In January 1776, General George Washington met in Cambridge with diplomats from the Caughnawaga Mohawk Nation. They had been waiting for a week to know whether their leader, Atiatoharongwen, would receive a commission in the Continental Army. Atiatoharongwen had come to Cambridge before and offered to muster four hundred men to fight for the colonists
against the British Army. But he had gone away — as he would a second time — empty-handed. Why? Delegates from the Abenaki, Oneida, and Haudenosaunee peoples offered assistance to the colonists as well. Why did General Washington resist?
The Longfellow House, History Cambridge, and the Cambridge Public Library will pose such questions in a series of events, part of Cambridge’s bid to commemorate the 250th anniversary of independence. On January 22, “The First President and the First People: Washington in the Native Northeast” features Dartmouth College Professor Colin G. Calloway — author of The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation — in conversation with Kabl Wilkerson, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Harvard University.
The story of American independence is more typically framed around the battles that began in and around Cambridge in 1775, and the Semiquincentennial celebration script handed down from the White House is bound to stick to the traditional story. Calloway and Wilkerson will delve into the social history of diplomatic relations among various Indigenous communities as well as between them and colonists from Britain and other European powers. Our authors will explain the tensions and shifting alliances of the 1750s and 1760s during what was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War, a conflict that had left the colonists and the Indigenous nations in the Northeast highly suspicious of each another.
In giving us an opportunity to learn about Anglo-Indigenous diplomacy, to explore the nature of George Washington’s resistance, the program asks a question that is all-too-relevant. How can disparate and divided peoples living together in the same contested land unite against a king? The event is free and open to all. Come in person to the Main Library or watch virtually. Registration is requested.
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