I want to learn more about the Iroquois, Delaware, and Susquehanna. Any scholars here educated in these Northeast Native American tribes? Whats a good starting point?

by GhostyLasers

I remember learning about Native Americans back in elementary and intermediate school, but I took all of that information for granted (in my defense I was young and it didn't really pique my interest). Going through college, I studied a lot about world cultures and history, but a recent hiking trip into the Adirondacks recently made me realize how little I know about our own history. Since I live (and have lived and vacationed) in the region where these three tribes occupied, I would love to learn some history about what may have happened in the forests all around me.

So anybody have some great information? articles? a good book? places of interest?

To start out with, for all three, the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast is a great place to start if you can get a hold of a copy.

I'm going to second /u/anthropology_nerd's recommendations for Richter's Ordeal of the Longhouse and Snow's The Iroquois (even if I disagree with Snow on the dating of Haudenosaunee foundation). I'll also recommend Jenning's The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies, Fenton's [The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy](The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy), and Mann's Iroquoian Women: the Gantowisas. Lewis Henry Morgan's The League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois is freely available online. It's one of the earliest works of anthropology / enthnography and sometimes shows its age. Morgan might have been one of the least racist anthropologist of the 19th Century, but that's a low bar. Luckily League itself isn't too bad on that front; Ely Parker seems to have kept him check and Morgan saved most of the racism for a later theoretical book. As long as you keep that in mind, League is still essential reading on the topic and many of the other books listed here will make frequent references to it.

For the Susquehannock (note: -hannock is for the people, -hanna is for the river), there's a lot less written. I'd go with Minderhout's Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley: Past and Present and Wallace's Indians of Pennsylvania, but in both cases the Susquehannock basically serve as a prologue to the Delaware / Lenape. This is a case were the Handbook might be your best bet.

For the Delaware / Lenape, there's a lot written about them. However, you need to be extra careful here, particularly of anything written before 1995, and even some material post-1995. The reason for this because the Walam Olum, which had considerable influence on the topic of Lenape history since it was 'translated' into English in the 1830s, was finally, definitively proven to be a fraud in 1994. Before 1995, its veracity had long been debated, so you find skeptics and supporters through the era. Keep that in mind if you happen to read something that references the Walam Olum, and be generally skeptical of references to "ancient traditions" and the like even if the text doesn't outright reference the Walam Olum. That said, check out (in no particular order) Weslager's The Delaware Indians: A History, Schutt's People of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians, Fur's A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians, Soderlund's Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, Kraft's The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage, 10,000 BC to AD 2000, and Heckewelder's History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (which is old enough to be available in full online).