Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks
Introduction
"Our Collection on Native Americans Is Limited"
References contained in local histories about the relationship of Native Americans to the Adirondacks have changed over time. ... While these statements appear contradictory, they are typical of the thinking about the history of Indigenous peoples in the Adirondacks, a mountainous area in northeastern New York State. Today the region is a well-known state park, but prior to the twentieth century its ruggedness created a sense of mystery about this place. ...
While nineteenth-century observers were perhaps more sensitive to the Aboriginal presence in the Adirondacks, by the twentieth century this awareness of their presence was becoming increasingly rare....
This book is about making visible the history of Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples who called this region their homeland over the centuries. The sources show that the Adirondacks have been an Indigenous homeland for millennia and that Native people were visible to the Europeans and Euro-Americans who came to the region as early as the seventeenth century and well into the nineteenth, and that it was late nineteenth and twentieth century historians who made them invisible. This book is also a study of how Indigenous culture continued and changed under settler colonialism within this geographic space, which was not much suited to commercial farming. As a result, other occupations emerged into which Native peoples could fit and may have helped lay the groundwork for wilderness tourism in the Adirondacks. Ultimately, the book is a history of the survival of Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples in a nonreservation, rural environment up to the present time.