once upon a time, places such as western New York were the American Frontier, was considered to be the “west,” and were largely untouched by European settlers. Think about the stories of James Fenimore Cooper, tales about that area such as The Last of the Mohicans and about his conflicted hero, Hawkeye/Leatherstocking. That’s the type of conditions in which the US made a treaty in 1797 that took the land in question from the Mohawks, the western-most group of the Iroquois Confederation. However, because of the military superiority of the American government, the Mohawks were forced into accepting what amounted to the stealing of their land.
Well, after a time, the Mohawks decided that they should try to rebuild their families and customs on their traditional lands. The Mohawk leaders pointed out that the treaty had never been approved by the US Senate (which, constitutionally, must approve all treaties with foreign nations, including native tribal groups). Thus, the treaty that took their land was invalid. A previous treaty, in 1794, had granted the Iroquois the land in perpetuity, and that treaty had been ratified. Thus, appealing to the 1794 agreement, the Mohawk re-occupied their land.
Now, it wasn’t a large plot of land, to be sure; it measured less than 1,000 acres. And it had been occupied by American settlers after the Mohawks were removed. But the native group re-occupied it and peacefully removed the Americans who had settled there. They then made the appeal that the US government should do the honorable thing and stay true to its word by allowing the Mohawks to reclaim the land. Interestingly, the US government policy in relating to native peoples has been a mixture of administration on the state and federal levels. Thus, the federal government allowed the State of New York to act as the chief negotiator and mediator between the natives and the federal authorities. Over the course of over 200 mediation sessions with the New York state legislature, an agreement was reached.
They named the reclaimed land Ganienkeh, the Mohawk word for “land of the flint,” the material by which the traditional hunting and working tools were crafted. The people carved out what they referred to as a non-reservation on the land, purposely rejecting the model of the US reservation settlement. That meant that, unlike the other reservations in New York State, the state and federal government had no oversight over them. They were an independent nation located within the borders of the United States, the last one of the Iroquois to be so.
And, would it surprise you to learn that Genienkeh was set up and reclaimed by the Mohawks in the late 1970s, and that it remains independent to this day?
The Rest of the Story 