Iroquois Food Diplomacy in the Revolutionary North

Abstract

This chapter details how Indians used hunger to fight back. During the summer of 1779, the rebel American army mounted a devastating victual-warfare campaign, known today as the Sullivan Campaign, against Britain's Iroquois allies. Two major related changes occurred after the expedition. First, British descriptions of Iroquois hunger by the 1780s allowed most officials to envision Indians as useful mouths who could overlook hunger while also requiring more provisions. This altered perception of Iroquois hunger created a second change: a reworking of Iroquoian food diplomacy into something more violent than its previous iterations. Iroquoian food diplomacy in the American Revolution was constituted, in part, by mutual fasting—a policy the Indians sometimes had to enforce through the use of aggression. This diplomacy took Indian requests for certain types of provisions into account, obliging non-Natives to go out of their way to accommodate Native tastes. The American Revolution ravaged Indian communities, including Iroquois ones, but, during the war, changing British perceptions of hungry Indians allowed the Iroquois to challenge the state of power relations at a time when contemporaries assumed they were powerless in the face of crop destruction and land losses. Iroquois abilities to ignore and endure hunger made it impossible for their British allies to think of them as useless mouths.