other Confederacy members became heavily involved in the fur trade. While some Indians dealt with the French, located to the north in what became Canada, the Mohawk established a trading relationship with the Dutch. But as the eastern lands' supply of beaver was depleted in the 1640s the Mohawk became intermediaries between the Dutch and the western Indians. In the subsequent struggles between the French and British (Mohawk trading partners who replaced the Dutch in 1666) the Mohawk had some success in keeping a balance of power between the French and the British by throwing support one way or another. Because all the Iroquois tribes flourished in this situation by 1700, for the first time, the Confederacy authorized a single representative for the five nations in negotiations with the Europeans. This ultimate cooperative effort took place despite the fact that the nations "had made no fundamental in their decentralized, segmentary, and kin-based social and political structure" (Champagne 28).
This unity was purely economic in origin--a response to the competitive phase of colonial contact--and as traders moved west in the 1740s the Confederacy's business was undermined. The idea of unity was only temporary and in the so-called French and Indian Wars (1754-60) the Seneca fought with the French while the Mohawk remained with the British. After the Revolutionary War "the pressures of increasing American hegemonic domination" weakened all the nations who were forced to surrender or sell their lands and had, by the turn of the century, either migrated west or north or settled in reservations. The Iroquois had gone from "center stage in colonial political relations to political marginalization and domination" by the new American nation (Champagne 29).
By 1820 the majority of the Mohawk had migrated to Canada and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the remaining members of the Iroquois Confederacy were united in...