Beaver Wars theory B. S.

Theory rests on ‘little or no evidence’

    Without knowing each other, José Antonio Brandao and George E. Sioui, both scholars of the Iroquois, know for sure the Beaver Wars theory is bunk. Google ‘Beaver Wars’ and you get this:  “The Beaver Wars …were a series of conflicts fought intermittently during the 17th century in North America.”

    True, but here’s where Google starts to get goggly: “All parties involved wanted portions of the Great Lakes and Hudson River Valley for the ability to hunt and control the fur trade, particularly beaver….” Current theory refutes that utterly.

    As Brandao discovered from his research, “The Beaver Wars interpretation rests on little or no evidence and on assumptions of a type of culture and behavior that is at odds with what the documentary record reveals about the way Iroquois culture functioned.”

    But that’s not the popular understanding. Google’s interpretation is as pop as popular can be and it’s wrong, according to Brandao, Sioui and influential others. It all began with Parkman. Academic reasons for the Iroquois attacks on the Hurons, the French and their Algonquin allies began to coalesce in 1940 around the Beaver Wars theory originally provided by Francis Parkman, then expanded upon by George Hunt.

   George Sioui explains what they were thinking, “After 1940 the Iroquois attacks against New France were viewed as part of a general pattern of economic warfare waged to gain control from the Hurons and their French allies.” Sioui doesn’t believe that. Neither does Brandao.

    Brandao writes, “The next phase in the evolution of the Beaver Wars interpretation was the development of the view that Indians were, in some ways, like Europeans.” Among other things this “next generation of historians” decided that because the Indians traded with the Europeans they had become influenced by them into a desire like the Europeans for accumulating material wealth.” “It led to an image of the Iroquois that was equally distorted and off the mark as Parkman’s.” One scholar called this economic view “capitalist entrepreneurs in moccasins.”

    It this view the Iroquois were accumulatoring material wealth by being a middle man between the fur trappers and the European market. He adds, “The general purpose of being a middleman is not made clear. Iroquois political goals were achieved, one assumes, by controlling access to cheap English trade goods.” “But in Iroquois society, accumulation of personal wealth and working purely for the sake of making a profit, or material gain, were alien motives,” says Brandao. These were the cultural things Parkman’s economic Beaver Wars theory neglected entirely.

    The economic and Euro-cultural interpretation of the war between the Iroquois and the French and its allies should have been assigned to the dustheap of time when an important historian who had been a Parkman/Hunt advocate, changed his opinion.

    Imminent historian W. J. Eccles was the swingman who changed his and the world’s thinking about Iroquois motives for making war. Brandao writes, “He accepted Hunt’s thesis wholesale and it has formed the basis, until recently of his interpretation of Iroquois-native and Franco-Indian wars.”

    Then the growing mass of anthropological findings had its effect. “Recently, Eccles has written that he erred in accepting Hunt’s economic interpretation. Eccles has now concluded that the Iroquois wars were for power or control over the lands in which they warred…. Iroquois wars against New France proceeded from these same motives.”

    Sioui’s argument is that the Five Nations Iroquois were the ultimate purists. They wanted the continent to be populated with Indigenous people only. Those were the motives of Pontiac then later Tecumseh, both from Algonquin-speaking tribes.

    Sioui, who is proud to be a Huron, writes of the people who tried their best to exterminate his ancestors, The Iroquois “were an extremely valorous people who, to enable the Amerindian race to survive, had to fight against the European powers, forcibly adopting nations that were already gravely diminished.”

    I would add, first they gravely diminished those tribes then brought the cowed survivors back to fill the ranks of their own dead or to serve as serfs to the master tribes. The Shawnee and the Delaware were both brought in to Iroquois villages as second class citizens and forced to wear signs of their disgrace.

    “For the Iroquois,” Sioui writes, “the goal of this war was to extinguish the power of strangers in the way one extinguishes a raging fire. With extraordinary strength of character, they had to eliminate part of their own race so as to save it.” Condonable by today’s standards or not, that’s a lot higher calling then fightin’ fer fur.

    As Brandao discovered, “The Beaver Wars interpretation rests on little or no evidence and on assumptions of a type of culture and behavior that is at odds with what the documentary record reveals about the way Iroquois culture functioned.”

    His Appendix D lists all the known Iroquois raids up to 1701 and this study “reveals that attacks against fur brigades represented a very small percentage of all Iroquois warfare.” Regarding the charge of stealing, “… most European contemporaries indicated that the Iroquois did not war to steal.”

    Even though debunked, the Parkman/Hunt explanation of the Beaver Wars holds sway today. Brandao concludes, “Unfortunately, ethnocentrism, specious logic, and little or no evidence are at the heart of the Beaver Wars interpretation.”

Sources:

Georges E. Sioui  For an Amerindian Autohistory

José Antonio Brandao Your Fyre Shall Burn No More

Who were these Iroquois? What is the Basque mask?