Since it was published in 1992, Dan Richter’s Ordeal of the Longhouse has become a foundational text for the history of Haudenosaunee peoples and for early Americanists writ large. It also, however, has become an essential component in the strategy of Canadian courts to curtail the articulation and practice of aboriginal rights by present-day Haudenosaunee communities. Since it was introduced into the trial of Grand Chief Michael Mitchell (also known as Kanentakeron) and extensively cited in the 2001 influential Supreme Court of Canada decision Mitchell v. M.N.R, Richter’s work has become an (if not the) authoritative voice on the trading practices of Mohawk peoples, delimiting a narrow view of their commercial activities that, within an evolving Canadian constitutional tradition, criminalizes the contemporary cross-border economies of all Haudenosaunee peoples. Contextualizing my own experience as an expert witness within a broader history of Canadian aboriginal law, this paper examines how The Ordeal of the Longhouse came to assume this role, tracing out its use by expert witnesses hired by Crown attorneys and its subsequent elevation by Supreme Court Justices. Richter’s work was published at a time in which Canadian courts articulated a conservative and originalist reading of aboriginal rights, capturing the work of historians and making early American / Canadian history central to debates over how descendant communities are allowed to live today. In this way, the history of The Ordeal presents a powerful reminder of the multiple audiences for our work and the unintended harms our scholarship can produce. It offers another avenue to reevaluate the vexed question of presentism in our discipline today and promote an open conversation about the effects of historical scholarship in the world today.

Chris Parsons is Associate Professor of History and the Health Humanities at Northeastern University. He is an interdisciplinary historian of science, the environment, and health in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, with a focus on French colonialism and the northeast of what are now Canada and the United States. His work has appeared in Environmental History, The William & Mary Quarterly, among other journals and edited collections. A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018 and won the Prix Lionel Groulx from the Institut d’hisotire de l’Amérique française. He is currently working on histories of smallpox in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northeast as a monograph and a larger digital project on the experience of epidemic disease in colonial cities.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Augustus Mosse.