There is great relevancy in this story as our world is rife with contested borderlands, put-upon ancestral residents, overlapping allegiances, and the manipulative hands of foreign governments.
The Divided Ground takes place in a fluid time; especially if you were an Iroquois seeking to know and negotiate with your adversary. France and England were still still rooted in and had designs on North America, the colonies were emerging as a nation which grew into states and an early federal government wrestling for jurisdiction and balance. There were enterprising pioneers as well manipulative power-brokers and politicians. At each of these turns, the tribes of the Iroquois nation were faced with a new power to trust, evolving strategies for survival, and overlapping promises and deceits as history ebbed and flowed around them.
If there were any constants in this flux, they included the appetite for land (and therefore revenue) by governments and speculators, the effort of the Iroquois to at least determine the dispensation of their homeland through leases rather than cessions, and the difficulties of remaining virtuous, for whites and Indians alike, at the extremity where limited and unlimited opportunity barter for their future.
And, as I am so often when reading histories, I was struck by the ambition and agency of individuals, by the reach and travel of those individuals in a wide-ranging and perilous landscape, and by the administration of leaders, at great time and distance, through the reliance of largely autonomous agents; for both honorable and not-so-honorable ends.
Finally, it encourages me to revisit some of these sites around New York that are not that far removed, either by distance or by time, from me and my world.
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