Red Jacket

Red Jacket, a Seneca, replied he would not embrace the white man’s religion until he saw it make a difference in his white neighbors.

“If we find it does them good, makes them honest, and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again what you have said.” (Rosenstiel 112)

Red Jacket (Segoyewatha)

(c. 1750-1830)
Seneca orator and political leader

As a child and young man, the figure whites knew as Red Jacket was called Otetiani, usually translated as “Always Ready.” Born into the Wolf clan in a Seneca village near present-day Geneva, New York, he came of age during the most stressful era of his people’s history. The American War of Independence deeply split the Six Nations of the Iroquois, of which the Senecas were both the westernmost and the most populous member. Ultimately, however, most of the Iroquois nations—including nearly all Seneca factions—sided with the British. That choice was disastrous. As fighting ended in the early 1780s, several thousand refugees were living near British Niagara, their villages destroyed by U.S. forces in 1779. When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, they had only begun to reoccupy homes that European diplomats had placed within the victorious state of New York.

During the war, Red Jacket had been a messenger for British officers and, so the story goes, received his namesake coat as a reward. On the whole, however, his military career was undistinguished, if not, as the political opponents who called him Cow Killer alleged, cowardly. His talents lay instead in diplomacy, and particularly in oratory, a skill long prized in Iroquois political culture. Sometime in the 1780s he assumed the ceremonial role of council orator, and with it the name Segoyewatha, traditionally translated as “He Keeps Them Awake,” but more accurately rendered “He Makes Them Look for It in Vain.”

Red Jacket’s oratory marked nearly every major treaty council between whites and Senecas from the 1780s to the 1820s. Iroquois traditions of political consensus required him to pose as spokesman for all Senecas. But usually he articulated a diplomatic middle course between two competing factions. On one side were the followers of his fellow Seneca Cornplanter, who pursued accommodation with U.S. and state authorities; on the other were the supporters of the Mohawk Joseph Brant, who continued his wartime alliance with the British and in 1785 led nearly half of the Six Nations population to new homes on the Grand River in present-day Ontario. Between these extremes, Red Jacket’s positions were consistent: the Iroquois Confederacy should remain neutral in disputes between the United States and British Canada; broker an honest peace between the new republic and the Shawnees, Miamis, and other western Indians with whom it remained at war; resist Christian proselytization; and—above all—maintain a land base within the boundaries claimed by the state of New York.

His success was mixed. Red Jacket was at his best with stirring speeches that inspired his followers and rebucked Euro-Americans. In 1792, for instance, when President Washington summoned him to Philadelphia in hopes that the Senecas would bring the western Indians to peace, the orator minced no words. “The President has assured us that he is not the cause of the hostilities,” he said. “Brother, we wish you to point out to us . . . what you think is the real cause.” Similarly blunt was the most famous speech attributed to Red Jacket, an 1805 response to a Christian missionary. “The Great Spirit . . . has made a great difference between his white and red children,” he declared. “We do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own.”

Oratory alone, however, could not solve the Senecas’ problems. Moreover, a long tradition of factionalized, decentralized politics ensured that no single policy could be pursued consistently and that federal, state, or private interests could always find leaders who could be coerced or bribed into surrendering Iroquois lands. By these means, treaties at Fort Stanwix in 1784, Big Tree in 1797, and Buffalo Creek in 1826 created a paper trail depriving Senecas of all but a tiny fraction of western New York. Despite his vigorous opposition during and after treaty councils, Red Jacket signed the Big Tree and Buffalo Creek documents and occasionally accepted cash from white negotiators. Perhaps, as some alleged, he sold out. Or perhaps his resistance was outweighed by his commitment to Iroquois unity and his ambition to remain at the center of power.

Whatever the case, Iroquois politics remained anything but unified. In 1801, for example, Cornplanter’s half brother, the prophet Handsome Lake, accused Red Jacket of witchcraft and nearly had him executed. Four years later, Red Jacket’s quarrel with Brant climaxed during a dispute between Canadian officials and the Grand River Iroquois over the terms of their royal land grant. While Brant’s ally, the adopted Mohawk John Norton, sought support at Whitehall, Red Jacket helped convene a rump council that repudiated Norton’s transatlantic mission and briefly deposed Brant. After the latter’s death in 1807, Red Jacket’s principal factional foes were Seneca Christians. In 1824, his “Pagan” faction used an obscure state law to win the temporary expulsion of the missionary Thompson S. Harris and to close his school on the Buffalo Creek Reservation. Three years later, the Christian faction retaliated with a written document ousting Red Jacket as orator.

By the time a subsequent council reinstated him, Red jacket had become a celebrity among white audiences captivated by stereotypes of the “Vanishing Indian.” Charles Bird King, George Catlin, and others painted portraits of the man people were calling “the last of the Senecas,” yet his final decade was hardly happy. To the devastating results of the Buffalo Creek Treaty and his battles with political enemies were added the indignity of public appearances that resembled carnival sideshows, the humiliation of his wife’s conversion to Christianity, the pain of ill health, and, probably, the demon of alcoholism. His last trip eastward, in 1829, took him to Washington, D.C., where he met the newly inaugurated president, Andrew Jackson. While en route home Red Jacket appeared before an Albany, New York, audience made up largely of Jacksonian state legislators. In a rambling speech that inspired most of the assembled worthies to walk out, he compared Old Hickory unfavorably with the nation’s first president.

Home at Buffalo Creek, knowing the end was near, Red Jacket made a round of farewell visits. “Let my funeral be according to the customs of our nation,” he reportedly said. “Be sure that my grave be not made by a white man; let them not pursue me there!” When death came on January 20, 1830, however, the Christian faction appropriated his corpse, prepared it for a Protestant service, and interred it in a grave indeed dug by whites. These acts were bitter symbolic blows to the causes Red Jacket had stood for. Yet, paradoxically, his enemies’ need to appropriate him in death as they could not in life affirms the magnitude of his legacy.

- Encyclopedia of North American Indians