Cultivating a Landscape of Peace

Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Relations in the Seventeenth Century examines the peculiar new worlds of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, the Dutch, and the French, who shared cultural frontiers in seventeenth-century America. Viewing early America from the different perspectives of the diverse peoples who coexisted uneasily during the colonial encounter between Europeans and Indians, he explains a long-standing paradox: the apparent belligerence of the Five Nations, a people who saw themselves as promoters of universal peace.

In a radically new interpretation of the Iroquois, Dennis argues that the Five Nations sought to incorporate their new European neighbors as kinspeople into their Longhouse, the physical symbolic embodiment of Iroquois domesticity and peace. He offers a close, original reading of the fundamental political myth of the Five Nations, the Deganawidah Epic, and situates it historically and ideologically in Iroquois life. Detailing the particular nature of Iroquois peace, he describes the Five Nations' diligent efforts to establish peace on their own terms and the frustrations and hostilities that stemmed from the fundamental contrast between Iroquois and European goals, expectations, and perceptions of human relationships.

Cultivating a Landscape of Peace was the winner of the New York Historical Association Manuscript Award (now the Snow Prize) and the Erminie Wheeler-Vogel Prize awarded by the American Society for Ethnohistory.

Winner of the 1994 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, first established in 1981 and awarded in recognition of the best book-length contribution to ethnohistory, by the American Society for Ethnohistory

Winner of the 1987 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize (formerly the New York State Historical Association Prize), for the best unpublished, book-length monograph dealing with the history of New York State.

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“Matthew Dennis’s innovative account of the cultural intersection of the Iroquois, Dutch, and French worlds . . . goes beyond recent works that have challenged the myth of the Imperial Iroquois to argue that the Iroquois not only never achieved an empire, they never sought one, and, indeed, are best understood in terms of their own peculiar cultural quest for peace.”—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus, Stanford University, MacArthur Fellow, and past president of the Organization of American Historians

“An important [book]. . . . Dennis’s analysis pivots . . . on the resiliency of the Iroquois themselves in establishing a cultural, social, and political unity embodied in the Great League of Peace and maintained through reciprocal kinship rituals. . . . [He] traces the Iroquois’ persistence, but ultimately frustrated, attempts to effect an amalgamation of peoples—Native American, Dutch, and French.”—Pacific Historical Review

“A thought-provoking study.”—American Indian Cultural and Research Journal

“Dennis seeks to replace the stereotype of the ‘bloodthirsty, aggressive’ Iroquois with the portrait of a people who sculpted an ecological and political ‘landscape of peace.’ . . . Most intriguing is Dennis’s suggestion that French-Iroquois hostilities stemmed from the French failure to understand that Iroquois overtures of peace were predicated on the sincere desire to adopt, literally, the French as relatives.”—Choice