Description

All One People and Under One King examines the social network of native peoples, Dutch and British settlers, and enslaved African people created by baptismal sponsorship at Fort Hunter along the Mohawk River during the 1730s and 1740s. Using social network analysis, Professor Maeve Kane challenges the primacy of white men as intercultural mediators on New York's northern frontier. Instead, Dutch women who went unmentioned in other written sources linked together communities by serving as godmothers. Similarly, Iroquois women used the institution of godparenthood to reinforce traditional roles within their clans.

Author Information

Maeve Kane is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York.  She received her PhD in American History from Cornell University and is currently revising a manuscript titled Shirts Powdered Red: Iroquois Women and the Politics of Atlantic Consumer Civility, 1600-1860.  The book argues that Haudenosaunee women of the Six Nations Iroquois used the Atlantic world of goods to shape their communities’ engagement with settler colonialism and reject colonialist constructions of civility and savagery.  Maeve’s research focuses on questions of community and identity formation and uses material culture, archaeology, economic history, and digital history to examine indigenous women’s agency, (maevekane.net).