New Guinea: Racial Identity and Inclusion in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian Communities of New York
New York History
Volume 90, Number 3 (Summer 2009)
23 paragraphs
Christopher Geherin
In 1818 the Stockbridge Indians initiated a series of land sales to the state of New York in order to finance the relocation of the tribe further west. By 1830, the Stockbridges had engaged in some thirteen land treaties, ceding more than 20,000 acres to the state. By the treaty of October 1, 1825, the tribe ceded another 1,436 acres of its land, including a distinct tract of 361.88 acres on the southern border of the community known by the name of New Guinea. An oft-cited history asserts that the Stockbridges had granted this tract to a colony of freed slaves who arrived circa 1800 from the Mohawk Valley. Here, New Guinea settlers are identified as including the Baldwin, Cook, Fiddler, Mitop, and Welch families. An earlier source corroborates the identification of John Baldwin as a settler on the New Guinea tract, adding also the name of Nathan Pendleton. Literature pertaining to the tract remains sparse, and the assumption that its inhabitants were former African slaves has persisted. That individuals of African descent were living at New Stockbridge is substantiated. As early as 1796, the Reverends Belknap and Morse noted the presence of free blacks in Stockbridge and Oneida villages. Similarly, Stockbridge missionary John Sergeant mentioned preaching to a small nearby settlement of mulattos. The 1825 Stockbridge treaty itself names no occupant of the four New Guinea lots, nor does the associated surveyor’s field book. Other evidence, however, identifies the inhabitants and reveals that the families of New Guinea possessed a more complex heritage than their characterization as freed slaves would suggest. Furthermore, the histories of the New Guinea settlers offer a valuable perspective on racial identity in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian communities—particularly in regard to intermarriage with African-Americans—and on racial integration in western New York in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
In recent years, historians have begun to render a fuller picture of a Native American identity as complex and fluid as any notion of an “American” identity itself, as diverse as eighteenth- and nineteenth- century perceptions of “Indian” were typically static and monolithic. Intermarriage with African-Americans represents an important facet of the evolving nature of that identity. At the same time that such intermarriage increased in native communities after the American Revolution—due to declining tribal populations as well as simple proximity—racial sensibilities were developing in American society; more and more preoccupied with racial distinctions, Americans began to categorize people according to heritable and fixed “racial” traits. This emerging ideology had implications for native communities. After the Revolution, “models of Indian citizenship were becoming more English,” and a number of New England tribes moved to restrict acceptance of Africans, largely because of diminishing land and a paucity of eligible men. Intermarriage with Africans became an even more divisive tribal issue in the nineteenth century, influenced in part by the growing insistence in larger society that to be “Indian” required an absence of racial intermixture. Any African descent came to be viewed as eclipsing Indian ancestry. Native Americans with discernible African heritage (and often without) were categorized as black, negro, mulatto, or colored, a practice demonstrated by white and tribal authorities. Both the Brothertown and Stockbridge tribes assimilated this standard, with the Stockbridges in particular manifesting the mutable character of racial consciousness. In 1824 the Stockbridge tribal council formally adopted William Gardner, identifying him as Narragansett. But in 1826 the legislature of New York defined Gardner as “coloured,” and by the 1870s the tribe sought to exclude the Gardners by characterizing the family as “negro.” (This was not the case for Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians of European ancestry.) Despite studies enriching our understanding of the diversity of Native American identity, examinations of the acculturated, multiracial, and multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown remain lacking.
Formerly from Massachusetts, the Stockbridges—or Muhheakunnuck as they refer to themselves—are a Mohican tribe that resettled in New York in the mid-1780s. The Stockbridge Mohicans originated as an amalgamation of diverse Algonquian groups living between the Hudson and Housatonic River Valleys. The Stockbridge tribe itself came into existence in 1734 as a Protestant mission community resulting from negotiations between Housatonic-Mohican villages and the Massachusetts provincial authorities. In that year, missionary John Sergeant, Sr., began work in the town of Stockbridge at the invitation of the tribe. In a progressive measure for the era, the Stockbridges shared with their English neighbors the governance of their township. Stockbridge warriors fought with the British during with French and Indian War, but, along with the Oneidas, sided with the American colonists in the Revolution. Despite this history and acculturation, however, the Stockbridges continued to face increasing pressures from white settlers in their Massachusetts home.
In 1773 seven other tribes from New York and southern New England formulated a plan to move west together to land among the Six Nations of Iroquois. Though also Christianized and acculturated, the so-called New England tribes had not been integrated into surrounding white society, and found themselves struggling to survive culturally, economically, and literally after decades of poverty, depopulation (due to disease and participation in colonial wars), and dispossession of their lands. They had come to believe that their vision of a Christian Indian community practicing European habits of agriculture could only be realized apart from whites. They also embraced a calling to Christianize and civilize their Six Nations comrades, and had undertaken missionary work among the Oneidas in the 1760s. Implementing their plan to emigrate, representatives from the seven tribes lamented to the Six Nations that the situation in New England had become so dire as to preclude their remaining there. In 1774 the Oneidas responded by designating a tract southeast of Oneida Lake in Madison and Oneida Counties for use by these various tribes, later to be known collectively as the Brothertown Indians.
The current study concerns the integration of people of African descent in the transplanted, multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown—in particular on a specific tract in New Stockbridge—and does not explore this issue among the Oneidas who welcomed them. Beyond the distinct history of tribal relocation and amalgamation, it is also worth noting significant cultural differences between the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians and their Oneida benefactors. Unlike the Christian communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown, potent and enduring factions within the Oneida tribe continued to resist the very acceptance of aspects of European culture, including agriculture and Christianity. Still, the Oneidas, too, constituted a multi-ethnic, multiracial community. (This despite disparaging the Brotherton Delawares who joined the Stockbridges in 1802 as “those newcomers from New Jersey, who consist of Indians, mulattoes and some white women connected with Indians.”) In 1796 Belknap and Morse reported that “among the Oneidas there is scarcely an individual who is not descended on one side from Indians of other nations, or from English, Scots, Irish, French, German, Dutch and some few, from Africans.” By welcoming the beleaguered New England tribes among them, the Oneidas sought to bolster their standing with their fellow Iroquois and deflect the State of New York’s acquisitive land efforts. It was also no coincidence that the land they offered stood on the eastern border of their territory, thus serving as a buffer against encroaching white settlement…
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