Native Nations Fought in the American Revolution to Protect Their Ancestral Lands. After the War, Settlers Seized Their Territory Anyway

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.”

To chronicle Native peoples’ involvement in America’s founding is to call attention to the complexities of a nation born not only from revolution but also from forced dispossession.

Why Native nations allied with the British versus the Americans

The French and Indian War, a 1754-63 conflict over land in North America, laid the groundwork for Indigenous involvement in the Revolution. Native nations fought on both sides of the war, joining American colonists in supporting the British or allying themselves with the French instead.

After the British won the war, they issued the Proclamation of 1763, which barred colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains. The measure suggested that “everything on the other side, the western side of the mountains, is really Indian land,” Bruegl says. “The colonists take this as really being told that they are not allowed to expand. They’re not allowed to grow.”

As Bruegl points out, one of the grievances listed by the colonists in the Declaration of Independence is the claim that Britain’s king, George III, left them vulnerable to attacks by “merciless Indian savages.”

“Those attacks,” Bruegl says, “are actually because colonists are coming over into land that they’re not supposed to be [in], and the Indigenous folks are just protecting their homelands.”

After the Revolution broke out in 1775, most Native nations sided with the British. Centuries of colonization had left many Indigenous communities “to some degree … dependent on these European powers economically,” Stephenson says. The British could provide trade goods like firearms and cloth; they also promised to honor existing provisions against expansion into Native territory.

Far from “doing the bidding” of the British or the colonists, Stephenson argues, Native Americans were “rational actors who were very diplomatically savvy,” making strategic alliances during the Revolution for political and economic reasons.

The Battle of Oriskany

In early August 1777, Brigadier General Nicholas Herkimer led his militia on a 40-mile march to Fort Stanwix, where the men hoped to relieve their besieged compatriots. Herkimer, whose parents had emigrated to the Thirteen Colonies from the Palatinate region of Germany, “grew up trading with the Mohawk, the Oneida, and that was his world,” Albright says.

On the second night of the march, Herkimer stopped to camp near the Oneida village of Oriska. Community leader Hanyery Tewahangarahken decided to join forces with Herkimer and accompany him to Fort Stanwix. The combined patriot and Oneida troops had little idea of what awaited them, as communications from the fort were limited.

“They make the very difficult decision to march” rather than wait for further instructions, Albright says. “And what becomes the Battle of Oriskany is them marching into an ambush at what today they call Bloody Creek. The British, the Mohawk and [the] Seneca were lying in wait for Herkimer and his men.”

Led by Joseph Brant, the Mohawk helped the British block a path to the fort, waiting in the undergrowth of a ravine near the trail that the colonists were following. But some Native soldiers started firing their weapons too soon, inadvertently warning the patriots, some of whom were able to escape. Herkimer was wounded in the chaotic fighting that ensued, but he stayed in the thick of it, delivering orders to his men while sitting against a tree for support.

The Battle of Oriskany proved to be devastating for the Americans, whose dead numbered around 385 men. (Herkimer died from his injuries ten days after the clash.) Casualties on the British side were significantly lower.

Nearly 250 years later, the battlefield stands as hallowed ground for the Six Nations, whose alliances splintered into civil war at Oriskany as each tribe chose the path forward that they believed would best protect their lands.

After Oriskany, “things are never the same in the Mohawk Valley again,” Albright says. “Those scars cut deep, and it really changed the landscape for the Oneida, for the Palatine settlers, for the colony of New York, for the Continental Congress.”

Despite the setback at Oriskany, the besieged patriots at Fort Stanwix managed to hold out until August 22, when the British retreated from the area amid a breakdown in their relationship with their Native allies. Less than two months later, Burgoyne’s campaign to seize control of the Hudson River Valley ended in a humiliating defeat, and the British general surrendered to the Americans at Saratoga on October 17.

The Cherokee and the Lenape during the American Revolution

Like the Mohawk, the Cherokee Nation, whose ancestral lands span much of the southeastern United States, decided to ally with the British rather than the patriots during the Revolution. The Cherokee were already engaged in a separate territorial war with the Americans, so they had little reason to support the colonists’ cause. That conflict would continue until 1794, more than a decade after the Revolution’s end. For the Cherokee, Dillard says, the 1700s were “just a century of warfare against encroaching settlements.”

The Cherokee had allied with the British during the French and Indian War. But relations soured because of infighting between American settlers and the Cherokee. To protect the Thirteen Colonies, which were still part of the British Empire at the time, Britain sent troops to fight in what became known as the Anglo-Cherokee War (1758-61).

After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the British proclamation limiting westward expansion into Native territory gave the Cherokee reason to think that the settlers’ ambitions would be curbed. The decree heightened tensions between the British and the colonists, some of whom defied it.

Cherokee leaders took different positions on how to deal with these interlopers. Some, such as Dragging Canoe, argued that the colonists’ actions were tantamount to theft and suggested that the Cherokee respond with force. Others, particularly Cherokee elders who had fought against the colonists, preferred to find a way to live in peace. Ultimately, when the Revolution began, the Cherokee decided to form “an alliance with the British in hopes of making sure that the proclamation line stays enforced and that they can protect their homelands,” Dillard says.

The Lenape people (also known as the Delaware Nation) initially attempted to remain neutral during the Revolution. In 1778, however, they signed a treaty with the colonists, pledging military support in exchange for protection and the creation of a 14th state, governed by Native Americans. The agreement fell apart within weeks, as the Americans failed to protect Lenape lands against territorial aggression and violence by settlers.

Native nations participated in the war beyond the battlefield, too. To support their patriot allies, who famously endured famine, disease and harsh weather at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania in the winter of 1777, the Oneida sent a delegation with bushels of corn. A member of this delegation, Polly Cooper, taught the soldiers how to cook the corn, in addition to tending to the sick. Oral tradition suggests that Martha Washington purchased a shawl for Cooper as thanks after the Oneida woman refused to accept payment for her services.

“Without the Oneida there basically breaking the famine at Valley Forge, the tide of the war could have very much changed,” Bruegl says. “There would have probably been a lot more death for the Continental Army.”

Broken promises and the legacy of Native involvement in the Revolution

The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolution in 1783, securing peace between the Americans and the British and formally recognizing the U.S. as an independent nation. But the Native groups who had fought alongside these powers found themselves excluded from the peacemaking process.

Not until 1784 did representatives of the Six Nations meet with the Americans at Fort Stanwix, where they were pressured into ceding lands north and west of a previously established boundary line. Over the next several years, American treaties with other Native nations, including the Cherokee and the Choctaw, paved the way for westward expansion by settlers, realizing the very fears that these Indigenous people had joined the war to assuage.

As Richard Bell, a historian at the University of Maryland, explains, the Revolution also created a massive refugee crisis, displacing tens of thousands of people, many of them Native Americans. “No Native community wins the American Revolution,” he says.

Nearly 50 years after the Revolution’s end, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 legalized the expulsion of Native Americans, including the Cherokee, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee were the last tribe forced to march west along the Trail of Tears. Of the 16,000 Cherokee people who embarked on the journey, an estimated 4,000 died of disease, starvation and exposure. Yet “the Cherokee never wavered” in their commitment to fighting for their homelands, Dillard says.

Native Americans’ roles in the Revolution—and the consequences they suffered as a direct result of the war—have long been overlooked. As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th anniversary on July 4, however, this history is worth revisiting. In Bruegl’s words, Native Americans are “remembering, we’re commemorating. Because not all of us are celebrating.”