According to Chad L. Anderson, “Humans create an imagined landscape to correspond with the physical one” (8). In The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, Anderson examines the imagined landscape of Iroquoia, the ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Anderson argues in his first chapter, Euro-Americans had little influence over Iroquoia’s “built and natural landscape” before the American Revolution (1). These visitors relied on Haudenosaunee informants to glimpse how Iroquoia’s landscape “connected the Haudenosaunee to their myths, history, and identities” (44). After the war destroyed much of Iroquoia’s built landscape and opened the region to settlers, white Americans created a physical and imagined landscape of their own in Iroquoia. For the remainder of the book, Anderson successfully argues that this imagined landscape appropriated Iroquoia’s Haudenosaunee past while denying the Haudenosaunee a place in Iroquoia’s future.
Anderson shows that settlers used Iroquoia’s built and...
