Drive-by History

Drive-by History: Roadside Markers in Haudenosaunee Homelands

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

This talk takes up public history of Haudenosaunee people through the lens of roadside historical markers and considers how these markers shape narratives of violence and dispossession, contributing to "replacement" narratives that engender Haudenosaunee erasure and fuel anti-Indian rhetoric. In the late 1990s a group calling itself Upstate Citizens for Equality organized to resist land claims and economic development initiatives by the Oneida Nation and the Cayuga Nation. During the period surrounding 1999 legal proceedings related to the Cayuga Nation’s land claim, UCE produced and distributed signs declaring "No Sovereign Nation, No Reservation." Traveling along back roads near Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region of today’s New York State, it was impossible to miss these signs distributed at regular intervals. Twenty years later few of these signs remain. What does endure are historical markers along the same back roads that commemorate sites of Seneca and Cayuga villages destroyed during the 1779 scorched earth campaign named for Major General John Sullivan. Drawing on a collection of over 90 images of New York State historical markers placed within Haudenosaunee homelands, as well as public records related to those markers, this essay argues that the ubiquitous markers present a coherent narrative that authorizes resistance to Indigenous nations' land claims and sovereignty.