Seneca Iroquois Fieldwork

My first fieldwork experiences came as an undergraduate student, when I joined the Syracuse University Seneca Research Project (SUSRP) in the summer of 1971. SUSRP was funded by the National Science Foundation as a Student-Originated Study, a very nice idea which involved graduate students devising research projects and recruiting undergraduate students to carry them out. A friend from college was one of the organizers and recruited me. The topic was the effect on the Allegany Seneca in southwestern New York of the forced relocation of much of the population when the Kinzua Dam was built downstream on the Allegheny River five years earlier. I’m not sure that our findings were of great import but the experience served to introduce me to issues surrounding the people now called Native Americans – they were still Indians then -- and I made wonderful contacts there of people my own age, and of some of the leaders of the people who followed the Handsome Lake religion.

So I kept returning to the reservation, living in a cabin on the river that had been the home before relocation of my Seneca adopted father, Harry Watt, Longhouse Chief of the Bird side, and a rural wise man of a kind perhaps not often found now.

I started grad school at Syracuse but decided to switch to law school; discussions with a professor of archaeology from the State University of New York at Buffalo made me aware that I could do a joint degree program there, JD/PhD. With full funding. So I did that. Thus, from the summer of 1972 through Fall 1977, when I wasn’t in classes in Syracuse (through 1973) or Buffalo or India, I was on the reservation. My interests changed from religion and politics to the Peacemaker Courts of the Seneca Nation of Indians, (SNI) and I got permission from the SNI Council to study them. However, this was the time when anthropology and anthropologists were becoming unwelcome on reservations, following the publication of Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). I was never made to feel unwelcome – far from it. While at Syracuse, I was welcome on the Onondaga Reservation when I came with Seneca friends, and had the honor of hosting Leonard Crow Dog, the spiritual leader of the American Indian movement, at my apartment. At Allegany I was literally pulled into the Longhouse right after they posted a sign saying “No Non-Indians Allowed,” with the words “That don’t apply to you.” After all, I had been adopted by Harry Watt in a ceremony in the Longhouse, with Avery Jimerson singing the personal chant for me since I couldn’t do it. And I was the only non-Indian on the Allegany Arrows box lacrosse team one year; my Seneca teammates reacted strongly when other teams started to beat up on the white guy.

nd so I never did publish anything from my Seneca fieldwork. However, in the first year of our marriage I took my new wife to the reservation frequently, to see/ take part in the entire round of yearly ceremonies in the Longhouse. Two years later, we decided to publish a collection of translations of Iroquois myths and legends as they had been recorded by ethnologists and anthropologists in the 19th an 20th centuries. Milica and our friend Snežana Dabić did the translations, while I provided an introduction and some notes. Svet na Leđima Kornjače [The World on the Turtle's Back] (Kruševac: Bagdala, 1991) came out just as Yugoslavia collapsed, so did not get too much attention. But it is one of the few works in the former Serbo-Croatian on a native American people.

I stayed in touch with Harry Watt until he died in 1985, and with his wife Myra Rodgers through the 1980s. On a brief visit to the reservation in 2018, I was fascinated to see that the Senecas are now among the more prosperous people in the southern tier of New York State, mainly due to the proceeds of casino gambling and of sales of tobacco free of most state and federal taxes. But that can be a topic for others to study.

My years on the reservation were crucial for me, intellectually and personally. Living in a rural county in New York State, 400 miles from New York City, taught me a very great deal about ways of life and sociability that a middle-class kid from the suburbs of Connecticut knew nothing about, and some aspects of both Seneca culture and rural New York State society were as unfamiliar as aspects of the society and culture in India and Yugoslavia later proved to be.

Robert M. HAYDEN, JD, PhD

Seneca Iroquois Fieldwork

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