Native American Input for Exhibit

Canandaigua Treaty
by Robt Griffing

Used with permission

It's Friday and it's late but I did want to acknowledge and thank Peter Jemison at Ganondagan State Historic Site for scheduling a meeting with the museum staff and our consultant, Linda Norris from RiverHill Asso. The association between the museum and Ganondagan will be a great addition to our exhibit research and help us better understanding the Seneca and Iroquois perspective of our time period.

Also, we have posted a link at http://www.ochs.org/ to sign up for our next webinar The Canandaigua Treaty. It will be at 7 PM on May 18th. Hope to see you there.

Why Do People Label Others as "Greedy"

Our Distance Learning Developer, Ray suggests that people pursue a basic human desire of "respect" in a community through personal success. Success can be measured by money, assets or position among other things. Accumulation of the stuff of success can lead for others to classify the accumulator as "greedy". The accuser through whose lens a person is "greedy" may have many motivations to make the claim. Ray suggests further that one motivation may be the lack of self respect or the lack of respect afforded the accuser by the accumulator of wealth (greedy one) may very well be the motivator of the name calling. Maybe jealousy comes into play.

Give it some thought..... have you ever thought of someone as being greedy? What was your motivation in making that claim?

To learn more about three of our great land speculators we have recorded a webinar that is available for public viewing. The link to this 1 hr, 20 min session is: http://ellum2.nyit.edu/play_recording.html?recordingId=1247620703983_1302731760227

Greedy, Who Will Decide

What’s all this about Greed?

Recently the local newspaper, the Canandaigua Daily Messenger (www.npnnow.com) published a short story on the exhibition with the headline : “Historical Society Exhibit Takes on Greed”. It was about the focus groups we were currently interviewing.

At a local Chamber of Commerce Dinner the evening that the article was published, I shared a laugh about the publicity over an adult beverage with several bankers who were familiar with the project. The word “greed” caught their eye and were interested in how the research was progressing. They inquired how our focus groups were reacting to the concept.

Later in the evening, I ran into a long-time friend and benefactor of our museum. She warned that the article and its focus on Greed was not good and that if we weren’t careful the concept could backfire and create negative feelings about the museum and its feature exhibit. Her words were not spoken in jest and I started reflecting on the comment.

Admittedly, the staff and exhibit committee has struggled with the concept. The exhibit is intended to offer a perspective of the people who fought and settled the area that is currently western New York. We want to look into the personal desires of our local forefathers and how their actions created the western New York we know today. There are dozens of books and original manuscripts we are reading in our effort to get to the root of our research.

Then I received a memo from our staff researcher and Distance Learning Developer, Ray. He contested the wording of questions we were asking the members of the focus groups that sought input on the differences between survival, ambition and greed.

“Greed is not a desire”, he wrote. “ Freedom and equality, are.” He went on to posit that these basic human desires manifested themselves in WNY historic movements such as the Underground Railroad and the Woman’s Rights movement. Our first settlers were not greedy. They sought economic freedom, above all and to replicate the communities that they left in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maryland.

Ray made a great point. Greed, ambition and survival are not a desires but rather a societal perception by others. Also these labels are a moving target. What was considered greedy or ambitious in 1650 was likely not the same as the greed label in 1812. That begs the question, what would visitors to the museum in the 21st Century think about the actions and methods of our county’s founders?

From this discussion, we are beginning to see a path in our research and exhibit development. If we present the stories of movers and shakers in our early years; people such as Oliver Phelps, Joseph Ellicott, Red Jacket, Corn Planter and Jemima Wilkinson. Then, offer the exhibit visitor a glimpse into 17th and 18th century western New York, we can let the visitor decide whether the individual actions made them survivors, ambitious or even greedy.

IDEA !!! Maybe it will be best to let visitors to the exhibit decide. If we keep track of their responses we can all learn from each other’s judgment of how to perceive the early settlers that caused our region to grow and become the home we know today.

Upcoming Webinars to Introduce Key Historical Figures and Events

As many of you may well know from this blog site, the Museum will be opening a major exhibit in 2012 that will be focusing on the role of human desires in the transformation of western New York from a vast wilderness dominated by the indigenous Iroquois peoples of the Six Nations to a bastion for white settlement formed around planned communities and framed by participation in the larger agrarian market economy. As part of our efforts, we are focusing much of our research on debunking the myths and erasing the stereotypes associated with western New York’s transitional period from 1650 to 1817 (Cut-off year currently undetermined). All too often, we may associate frontier settlement with savage Indians, corrupt federal officials, greedy aristocratic speculators, and the ideal rugged frontier settler who hacked out his existence through hardship after hardship fighting off weather, savages, disease, and wild animals while being isolated from civilized society and standing in stark contrast to the wealthy and indifferent speculators who time-and-again took the miniscule profits that the frontier settler was able to muster.

What we hope to create through our upcoming exhibit is the opportunity for the individual viewer to make their own well-informed judgments based on the information that we are able to provide.

• Were the Iroquois peoples actually naïve, savage, or stubborn in the face of the inevitable as one might expect? 
• Were the Iroquois in fact faced by a united front in the form of state and federal officials, speculators, and white settlers or were they the victims of an array of competing interests that drove western expansion further and faster than the natural rate of population growth among whites would have necessitated? 
• Were white emigrants to western New York predominantly poor New England discontents looking to free themselves from the demands of eastern society and religion? 
• Was their desire to establish a new egalitarian way of life in western New York where all men were equal? 
• And finally, are the speculator-developers who purchased the original rights to the near four million acres of formerly Indian inhabited lands west of Seneca Lake best characterized as greedy money grubbers hoping to turn a quick buck at the expense of the heroic settler and naïve Iroquois chiefs as we might imagine them to have been? 

 These are just a few of the questions that we hope will inspire you to not only come and visit our upcoming exhibit, but also motivate you to take an active interest in who the people were that influenced western New York in the formative years from 1650 to 1817. This exhibit will not only focus on informing the viewer, but more importantly, inviting the informed viewer to see a different perspective of events. In so doing, we hope to highlight that next to the elusive elements of truth and fact, subjectivity may be the most important aspect to our historical understandings. The judgments and conclusions will be left to you, the viewer, but our desire is that the exhibit presents these individuals and events in formats that allow for all sides of the story to be told without any skewed biases. It is not the Museum’s intent to point out the legitimacy of individual desires, but rather, to present our selected historical actors in a format that leaves their individual desires open to your interpretations.

 As part of our efforts to create an informed visitor to our upcoming exhibit, we would like to invite our membership and the general public to attend two live, web-based, lectures that will introduce many of the key individuals and events that shaped western New York in those formative years. We will begin on April 13th by presenting a lecture on Oliver Phelps, Charles Williamson, and Joseph Ellicott who comprised the three major speculator-developers that collectively played the greatest role in shaping the villages, towns, and counties of western New York that are still recognizable today. We will also highlight their combined role in establishing the security and economic opportunities that would ensure the success of the many eager and entrepreneurial individuals that initially made their way to western New York.

Then on May 18th, we will present another web-based lecture on the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 highlighting the precarious position of the federal government in 1794, the importance of the treaty to settlement in both western New York and the Ohio Valley, and the motivations behind the Six Nations’ decision to negotiate the treaty in 1794. We will also point out the importance of the individual articles that establish the independent sovereignty of the Six Nations and outline the enduring relationship between the Six Nations and the federal government that the articles of the Canandaigua Treaty were intended to establish.

You will be able to attend these webinars from the comfort of your home or office after receiving an email link to a separate web-page. You will not need to be technically savvy or computer literate beyond opening an email and clicking on the enclosed web-link to attend the live webinar lectures and there will be plenty of opportunity for individual questions at the end of the presentation. Details on how to register and pay for these web-based lectures will be advertised in the coming weeks. Those involved in the Ontario County Historical Society and Museum’s upcoming exhibit hope that you will take this exciting opportunity to become an informed visitor in the months before our exhibit opens and we are excited to be hosting these presentations on behalf of Canandaigua National Bank and Constellation Brands. Hope to see you online!

What's Your Perspective?

Perspective and point of view are certianly part of our conversations as staff continue to talk about the 2012 exhibit on the history of Western New York, 1650-1825. An earlier blog related that staff members had each chosen a reading assignment to inform and broaden our thinking as early phases of work preparing for the exhibit are underway.
My reading assignment is Daniel K. Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. The prologue of Richter's book opens with the author looking East out his hotel room window through the St. Louis Gateway Arch. It occurrs to Richter that the eastward perspective was the point of view of native populations as Europeans landed on the Atlantic shores. Rumors about the Europeans and perhaps some physical evidence of their culture probably traveled from seaboard tribes to those in the interior over time. Eventually some trade goods may have traveled to the interior as well, perhaps long before native groups actually encountered any of the newcomers.
Although perspectives and native encounter experiences with Europeans differed, how were Europeans viewed?
Were they to be welcomed? Were they to be feared? Should they be driven away or redirected at neighboring tribes? Were they competitiors? Were they suppliers of sought after goods? Did a relationship with them bring status within a tribal group?
Did a relationship with Europeans provide status and control that neighboring groups may envy? How would the encounters reshape traditional cultures? How would encounters with Europeans change one's family's life, both day-to-day and long term?
Interesting points of view to think about for sure.

I'm still reading and will share more at a later time. Stay tuned.

Focusing in on Focus Groups

The IMLS Grant we received for this project required a Formative Evaluation. The effort will provide us with public input on the exhibit.

Rob Lillis from Evalumetrics Research helped us develop the questions and will serve as the facilitator for each focus group session.

• We will be asking the group to differentiate between surival, ambition and greed


• We will then ask how these characteristcs influenced those who shaped the history of our area. We will offer examples of people who were involved in the time period in question.


• Then we will ask what they would want or need to know about these characters to help better understand what motivated them. How would one know if they were ambitious, greedy or just trying to survive?


• Finally, What method or media would help the respondant better learn about the characters that shaped the development of WNY.

Simple? Maybe. We'll see

The focus groups will begin in Canandaigua. We have appointments with the schools. The other group of adults were solicited from the general public, the local Rotary Club and a history book club that meets periodically at the museum.

Then we will move into western New York to seek input. A post on the Museumwise (A regional musuem group) list serve seeking locations for focus groups was fruitless. Then we drafted a letter and sent it personally to all our museum contacts in the region. Two days after we mailed it we received an e-mail response from the Niagara Co. Historical Soceity, who were agreeable. They asked for a bit more information which we responded to immediately. We will likely hear from more next week.....

Speaking of next week, we will hold our information focus groups on Wednesday and Thursday; two each day. Then we will return to a local school for a Noon session on Friday.

Little by little the exhibit will come into focus.

What stories should we tell?

As we dig deeper into the history of Western New York we find that the geographic area we want to explore becomes harder and harder to define.

Western New York, in truth, did not exist under that name until sometime after the Revolutionary War. Until that time it was just a wild, unsettled territory that was the location of many competing interests.

Early - Is the story of the Jesuits and their encounters with the native Americans appropriate? Was their motivation religious or political? How about the fur traders, was the pursuit of beaver pelts an adventure or an economic effort. Then, of course there were the French including DeNonville who frequented this area skirmishing. Was their effort for Country?Louie XIV? or personal gain? Who was right?, The Indians who believed that the land was there to pass aolng to future generations or the Europeans who saw the forest as something they could sell?

Mid - In the mid 1700s the story of The Sullivan Campaign must be told. But, from what persoective, George Washington's; Oliver Phelps's, the Seneca nation or those that wanted to escape the issues of land and freedom in Connecticut, Maryland, or other established New England colonies, now states in the Union? How did Robert Morris the Financier of the Revolutionary War influence our area? Why did he have to send his son, Thomas to negotiate with the indians?

1800s - Treaties led to poineer settlement which led to conflict. Did money rule? Why did the Dutch want to invest in Western New York? Why did the Holland Land Company select Charles Ellicott to be their representative and land agent. Why did Oliver Phelps go bankrupt and die in debtor's prison? Who owned the property over which the Erie Canal was dug? Why did Ellicott fight so intensely to divide Ontario County into many new counties. Why did Canandaigua oppose the new political subdivisions of the state.

Was Greed the sourse of all this conflict? Maybe. But Greed is funny. It seems that few individuals claim to be greedy. It always seems to be the other person who is the greedy one....

We will be asking the public what they think in a series of focus groups starting in February. We are anxious to hear their take on motivations.

We promise great stories .