In early 1777, British General John Burgoyne hatched a plan to take over New York’s Hudson River Valley and end the American Revolution by cutting off the colonists’ maritime supply routes.
Fort Stanwix, a stronghold built by the British two decades earlier to protect an overland path through Haudenosaunee territory, would play a pivotal role in this campaign. Reclaimed by the Americans at the beginning of the war and rechristened Fort Schuyler, it was “really the western door for the colony of New York,” says Alexis Albright, Oneida County historian and the curator of the Oriskany Museum. As the British laid siege to the fort in the summer of 1777, the patriots found themselves running out of supplies.
Against this backdrop, members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a coalition of six Native nations in the Mohawk Valley, began hearing rumors that the British planned to target their lands next. At the beginning of the Revolution, the confederacy had tried to avoid taking sides in the conflict, but this commitment to neutrality didn’t last long.
“Once the Declaration of Independence is issued by Congress, then it kind of changes the calculus,” says R. Scott Stephenson, president and CEO of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. “Then, both sides are putting pressure on Native people to join one side or the other.”
The Oneida and the Tuscarora pledged their support to the colonists, while the rest of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Cayuga and the Seneca—allied with the British. Tensions between these formerly united groups came to a head at the Battle of Oriskany, a British ambush a few miles east of Fort Stanwix on August 6, 1777. Native soldiers fought on both sides of the clash, which represented “one of the first breaks in the confederacy between the Six Nations,” Albright says. “There hadn’t been infighting for hundreds of years.”
The Six Nations weren’t the only Native communities to play a part in the Revolutionary War. These Indigenous groups’ contributions to the conflict underscore the contradictions of America’s early history. Even as the colonists fought for freedom from tyranny, they laid claim to lands that didn’t belong to them, prompting Native Americans to join the Revolution in hopes of preventing further territorial expansion.
Native communities viewed alliances with either the British or the Americans as “the best chance they have to protect their homelands from increasing invasion and settler encroachment,” says Brandon Dillard, the director of historic interpretation and audience engagement at Monticello and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Heather Bruegl, a public historian, citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and first-line descendant of the Stockbridge Munsee, adds, “While many tend to argue that the American Revolution is a war of independence, it’s really a war about land and access to it.”