<i>Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution</i>. By Christopher R. Pearl.

In 1987 historian James H. Merrell published an essay entitled “Declarations of Independence: Indian-White Relations in a New Nation.” Then, the notion that there could have been multiple declarations of independence, with multiple meanings, raised eyebrows rather than ire. Now, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the historic signing in Philadelphia's Independence Hall, the same title might be denounced as heresy by those who claim a monopoly on freedom and would have us believe that complicating the nation's creation story somehow maligns America. Never have the so-called history wars been more heated or the meanings attached to the American Revolution more important.Christopher Pearl joins a growing chorus of historians who see the revolution as a contest for land and sovereignty, as well as a war for independence. The book opens and closes with a declaration of independence ostensibly signed on July 4, 1776, by frontier squatters on Indigenous land at Pine Creek on the west branch of the Susquehanna River. The event survives in popular memory as a local expression of the national spirit of liberty penned into immortality two hundred miles to the southeast on the same day. But Pearl looks beyond local lore and roadside markers. He explores the different meanings and experiences of independence for these squatters and other groups of people in the northern Susquehanna Valley. Speculators sought unrestricted access to Indigenous land as the route to riches. Settler colonists sought the same land as the basis of their economic independence. They wanted government (on either side of the Atlantic) to aid and abet, not regulate and restrain, their efforts to rid the land of Indigenous occupants.As settlers encroached on Indigenous land in growing numbers, the ethnic, social, and political tensions escalated. The collapse of the old imperial order brought upheaval and new levels of violence. Aggressive Americans pushing on their borders posed a greater threat to Indigenous lands, liberties, and ways of life than did a distant king. Indigenous people sought their independence by trying to preserve their homelands from squatters who formed the cutting edge of settler colonialism. Frontier populations that rebelled against George III also contested the government of eastern elites. They struggled to build new societies on their own terms and at the expense of Native Americans, whose lands they coveted and whose removal they demanded. Local struggles for power, authority, and resources often took precedence over the larger conflict between the crown and the colonies. “It was as if visions of the Revolution, though understood as far-reaching, could not be viewed beyond geographically confined local parameters,” Pearl writes (234).Pearl traces the protracted struggles for land in the region from the visit of a Haudenosaunee delegation to Philadelphia in 1749, and a treaty in which they granted 2,000,000 acres of Delaware land to Pennsylvania, to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1784, in which Haudenosaunee delegates were coerced into signing away their lands. Simple conflicts between clearly defined groups—patriots and loyalists, Indigenous peoples and whites, winners and losers—who were committed to a single cause disappear in a kaleidoscope of moving players competing for survival, sovereignty, and their visions of the future. Pearl does a particularly good job of leading his readers through the intricacies of the Fort Stanwix treaties (1768 and 1784). He includes Indigenous people and peoples as actors rather than simply victims in his story. Pearl sketches the roles of prominent individuals such as Teedyuscung, a Delaware chief who strides boisterously in and out of the records of colonial Pennsylvania, as well as behind-the-scenes figures such as Osternados (Seneca George), although he does conflate Algonquin and Algonquian, a perennial error among historians.Readers who know the works of Daniel Barr, Patrick Griffin, Woody Holton, David Preston, Patrick Spero, Matthew Ward, and other historians of the 18th-century backcountry will find familiar themes and events in Pearl's story. But by sustaining a clear focus on the northern Susquehanna Valley, an area often overshadowed by events elsewhere, and by providing clear depictions of the region's confusion and complexity, Declarations of Independence significantly adds to newer work. Pearl's effort is part of the careful, responsible scholarship demonstrating that independence in revolutionary America held different meanings for different peoples, and that the 250th anniversary should be an occasion to understand the past, not simply to celebrate it.