Review: Beyond the Covenant Chain

Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 #

By Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds.

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003

Richter, Daniel K., and James H. Merrell, eds. Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. ISBN 9780271101255.

For a long time the standard story of the Five (later Six) Nations ran through Albany. The Iroquois mattered, in that telling, because of the Covenant Chain, the alliance system that bound them to New York and the English Crown; diplomacy became a two-party affair, Haudenosaunee and Anglo, with everyone else pushed to the margins as background or bystanders. This volume, first published by Syracuse in 1987 and reissued by Penn State Press in 2003, set out to break that frame. The title announces the argument: to understand the Iroquois, look beyond the Covenant Chain, at the crowded field of Native neighbors and rival European powers with whom the Confederacy actually dealt. I will argue that the collection won its argument so thoroughly that its multipolar framework now reads as self-evident (the surest sign of a book that changed a field), and that its remaining weaknesses are the weaknesses of the edited collection as a form.

The argument and its shape #

The editors, Daniel Richter and James Merrell, gathered a strong roster of colonial ethnohistorians and organized their essays into a clear geographic logic. A first section works from inside Iroquoia, taking up the internal structure of the Confederacy, the grammar of intertribal diplomacy, and the vexed relationship with the English. From there the book moves outward in concentric rings. "Near neighbors" covers southern New England Algonquians, the peoples lumped together as "Pennsylvania Indians," and the Ohio Country groups caught between empires. A final section reaches to distant friends and foes: the long Catawba wars, Cherokee relations, and the Tuscaroras, whose northward migration made the Five Nations six.

The cumulative claim is that Iroquois power was relational and multipolar; the Confederacy made and unmade that power in dealings with many partners at once rather than receiving it from a single English connection. Francis Jennings, whose own work on the Covenant Chain looms over the collection, sits alongside contributors including Neal Salisbury, Michael McConnell, Theda Perdue, Mary Druke-Becker, Richard Haan, and Douglas Boyce. The evidence base is the familiar archive of the field: treaty minutes and council records, colonial correspondence, and missionary accounts, read against the grain for the Native diplomatic logic they imperfectly preserve.

What it changed #

The book's importance is easy to state. It helped normalize a multipolar approach to northeastern Native history and pushed scholars to stop treating Indigenous nations as satellites of European empires. By insisting that the Catawba wars or Iroquois-Cherokee contacts belonged to the same analytical picture as Albany diplomacy, the contributors modeled a wider geography of Native politics; they showed a diplomatic world constellated around many centers rather than one chain. The essays on intertribal diplomacy in particular gave later scholars a vocabulary for kinship idioms, condolence, and the ritual work of alliance that a purely political-history reading tends to miss.

The method also holds up. The contributors are careful readers of difficult sources, alert to the ways colonial scribes distorted what Native speakers said in council. The volume rewards anyone learning to handle treaty records as evidence rather than transcript.

The limits of the form #

The weaknesses, as I noted at the outset, are the weaknesses of the edited collection, and the editors would not have denied them. Coverage is uneven by design. Two centuries and a continental spread cannot receive even treatment in nine essays; some neighbors get a full chapter while others appear only in passing. The book samples rather than surveys, and a reader hoping for continuous narrative across 1600 to 1800 will have to build it from pieces that vary in depth and approach. Individual chapters also carry the interpretive priorities of the late 1980s, and the collection predates the fuller incorporation of Haudenosaunee oral tradition and community-based scholarship that has reshaped the field since; it gestures beyond the colonial archive without fully escaping it.

There is also the matter of coherence. The concentric organization is elegant, but the contributors wrote their essays to stand alone, and the connective argument lives mostly in the editors' framing rather than in sustained conversation among the chapters. The whole is a little less than the sum of its parts, though the parts are good.

Verdict #

The volume remains foundational, and the Penn State reissue keeps it in reach (including an open-access edition). In my estimation it is best read as a landmark in the historiography rather than as a current synthesis: the place where the field turned away from the Albany-centered story and toward the wider Native world the Iroquois actually inhabited. Graduate students in early American and Native history should know it, both for its arguments and for its models of source work; specialists will still cite it. General readers looking for a single continuous account of Iroquois history should start elsewhere and come here second, once they want to see how the scholarship first learned to think in more than two directions at once.