What is a "Treaty"?

Continued from last week

A report of the Lords of Trade was read in Council at the Court of St. James, November 23, 1761. It states:

That it is as unnecessary as it would be tedious to enter into a detail of all the Causes of Complaint which, our Indian Allies had against us at the commencement of the trouble in America, and which not only induced them tho’ reluctantly to take up the Hatchet against us and decimate the settlement on the frontiers but encouraged our enemies to pursue those measures which have involved us in a dangerous and critical war, it will be sufficient for the present purpose to observe that the primary cause of that discontent which produced these fatal effects was the cruelty and injustice with which they had been treated with respect to their hunting grounds, in open violation of those solemn compacts by which they had yielded to us the Dominion, but not the property of those lands. It is happy for us that we were early awakened to a proper sense of the injustice and bad policy of such a conduct towards the Indians, and no sooner were those measures pursued which indicated a disposition to do the all possible justice on this head of complain than those hostilities which had produced such horrid scenes of devastation ceased, and the Six Nations and their dependents became at once from the most inveterate enemies our fast and faithful friends.

(Colonial Documents, Number Five, Vol. VII. P. 473: in American and British Claims Arbitration, Cayuga Indians, appendix to the Answer of the United States, vol. 1. P. 17)

Sir William Johnson, who as Superintendent General of Indian Affairs understood the significance and history of the transaction, wrote in about 1775:

That memorable and important act by which the Indians put their patrimonial and conquered lands under the protections of the King of Great Britain their Father is not understood by them as a cession or surrender as it seems to have been ignorantly or willfully supposed by some, they intended and look upon it as reserving the Property and Possession of the soil to themselves and their heirs. This property the Six Nations are by no means willing to part with and are equally averse and jealous that any Forts or Settlements should be made thereon either by us or the French.

These are their Hunting Grounds, by the profits of which they are to maintain themselves and their families; they are therefore against any settlements there because the consequence would be the driving away game & destroying their livelihood & riches.

(NYCD, London Docs. XXXIII p. 18).

Significance of the 1701 Nanfan Treaty:

The Nanfan Treaty was a council in which the Confederacy notified the English authorities at New York of the growing French threat, and sought by various Weans to encourage the English to take a more active part to stop that threat.

Nanfan was encouraged to move to Albany himself, to make war himself, to send the Secretary of Indian Affairs to England, and to lower prices of English trade goods and provide Christian ministers to help stem the emigration of Haudenosaunee from their homelands to French territory.

The Nanfan’s Treaty’s “trust deed” stand among the first land transactions between the Crown and the Haudenosaunee. On its face, it is a document in English legal language in which subject tribes abjectly surrender a territory to the “dread Lord Sovereign”, in exchange for protection of their hunting rights. Contemporary and later analysts, including those close to the Haudenosaunee, understood the “deed” as a means of securing English protection of the land, without relinquishing title.

Continued next issue