A Longhouse Fragmented: Ohio Iroquois Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century

A Longhouse Fragmented is a historic ethnography of the Ohio Iroquois and, in particular, of the people known as the Seneca of Sandusky during the early nineteenth century. Using contemporary social theory and interdisciplinary methodologies, Brian Joseph Gilley tells the social history of the Native peoples of Ohio before and during the sociopolitical buildup to removal. As culturally, geographically, and socially displaced Iroquois, the Sandusky Iroquois were fragmented away from American historiographical constructions of Iroquois social history by the American Indian academic establishment. This fragmentation makes the early cultural history of the Ohio Iroquois an ideal foil through which to consider how normalized interpretations of social history come to appear real and have real effects for the subject societies well into the twentieth century. These stories are intended to begin an overdue conversation about the effects of a unified Iroquois history congealed around highly specific categories of knowledge.