SINAS Research Seminar: “‘No Knife Near Our Dish’: Hospitality and Food in 18th-Century Haudenosaunee-European Diplomacy”

Abstract:

When headmen of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee held diplomatic conferences with representatives of the European colonial powers in northeastern America throughout the eighteenth century, their encounters were always fundamentally shaped by rituality and material culture. Most prominently, these meetings centered on the exchange of symbolic and practical gifts like Wampum Belts and trade goods, though the intercultural blend of protocol that informed their meetings also frequently called for other, more savory arrangements.

As they discussed questions of trade agreements, military support, and access to hunting grounds and arable land, they also always exchanged gifts of maize and rum, and ate, drank, and smoked together. In this, Haudenosaunee rituals and conceptions of hospitality provided the framework under which they could do so, while the goods French and British colonists imported from Europe served as material signifiers of their willingness to respect the tenets of their agreements.

Meanwhile, ever-more crafty colonial officials, interpreters, and cultural brokers worked to subvert these rituals and ideas in order to both gain additional benefits in trade, as well as strengthen their territorial foothold vis-a-vis the various Indigenous groups and their European rivals in the region. Consequently, this thesis project aims to investigate what role Haudenosaunee conceptions of hospitality as a political tool played in eighteenth-century diplomatic interactions between their Indigenous Nations and European actors in the American northeast, and how its situational expression in the form of food diplomacy shaped and impacted their commercial, military and political relations.

The seminar will take place on Zoom. The text will be available one week before the seminar.