| Summary: | This dissertation is a social history of Algonquian and Iroquoian people in the Adirondacks of New York State, a rural, borderlands region that shares geography and history with parts of Canada. My study is a microhistory that brings a local history into a larger national dialogue and debates about Indigenous people in colonial and nineteenth century North American history. It argues the Adirondacks have always been an indigenous homeland to Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples and that they contributed to the fabric of its culture there. It also examines and complicates the history of landscapes known as hunting territories or, as I have also called them, locations of exchange, defined as “a purposeful and occupied place where reciprocal acts occur, creating opportunities for entangled exchanges between people and the land.” These themes run throughout the thesis. My dissertation briefly investigates the pre-colonial relationship between Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking people with this place and then focuses on the entangled relationships that formed post-contact, over time, between Indigenous people and Euroamerican Adirondackers, as well as visiting urban sportsmen and tourists. My work examines nineteenth century relationships in the Northeast between men and women in both social and economic endeavours; it is also a history about labour, including performance. In addition to ethnicity, gender, and class, this study examines the nature of rural society in this time and place, to further complicate our understanding of Indigenous histories. I suggest that class relations and rural society are important lenses to view contact history during the nineteenth century and later, especially in the East where contact was longer and the trope of the “vanishing Indian” was privileged. Moreover, my dissertation demonstrates the ability and need to extend Native peoples’ history past the contact period in any historical narrative about place or culture in North America. PhD
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