Overview
Jon Parmenter is an associate professor in Cornell’s department of History. I am a historian of early North America specializing in the history of Indigenous peoples of what is now the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. My research interests center on the relationships of Indigenous nations to their spatial environments, the subject of my first monograph The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701 (2010). I have published article-length studies in Diplomatic History, William and Mary Quarterly, and the Journal of Early American History. Most recently I have published a peer-reviewed essay on “Indigenous Nations and US Foreign Policy” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Since September 2021 I have also been active in preparing reports and providing expert testimony in several Canadian court cases pertaining to Indigenous nations’ treaty rights and land claims.
Research Focus
A Speculative Vision: Cornell University’s Origins in Indian Country
Cornell University, as New York State’s designated federal land-grant university, received approximately one million acres (ten percent of the acreage allocated nationally) by the Morrill Act of 1862. By 1900, nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act land-grant revenues generated by all the states had accrued to Cornell University. Relying on the University’s extensive archival records, this book will demonstrate how Ezra Cornell (and institutional successors) wrung incredible profits from lands and natural resources initially taken by the federal government in nine prior treaty surrenders secured from five different tribal nations located in what are now the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas. Carrying the story forward to the present day, the book will assess the comparative outcomes of the dispossession for the Indigenous nations in question vis-à-vis the benefits that flowed to the University. The book also seeks to address the question of Cornell University’s contemporary obligations as a land-grant institution to the key original stakeholders in its founding: the Indigenous nations whose appropriated birthright provided the economic fuel that transformed Cornell University from a sleepy, one-building college to an internationally-known center of higher education with the third-largest endowment of any American university by the turn of the twentieth century.
Publications
MONOGRAPH
The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701. Michigan State University Press, 2010; paperback edition, University of Manitoba Press, 2014.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession,” in Vanessa Holden and Michael Witgen, eds., “Forum: ‘The End of Early America?’” William and Mary Quarterly 81 (January 2024): 123-34.
"The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?" Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 82-109.
"The Perils and Possibilities of Wartime Neutrality on the Edges of Empires: Iroquois and Acadians between the British and French in North America, 1744-60." (coauthored with Mark P. Robison) Diplomatic History 31 (2007): 167-206.
"After the Mourning Wars: The Iroquois as Allies in Colonial North American Campaigns, 1676-1760." William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007): 39-82.
BOOK CHAPTERS AND INVITED ESSAYS
"Separate Vessels: Hudson, the Dutch, and the Iroquois." In Jaap Jacobs and Louis Roper, eds., The Worlds of the Seventeenth Century Hudson Valley (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 103-33.
"In the Wake of Cartier: The Indigenous Context of Champlain's Activities in the St. Lawrence Valley and Upper Great Lakes, 1550-1635." In Nancy Nahra, ed., When the French Were Here…And They're Still Here: Proceedings of the 2009 Champlain Quadricentennial Conference (Burlington, VT: Champlain College, 2010), 87-115.
"'Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh': Reassessing Iroquois Relations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1723-1755." In Nancy Rhoden, ed., English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Professor Ian K. Steele (Montréal, QC, and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007), 235-83.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES AND SHORT ESSAYS
“The Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 2024. https://encyclopediavirginia.org
“La Ligue haudenosaunee, ou l’art du récit.” In Pierre Singaravélou, et al, eds., Colonisations: Notre Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2023), 887-89.
“Indigenous Nations and US Foreign Policy.” In Jon Butler, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press; article published June 2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.744
“Iroquois Diplomacy.” In Gordon Martel, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2018).
"Native Americans," in Mark G. Spencer, ed., Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (2 vols., New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2: 740-43.
"The Beaver Wars," in Antonio Thomson and Christos Frentzos, eds., The Routledge Handbook of U.S. Diplomatic and Military History: Colonial Period to 1877 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 33-41.
"Agriculture." In John Demos, ed.,American Centuries: The Ideas, Issues, and Trends that Made U.S. History, Volume 2, The Seventeenth Century (New York: MTM Publishing, 2011), 17-23.