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MoneminsCastle
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 Posted - May 26 2009 : 08:35:43 AM
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Arthur Caswell Parker (April 5, 1881 January 1, 1955) was an archaeologist, historian, folklorist, museologist and noted authority on American Indian culture. He was director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences from 1924 to 1945, and an honorary trustee of the New York State Historical Association.
Arthur C. Parker was born on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York, the son of Frederick Ely Parker, a Seneca Iroquois, and Geneva Griswold, a woman of Scottish and English descent, who taught school on the reservation. Parker's Iroquois name was Gawaso Wanneh (meaning "Big Snowsnake"). His grandfather, Nicholas H. Parker, was an influential Seneca leader, whose brother, Ely S. Parker, was a brigadier general and secretary to Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War, and later the first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Parker's Theory on Algonkin and Iroquois Migration:
According to Parker, the Lenape or Algonkian-speaking peoples moved into the NE or "Dawnland" in four successive waves spread out over thousands of years. The first wave he called the "Archaic Algonkian Wanderers," who hunted big game with javelins and lived in rock shelters. "The Second Period of Algonkian occupation must have been one of great length in time, " Parker concluded. "It may cover several thousand years. Certainly it was subject to a great number of intrusions." He mentions the "Red Paint People," the "Mississippian Mound Builders," and an early "Eskimo-like" people, among these "intruders."
"The Third Algonkian Period is quite definite in character, and its evidences are found widely scattered throughout the state [New York] ...The people seem to have feared few enemies at first, and to have scattered their hamlets over wide areas... as if the group feared no predatory enemies and felt free to wander within its known limitations. These people must have carried on agriculture to a considerable extent, for corn and beans have been found in their refuse heaps."5 Parker also noted that numerous tobacco pipes have been found from this period and evidence of trade, and that, "On the whole their implements are those of hunting and agriculture and not war."
The final wave of Algonkian migration was that of the historic parent body, the Lenni Lenape. The prefix Lenni (meaning "Original") being used to distinguish them from earlier waves of Lenape who had mixed with others. According to the Moravian missionary, John Heckewelder: "This was the case of the Mahicanni or Mohicans, in the east, a people who by intermarriages had become a detached body, mixing two languages together and out of the two forming a dialect of their own ...New tribes again sprung from them who assumed distinct names..."
The capital of the Mahican Confederacy was at Schodack ("Place of the Ever-Burning Council Fire") on an island on the west shore of the Hudson below Cohoes Falls. They had a fortified stronghold there at the falls called Moenemines. Beyond that, was the territory of the Iroquois.
Between the time of Jacques Cartier's exploration of the St. Lawrence (1534-1542) and Samuel de Champlain's establishment of an settlement at Quebec, (from the Algonkian word for "Narrows"), which was formerly the Iroquois town of Stadacona, in 1608, war had broken out between the Huron and their Algonquian allies and the Laurentian Iroquois. Champlain joined forces with a Huron-Algonquian war party and engaged a large force of Iroquois on Lake Champlain in 1609, thus beginning hostilities that would last as long as the French were in Canada.
The Laurentian Iroquois apparently displaced the Iroquois who were living by the Mahicans, who in turn invaded the territory of the Minsi Lenapes in the Wyoming Valley and then proceeded down the Susquehanna, becoming known to history as the "Susquehannocks." The Laurentians became known as the "Mohawks."
The first appearance of French traders among the Mahicans may have been as early as 1540, when they are believed to have established a trading fort on Castle Island near Albany. Adrian Van Loon is known to have come down from Canada to trade in 1598. Henry Hudson explored the river for the Dutch in 1609, and in 1614, they established a trading fort at Castle Island.
From the start, the presence of the Dutch traders among the Mahicans excited the envy of the Mohawks, who were determined to displace the Mahicans from the west shore on the river and capture their position in the fur trade. In 1626, a few Dutch soldiers accompanied a Mahican war party that fell into a Mohawk ambush. They were roasted and eaten. After that, the Dutch remained neutral in the Mahican-Mohawk War and traded guns for furs with both sides.
In 1628, many of the Mahicans were driven from their homes on the upper Hudson and in the Hoosic and Hoosatonic Valleys. The invading Mohawks drove as far south as Catskill Creek, where they were turned back by a combined force of Minsi and Mahican warriors, after heavy losses on both sides. The Mahicans stayed in force around Fort Orange (Albany), in a conflict that lasted nearly three-quarters of a century.
The old Dawnland Confederacy was thus pretty well ripped apart by European contact. The new trade, which linked the nations to a global economy of capitalist exploitation, set the nations in competition for goods, that they could not produce themselves; that rendered what they could produce obsolete. Steel knives, tomahawks and guns became essential for survival in the climate of intertribal war that ensued. To get more they over-hunted and over-trapped until their hunting grounds were depleted. Then they had to depend upon trade with nations farther inland, acting the role of middlemen, to get the items they had become dependent on. Thus the fratricidal Beaver Wars began.
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Arthur C. Parker - Google Books
http://books.google.com/books?as_q=&num=50&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES&lr=&as_vt=&as_auth=Arthur+Parker&as_pub=&as_sub=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_isbn=&as_issn=
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Arthur C. Parker
