An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

76 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

the monarchy, armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous

people, largely realizing their objectives. The Cherokees were forced

to accept tributary status, yet the attacks continued. It would take

nearly a half century after US independence was won to forcibly

remove the Cherokee Nation from the South, but the effort was un­

relenting. For the settlers squatting on Indigenous lands across the

1763 Proclamation Line of King George III, the wars waged by set­

tlers during the war of independence were a continuation of those

their ancestors and other predecessors had waged since the early

seventeenth century. Some historians portray the British as the or­

ganizers of Indigenous resistance during this period. The separatist

colonial oligarchy that drew up the Declaration of Independence

in 1776 certainly took that view. Yet, as Grenier points out, the

Indigenous people were well aware that negotiating with a faraway

empire would yield much better outcomes than would dealing with

the government of extermination-minded settlers.53

THE HAUDENOSAUNEE

On the western edge of the colony of New York, as in the southern

colonies, settlers were invading and squatting on the territory of the

Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) by the mid-177os. As with

the Cherokee Nation, the British and the separatists knew that the

Haudenosaunee would be an important factor in their war, and, as

with the Cherokee Nation, both parties sent representatives to the

Haudenosaunee councils to appeal for their support. Each member

nation of the confederacy had its own specific interests because each

had had different experiences in the previous century and a half of

British and French intrusion. Much of the French and Indian War

had been fought in their territories, with Indigenous people doing

most of the actual fighting on both sides. In 1775, the Mohawk Na­

tion allied with the British against the separatist settlers. The Sen­

eca Nation had early on considered the British to be an intractable

enemy but with the separatist war looming was more afraid of the

settlers, and so the Senecas followed the Mohawks' lead into a Brit­

ish alliance. The Cayuga, Tu scarora, and Onondaga Nations did not