Iroquois Confederacy in the context of "Onondaga people"

New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick to the northeast and Quebec to the north. The Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean are to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the southwest. Boston is New England's largest city and the capital of Massachusetts. Greater Boston, comprising the Boston–Worcester–Providence Combined Statistical Area, houses more than half of New England's population; this area includes Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England; Manchester, New Hampshire, the largest city in New Hampshire; and Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of and largest city in Rhode Island. In 1620, the Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony, the second successful settlement in British America after the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, founded in 1607. Ten years later, Puritans established Massachusetts Bay Colony north of Plymouth Colony. Over the next 126 years, people in the region fought in four French and Indian Wars until the English colonists and their Iroquois allies defeated the French and their Algonquian allies.

In the late 18th century, political leaders from the New England colonies initiated resistance to Britain's taxes without the consent of the colonists. Residents of Rhode Island captured and burned a British Royal Navy ship which was enforcing unpopular trade restrictions, and residents of Boston threw British tea into the harbor. Britain responded with a series of punitive laws stripping Massachusetts of self-government which the colonists called the "Intolerable Acts". These confrontations led to the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and the expulsion of the British authorities from the region in spring 1776. The region played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and it was the first region of the U.S. transformed by the Industrial Revolution, initially centered on the Blackstone and Merrimack river valleys.

The Mohawk, also known by their own name, Kanien'kehá:ka (lit. 'People of the Flint'), are an Indigenous people of North America and the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Five Nations or later the Six Nations).

Mohawk are an Iroquoian-speaking people with communities in southeastern Canada and northern New York State, primarily around Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. As one of the five original members of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawk are known as the Keepers of the Eastern Door who are the guardians of the confederation against invasions from the east.

The Southern Tier is a geographic subregion of the broader upstate region of New York State, geographically situated along or very near the state border with Pennsylvania. Definitions of the region vary widely, but generally encompass counties surrounding the Binghamton, Elmira-Corning, and Jamestown metropolitan areas, along with the land of the Seneca Nation. This region is adjacent to the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania, and both these regions together are known as the Twin Tiers.

Geographically, most of the Southern Tier resides in the Allegheny Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains, with the eastern areas of the region nestled in the western portion of the Catskill Mountains. A longtime home of the Iroquois Confederacy, European settlers moved to the region after the American Revolutionary War. The fertile yet hilly land, combined with sweeping river valleys, led the region to support a combination of manufacturing industries (including large companies such as IBM and Corning Inc.) and farming, but with less development compared to neighboring subregions of upstate. Since the 1950s, the area is often considered to be a part of the Rust Belt, as manufacturing jobs have left the region.

The Neutral Confederacy (also Neutral Nation, Neutral people, or Attawandaron) was a tribal confederation of Iroquoian peoples. Its heartland was in the floodplain of the Grand River in what is now Ontario, Canada. At its height, its wider territory extended toward the shores of lakes Erie, Huron, and Ontario, as well as the Niagara River in the east. To the northeast were the neighbouring territories of Huronia and the Petun Country, which were inhabited by other Iroquoian confederacies from which the term Neutrals Attawandaron was derived. The five-nation Iroquois Confederacy was across Lake Ontario to the southeast.

Like others of Iroquoian language and culture, the tribes would raid and feud with fellow Iroquoian tribes. They were generally wary of rival Algonquian-speaking peoples, such as those who inhabited Canada to the East, along the St. Lawrence Valley basin. Iroquoian tribes were later known to historians for the fierce ways in which they waged war. A largely agrarian society, the Neutral Confederacy developed farmsteads that were admired and marveled over by European leaders writing reports to their sponsors.

The Phelps and Gorham Purchase was the 1788 sale by the state of Massachusetts of its preemptive right to a portion of a large tract of land in western New York State owned by the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Confederacy to a syndicate of land developers led by Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham. The larger tract of land is generally known as the "Genesee tract" and roughly encompasses all that portion of New York State west of Seneca Lake, consisting of about 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km).

According to the Treaty of Hartford (1786), it was agreed that the Genesee tract was owned by the Senecas, was a part of and under the jurisdiction of New York State, and that Massachusetts had the preemptive right to purchase the land from the Senecas. In other words, the Senecas could sell the land only to the owner of those preemptive rights (unless those rights were relinquished), and that those rights were owned by Massachusetts.

Laurentian, or St. Lawrence Iroquoian, was an Iroquoian language spoken until the late 16th century along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River in present-day Quebec and Ontario, Canada. It is believed to have disappeared with the extinction of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, likely as a result of warfare by the more powerful Mohawk from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy to the south, in present-day New York state of the United States.

In 1749, the Sulpician missionary, Abbé Francois Picquet, built a fort where the Oswegatchie River empties into the St. Lawrence River (present-day Ogdensburg, New York). He invited the Iroquois to come to Fort de La Présentation to learn about Catholicism. To settle at La Présentation, families had to agree to live monogamously, convert to Catholicism, give up alcohol and swear allegiance to France. By 1751, 396 Haudenosaunee families, largely Onondaga with some Oneida and Cayuga, had settled in the area between Toniato Creek (now known as Jones Creek, in Thousand Islands National Park) and the Long Sault. They came to be called the Oswegatchie. This was one of the Seven Nations of Canada.

While never allowed as a separate tribal member of the Iroquois Confederation, the Oswegatchie were considered "nephews" because of their members' family ties to the Six Nations. When the Seven Years' War broke out between France and England, the Oswegatchie fought with the French on numerous raids in the Ohio, Champlain and Mohawk valleys, where they attacked British colonists.