1613 Treaty between Iroquois Indians and Dutch Government
The Two Row Wampum Treaty, also known as "Guswenta" or "Kaswentha" and as the Tawagonshi Agreement of 1613 or the Tawagonshi Treaty, is a mutual treaty agreement, made in 1613 between representatives of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) and representatives of the Dutch government in what is now upstate New York. The agreement is considered by the Haudenosaunee to be the basis of all of their subsequent treaties with European and North American governments, and the citizens of those nations, including the Covenant Chain treaty with the British in 1677 and the Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States in 1794.
The treaty is spiritually and culturally revered and widely accepted among the Indigenous peoples in the relevant territories, and documented by the wampum belts and oral tradition. However, in more recent years the authenticity of the later, written versions of the agreement have been a source of debate, with some scholarly sources maintaining that a treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawk nations did not take place or took place at a later date. In August 2013, the "Journal of Early American History" published a special issue dedicated to exploring the Two Row Tradition.
Background.
At the start of the 17th century, the Iroquois Mohawk and the Mahican territory abutted in what is now known as the mid-Hudson Valley. Soon after Henry Hudson's 1609 exploration of what is now known as the Hudson River and its estuary, traders from the United Provinces of the Netherlands set up factorijs (trading posts) to engage in the fur trade, exploiting for extractive purposes the trade networks that had existed for millennia. The Dutch traded with the indigenous populations to supply fur pelts particularly from beaver, which were abundant in the region. By 1614, the New Netherland Company was established and Fort Nassau was built, setting the stage for the development of the colony of New Netherland.
"Kaswentha".
According to Jon Parmenter:
The treaty.
"Contemporary Haudenosaunee oral tradition identifies the original elaboration of "kaswentha" relations between Iroquois nations and Europeans with a circa 1613 agreement negotiated between Mohawks and a Dutch trader named Jacob Eelckens at Tawagonshi, as a precursor to the formal establishment of Dutch Fort Nassau at nearby Normans Kill." According to Parmenter, "Dating of the original agreement prior to circa 1620 finds support in [a] 1701 recitation, in which Haudenosaunee delegates described their original agreement with the Dutch occurring 'above eighty years' prior to that date, and in 1744 Onondaga headman Canasatego dated the origin of the relationship to "above One Hundred Years Ago'."
Parmenter has investigated the extent to which Haudenosaunee oral tradition is corroborated by surviving documentary (written) records and found that "the documentary evidence, considered in the aggregate, reveals a striking degree of consistency over time in the expression of fundamental principles of the "kaswentha" tradition by Haudenosaunee speakers", with "the fullest single written source that corroborates the early seventeenth-century origins of a "kaswentha" relationship between Iroquois nations and the Dutch appear[ing] in [...] 1689". And the earliest record of Haudenosaunee speakers explicitly mentioning or reciting the "kaswentha" tradition before Anglo-American and French colonial audiences dates to more than 30 years before this, in 1656 (43 years after the putative origin of the treaty in 1613).
While the evidence that the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch entered into "some" kind of political or economic agreement in the early seventeenth century is overwhelming, some historians have found reasons to be cautious about assuming the nature of that agreement was formal and treaty-like. The Dutch, for example, may not have recognized their agreement with the Haudenosaunee as a "treaty" in the way that Haudenosaunee tradition remembers it, and may instead have seen their agreement as something less official and more contingent. Mark Meuwese has examined the history of Dutch-Indigenous relations in Africa and Brazil and found that, before 1621, "Dutch traders did not conclude treaties with Native peoples in the Atlantic world. Various agreements and alliances were made, but these took place only when specific factors were involved — the threat of Iberian intervention and the presence of centralized political orders among Indigenous peoples, factors that were not present in North America." Similarly, examining Dutch language sources pertaining to early Dutch trade voyages to the Hudson River and other areas in the mid-Atlantic region, Jaap Jacobs finds that "Dutch traders would have had no need to make a treaty with local Indian groups on behalf of the Dutch nation and there is no indication that they did so. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that Dutch traders and local Native people would have made some sort of agreement as indicated by the Dutch building of the Fort Nassau on native lands and the Kleyntjen affair." Jacobs concludes (along with Paul Otto) that 
Nevertheless, Haudenosaunee tradition records not only the existence of a treaty, but its specific meaning, in the form of a Haudenosaunee reply to the initial Dutch treaty proposal:
The treaty is considered by Haudenosaunee people to still be in effect. The Haudenosaunee tradition states:
The Wampum Belt(s).
Wampum belts of the two-row style are merely one of many methods of representing in physical form the diplomatic and economic agreements implicit in the "kaswentha" relationship.
There is clear evidence of Haudenosaunee use of wampum for diplomatic functions during the pre-contact period, while the post-contact period saw "increasing significance of wampum as a material form to facilitate communication across cultural boundaries". Early evidence for wampum in the region indicates that the dominant style was a relatively simple, monochrome design, often with discoidal beads strung together (rather than tubular beads woven together). Historians debate whether or not the technology required to construct the sophisticated two-row style wampum belt (including, most importantly, tubular purple beads) was available to communities in the region prior to 1613; however, Parmenter indicates that archeological evidence does not rule out the possibility that two-row wampum belts may have featured in the initial treaty negotiations between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee.
The significance of the two-row style of wampum, according to Parmenter, is that it captures the original "ship and canoe" metaphor present in the Haudenosaunee understanding of the "kaswentha" relationship. Parmenter explains how this "ship and canoe" metaphor is one of many "media" by which the Haudenosaunee have represented pictorially their relationship to European newcomers over the centuries, with other media including "a piece of tree bark or rope" and (later) images of an iron chain and, eventually, a burnished silver and/or covenant chain. But of these, it is the "ship and canoe" conception of the "kaswentha" relationship that is the deepest and most significant, and it is the two-row wampum that is understood to represent this conception most powerfully, with two rows of purple wampum beads against a background of white beads, each row representing a parallel river, down which the respective vessels of each people travel, independently but in mutual support of each other.
The question of what materials — wampum or otherwise — were exchanged at the initial negotiations of the treaty cannot be answered definitively. While it is possible that a two-row wampum belt featured in the initial treaty negotiations, there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. There is, however, evidence in the form of Haudenosaunee oral tradition that wampum belts featured, if not in the original negotiations, then at least in the earliest rituals of renewal (of which there were many) between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch (later the British). According to Parmenter:
While most of the earliest recorded recitations of the "kaswentha" relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch do not mention wampum belts specifically, descriptions "of wampum belts in documentary sources, particularly from the early period of contact, are notoriously vague." Moreover, as artifacts wampum belts were extremely prone to deterioration and disassembly, so there is no expectation that early belts should have survived had they in fact been exchanged in the early seventeenth century.
In any event, by 1870 the image of the two-row wampum belt had come to symbolize for the Haudenosaunee their ongoing treaty and "kaswentha" relationship with the Dutch crown.
Diana Muir Appelbaum has written that: Indeed, no documentary evidence (including wampum, which is very fragile) survive from the original treaty negotiations of 1613. But, as Parmenter points out:
Oral tradition.
Onondaga leaders state that the oral tradition which accompanies the wampum belts is evidence that an agreement was made in 1613. Andy Mager of the Syracuse Peace Council was quoted in The Post-Standard as saying "We believe the Haudenosaunee oral history of the treaty...We believe the basic outlines of a treaty and that a treaty was negotiated between representatives of the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee in or around 1613."
Interpretations of the treaty.
The Netherlands have been called upon as allies by Haudenosaunee in international affairs, notably at the League of Nations in 1923 in a conflict with Canada over membership and at the United Nations in 1977, requesting the Haudenosaunee passport to be honored internationally. The Dutch government honored the passport until 2010. It remains unclear if the policy will be changed in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the treaty. In September 2013, three Haudenosaunee leaders traveled to the Netherlands for an official visit in recognition of the anniversary, traveling on Haudenosaunee passports.
The Two Row Wampum continues to play a role in defining the relationship between citizens of New York State and Haudenosaunee residents of the region. In 2006, a dispute over whether Onondaga Nation students could be permitted to wear native regalia at their graduation ceremony at Lafayette High School in LaFayette, New York, was resolved in part through the school board's consideration and application of the principles of the Two Row Wampum.
Larger disputes concerning extant treaties based on the Two Row Wampum, such as the Treaty of Canandaigua, remain unresolved through litigation and pending land claims.
The Two Row Treaty contradicts the 15th Century Doctrine of Discovery, which decreed that Christian European nations could seize lands of non-Christian peoples whom they encountered in the New World. Modern legal rulings, including a 2005 decision by the US Supreme Court against Haudenosaunee plaintiffs, continue to hinge on that doctrine, and Two Row Treaty supporters promote the treaty as a legal standard to replace it.
Supporters of the Two Row Wampum Treaty note that it conveys a respect for the laws of nature and thus an obligation for ecological stewardship. The treaty has been cited as an inspiration to clean up polluted waters such as Onondaga Lake and the Mohawk River. "Water is sacred, like all parts of creation," said Freida Jacques, an Onondaga Clanmother. "All life relies on it. It has a sacred duty, given to it by the Creator, to give all creation clean, fresh water."
Tawagonshi document.
The existence of an alleged written version of the treaty was first made public in an article in 1968 by documents collector L.G. van Loon. He claimed to have acquired it from an unnamed person on the Mississauga reserve in Canada.
In 1987, academics Charles Gehring, William Starna, and William Fenton published an article in the New York History journal entitled "The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613: The Final Chapter." Their theory is that this written version is a forgery because it contains what they argue are grammatical anachronisms; that a blend of handwriting styles from the 17th and 20th centuries is used; that the names of villages and not chiefs are used; and that the writing is "too smooth" to be made by a 17th-century quill pen. Herkens writes that the document contains c. 40 grammatical anachronisms, and that on grammatical grounds it is likely that the text was written in the 20th century. Given that Van Loon forged other pieces from the same period, they point to him as the most probable forger. In 2013, linguistic experts Harrie Hermkens, Jan Noordegraaf, and Nicoline van der Sijs submitted the document to further linguistic and historical analysis, including its provenance and connection to Lawrence G. Van Loon. They also found the document to contain "a significant number of anachronisms making it impossible for the text to have originated in 1613. Nor is it possible that it is a later copy of a document since lost."
Robert Venables, a retired Cornell University professor, is among those who remain convinced that the document version is also valid, and concurs with other scholars who point out that any