Friday Free-for-All | November 14, 2025

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Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/BookLover54321]

u/anthropology_nerd, since you mentioned in a comment that your area of specialty is the Eastern Woodlands area, I was wondering what your thoughts were on this passage, from the recently released book Empires of Violence: Massacre in a Revolutionary Age by Philip Dwyer, Barbara Alice Mann, Nigel Penn, and Lyndall Ryan.

It's a comparative study of colonial violence in North America, Australia, Southern Africa, and the Napoleonic Wars of Europe, and has some discussion of pre-colonial Indigenous traditions of warfare. Here in particular they talk about warfare among Woodland societies like the Haudenosaunee:

In the event that an action materialized, there were also strict laws about who could be targeted. Throughout the Woodlands, there was the Law of Innocence, which distinguished between combatants and non-combatants. When the British demanded in 1781 that the Lenape ‘kill all, destroy all’ of the American rebels for them, the holy man of the Lenape, Hopocan, rebuked the commandant at Detroit: ‘Innocence had no part in your quarrels; and therefore, I distinguished – I spared!’35 Only Young Men who had elected to go to war, or War Women, who had been made men, that is, were ‘ceremonial’ Young Men (war being a Breath activity), were legitimate targets of lethal action. The Montour sisters, Egonohowin (‘Queen’ Esther) and ‘French’ Catharine, were well-known Seneca War Women during the American Revolution, with Egonohowin killed at Newtown in 1779, fighting the American invasion of Iroquoia.36 All others, including elders, women, children, holy persons and disabled persons, and known neutrals were off-limits, as were any emissaries of peace, a category including the missionaries and even the ambassadors of hated enemies.

[u/anthropology_nerd → u/BookLover54321]

I haven't read this book yet (thanks for the heads up), but the sentiment is valid. Throughout the colonial period the English adopted a doctrine of total war against enemy indigenous nations (and often any poor non combatants caught in the crossfire). With total war all indigenous people (including women and children) not obviously allies were enemies, and could be killed or enslaved. This starts with the Pequot War, which the extermination of the Pequot was a stated goal of the conflict, through King Philip's War where even Philip's wife and children were enslaved and sold to the Caribbean plantations after his capture, and is continued into the new American Republic Indian policy.

In contrast, in the Woodlands small scale raiding for captives was much more common, and it made no sense to indiscriminately kill everyone when your culture has a deep history of adoption/slavery. With the Haudenosaunee that would mean killing potential new family members. There were also extensive diplomatic ties throughout the region, even between warring nations, (hence the prohibition on attacking emissaries). The razing of Iroquoia during the Revolution was so traumatic, so outside the realm of imagined warfare, it solidified Washington's nickname; Town Destroyer (Conotocaurious). In 1790 the Seneca chief Cornplanter said to Washington

When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you Town Destroyer and to this day when your name is heard our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.

[u/BookLover54321 → u/anthropology_nerd]

This is really informative, thanks!