“No useless mouth”: Iroquoian food diplomacy in the American Revolution

Abstract

After 1660, writes historian Michael LaCombe, Englishmen depicted Native Americans as “tragic, hungry, and helpless victims.” A century later, Anglo-Irishman William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, did otherwise. In describing the increased expense of Indian alliances in 1765 he complained, “All the Bull feasts ever given at Albany would not now draw down Ten Indians.” LaCombe’s English writers portrayed powerless, starving Indians, while Johnson worried about powerful ones uninterested in feasting. Historians must reconcile these contrasting portrayals. This article examines several ideas about Native hunger—that of the starving and useless mouth, that of the supplicant using hunger as a metaphor, and that of the warrior capable of doing without European provisions—which emerged over more than a century of Native and non-Native diplomacy. It contends that British misunderstandings of Iroquois (otherwise known as Six Nations, or Haudenosaunee) hunger during the American Revolution enabled Indians to use food diplomacy to retain power during a period that historians have characterized as disastrous for Natives. Indians accepted provisions and then refused to do what their allies wished, they explicitly ignored their hunger, and most significantly, they destroyed their allies’ food.

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