Library and Archives Canada acquires important archival material by John Norton

Newly Acquired by Libraries and Archives Canada

We are pleased to announce the acquisition by the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) of an unpublished journal written by John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) (1770–1827) and accompanying letters. The material documents, among other things, his time in the United Kingdom in 1804–1805 as a diplomatic envoy representing the Six Nations.

Autograph material by Norton is of the greatest scarcity. Apart from the journal of 1809–12, still in the collection of the Dukes of Northumberland (a fair copy not in Norton’s hand), the main repositories are the Archives of Ontario (papers including correspondence found in Norton’s house), the University of Western Ontario (a diary for 1802–8), and the Newberry Library (a letterbook in a different hand).

About John Norton (Teyoninhokarāwen)

John Norton (1770–1831?) was the son of a Cherokee who had been adopted as a boy by a Scottish soldier, and a Scottish woman from the Anderson family. He was born in Scotland, but his early history has long been unclear.  Norton’s father was a soldier by profession, and in 1784 Norton followed in his footsteps, enlisting in the 65th foot and travelling with the regiment to Canada the following year. Unsuited to the army hierarchy, he deserted before managing to secure his discharge in 1788. He may have worked briefly for a printer in Quebec, but then travelled west to join up with the indigenous tribes in conflict with American forces in the Northwest Indian War, which is where he first connected with the formidable Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea, 1743–1807), an advocate of pan-Indianism. Norton worked as a teacher in a Five Nations settlement in around 1790 (at the invitation of Dr Stuart, whom Robert Barclay had met 16 years earlier) and then for a number of years as a fur trader along the Mohawk river on behalf of John Askin of Detroit.

From 1796 he was an interpreter for the Department of Indian Affairs, until Brant convinced him to leave that post and ally himself with the Mohawks of Grand River, adopting Norton into the Mohawk as his nephew and appointing him as a chief. Norton’s mixed heritage, his linguistic skill, and a natural affinity for diplomacy (he was ‘a complex man who stood astride two cultures with sensitivity, kindness and intelligence’ (Klinck), his adopted Mohawk name meaning ‘It keeps the door open’), made him an ideal figure to represent the Five Nations (the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee confederacy of which the Mohawk were part) in negotiations with the British.

 

The Autograph Journal

An exceptional, unpublished, autograph manuscript of well-over 60,000 words – among the earliest literary productions by a writer of indigenous American origins – the half-Cherokee adopted Mohawk (Kanyen’kehà:ka) chief John Norton, or Teyoninhokarāwen.  Until its recent discovery among the papers of the Barclay family, to whom it was sent with the intent of publication in 1808, its existence was conjectured only from a letter, and it is the only known source for much of the information it contains. It is a major new document in the study of Norton’s life and in the history of Anglo-Mohawk relations, and predates the journals of Norton’s tour to the Cherokee in 1809–10 and his account of the War of 1812, which were also written for a public that never saw them, and were only published after their discovery in the library of the Dukes of Northumberland in 1966.

 

The Letters

An exceptional archive relating to the half-Cherokee Mohawk chief, diplomat, and soldier John Norton, including among other things his only surviving letter from the Cherokee nation (k.), a long description of his most important military action of the War of 1812 (l.), and an account of his early years (i.), a period for which little other information is available.

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