Unsettled New York: land, law, and Haudenosaunee nationalism in the early twentieth century

During the first decades of the twentieth century, officials in Washington, D.C. and Albany, N.Y. unsuccessfully attempted to solve the ideological, jurisdictional, and material problem posed by Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities in upstate New York. This administrative crisis stretched back to the first decades of the republic, when overlapping treaties, colonial charters, and private preemption rights clouded title and, in turn, jurisdictional suzerainty to much of what would become the northeastern United States. Within the interstices of colonial law and governance, Iroquois people maintained an independent political culture that exploded into a movement for territorial repatriation in the 1920s, a historical moment otherwise marked by imperial ascendance and racial backlash.