Author and historian Susan A. Brewer grew up on a dairy farm in Madison County, New York. Her family had lived and worked the land, what her grandfather deemed “the best land,” for generations. It was her home, it was “what she knew.”
As she grew to be a teenager in the 1970s, however, Brewer would learn that “what she knew” about the best land, about her home, wasn’t much. When members of the Oneida tribe claimed sovereign rights over a parcel of the land and won their court case, Brewer was left with more questions than answers. Just who did the best land really belong to? And why hadn’t she ever learned the true history behind who lived and loved there?
Brewer’s debut, The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (Three Hills, 2024), strives to answer those haunting questions of her youth with uncanny subjectivity. It is an intensely researched account of the best land’s history, tracing over four centuries of the two families—her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny—who called the best land home.
I spoke with Brewer over Zoom about what it was like researching the history behind the land on which she grew up and how it felt to uncover its many long-dormant revelations and uncomfortable truths.
***
The Rumpus: First, would you mind putting “the best land”—not just the title, but the concept—into context? What exactly is “the best land,” in your own words?
Susan A. Brewer: I first heard [the expression] one day as a child when I was tagging along with my grandpa on the dairy farm. When he referred to the land as “the best land in Madison County,” that just stuck with me. I couldn’t describe this place that I would later write about as “our farm” because it wasn’t our family’s farm for so much of the time. And I realized as I was doing my research that people in the past were referring to it as “the best land” too, but for different reasons. My grandfather called it “the best land” because it was such excellent farmland. But to the colonizers, it was the best land because of the way the west ran through it. I grew up with the Erie Canal in my backyard, the New York Central Railroad in my front yard. And, later, I realized that what made Oneida territory so valuable to the Dutch, the French, the British—and then later the Americans, the New Yorkers—was that it was the only relatively flat, dry route through the Appalachian Mountain range. Whoever controlled it controlled North America. That’s also why the Oneidas valued it so much, in part. It has layers of meaning.
Rumpus: Would it be fair to say that the land’s meaning, those layers, evolved over time?
Brewer: That’s right. The state of New York, for example, wanted to build a canal through there. That’s why it was important to them. My family just wanted to farm on it. That’s why it was important to them. For the Oneidas, it was and still is important for a whole bunch of reasons: because they view it as sacred, because they view themselves as “belonging to the land” rather than vice versa. So they revered the land and loved it too.
Rumpus: What inspired you to write about the best land and its history?
Brewer: Growing up on the family farm, I was constantly surrounded by family—grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, aunts, uncles—and I think when you’re a child, you just feel that it’s always been that way. You feel totally tied to [your land]. The people you love are there. I always felt very stable and very secure, that the land was just there, that it will always be there. But when I was in high school, the Oneida Indians claimed that New York State had illegally acquired their land, and that won in court, which upended everything. That experience called into question: Who does this land really belong to? Was it possible that we might lose our farm? I was stunned by this and wondered, “Well, what actually happened here, and why don’t I know anything about it?” And those questions stayed with me for years. In a way, I’ve really been haunted by these questions. So, later in my career, I thought, “I’ll just go back and try to find out.”
Rumpus: From the beginning to the end of your book, you use your own history and ancestry as reference points while recounting and telling the history of the best land. What made you decide to do so?
Brewer: I wanted to tell the story of the dispossession of the Oneidas, but it’s a very complicated story. And I thought it might be clearer, easier, to take one piece of land and trace what happened to that. I knew that my great-grandparents had bought it from the grandchildren of Polly Denny, who was a Mohawk/Oneida woman, and before that, the land had belonged to the Oneidas. And I thought, “Oh, that will be a fairly clear story.” I thought, “I’ll trace Polly’s family and mine to look at how ownership in the best land happened.” I had no idea what I was getting into. But when I started the research and tracing the families, I figured I’d be going back to the 1800s. Because I just didn’t know! After all this detective work, however, I found that my family had been interacting with the Oneidas for four hundred years. And I thought, well, that’s the story. And I knew nothing about it. What I learned was in such contrast to the history I learned in school.
Rumpus: That brings up a great point that I was hoping to address: how common it is for Americans to have been taught one particular version of their own regional and national histories while likewise growing up to be completely unaware of these other different, sometimes more accurate accounts and histories. What was it like for you unraveling all of that information?
Brewer: There was my ancestor, Marie, who was indentured to the Dutch West India Company, which just wanted to bring people over to what was then New Amsterdam [Manhattan] to support their trading operation. Marie arrived when she was seven and grew up there. She was eventually banished from Manhattan for selling brandy to Native people, so her whole family moved to what’s now Albany. And because they spoke both Native and European languages, Marie’s family members became “go-betweens.” They sort of found a way to make a living by being useful to both Mohawk and Oneida leaders, as well as to colonial administrators. And because they intermingled and had kinship ties to the Mohawks, they were at an advantage. They survived that way for generations, which really surprised me because I grew up thinking that Native people and European settlers were totally separate people.
Rumpus: I think that’s how most of us were taught. Don’t you?
Brewer: Exactly! And I think that [Native and colonizer coexistence] might surprise a lot of people. For a large part of the history of the early colonies, that was a way to get ahead—until it wasn’t acceptable anymore. And I think that’s one of the reasons we don’t know anything about it, because people bury that part of their history. It’s just not passed on. Of course, you don’t want to make these connections seem too friendly. They were still rivals over the land. But it’s true that these people lived together, went to church together, fought side-by-side for another couple hundred years.
Rumpus: That’s another part of history that isn’t commonly taught in school, that tribes fought alongside colonizers in wars. In your book, for example, you write about how the Oneidas fought alongside the Rebels in the American Revolutionary War. I imagine that kind of information wasn’t readily available. How were you able to uncover it?
Brewer: Well, I was helped by some scholarly works that pointed me in the right direction. I read some Revolutionary War pension applications submitted by all these people. And I really dug into that part. Because once you start to understand what [the pensioners] are recalling about the war, you see how much of a difference the Oneidas made with the Rebels all through the Mohawk Valley. The Rebels were just barely hanging in there before the Oneidas came to help. That information became really important to the Oneidas and their history but was largely forgotten by the Americans. It’s an example of how two different histories are passed down to people, people who still live alongside each other.
Rumpus: You mention in your foreword that you came across various mismatched, misspelled names of historical people, as well as personal written accounts you suspected were embellished. What was it like parsing through sources and assessing their historical reliability?
Brewer: I found it very frustrating, especially [the written accounts] about Native people. I think that a lot of white people—Europeans and Americans—felt like they could just make up anything about the Native people because they would never be checked or held accountable. I was also skeptical about the kind of tone that people took in their accounts. I was on alert to this because my ancestors were in the records. I think that the people keeping the records tend to have authority, and they tend to have an agenda, so they’re going to portray things in a way that fits their agenda. And that’s what they did in some instances, many instances. So, I think that I just developed a really strong skepticism of some of the records, and I tried to weave some of that skepticism into the book by stating, “Here’s what I’ve got, but I have questions about this account.”
Rumpus: What prompted you to show up, just on rare occasions, in first person in your book?
Brewer: I had to. And that’s against my training, to show up in my own story. But I had to be in it as a historian, a participant, an eyewitness. I really wanted readers not to be told what to think about [the history of the best land] but to read my version. Because there are many ways to tell this story, and I don’t want to claim that mine is the only and ultimate way to tell the story of dispossession.
Rumpus: You managed to go into impressive detail in the first part of your book, which dates all the way back to the 1600s. How were you able to find these accounts from so far back?
Brewer: The Dutch and the British as colonizers were weaker than the Haudenosaunee. When they arrived, the five nations—or the Iroquois or the Haudenosaunee—were the power. And they became more powerful because of their location. So, initially, the Dutch and the British were pretty respectful. They wrote down what [the Native people] ordered and what their leaders said. We still have those kinds of documents. And even as the Haudenosaunee were weakened by more Europeans arriving, by war, by disease, the British continued to keep records of what they’re saying because they valued their relations with them. The early U.S. and New York State settlers did that too. It’s only by the early 1800s, when New York State decides they don’t want to write down what these leaders are saying anymore, they don’t want that kind of written record, that we lose those voices. But up until then, we have a lot of their voices. That was really amazing to me. Because they’re so powerful. You can really see the Haudenosaunee trying to do what’s best for their people. The thing is, though, they’re divided. They don’t agree. Who would? What do you do? Do you accommodate these people? Do you resist them?
Brewer: The latter half of your book goes into great detail about your father, Herb Brewer, and his involvement in the Oneida land claims of the 1970s. What was it like to write about your own personal history and that of your father during this time?
Rumpus: My father was a dairy farmer, and then he was the part-time mayor of the city of Oneida when the land claims cases became so controversial in the seventies. I’m sure I was probably the only teenager in town who really paid attention to what was happening because I was always interested in history and because I followed my father trying to figure out what was going on. He was completely unprepared for this. The idea that this thirty-two-acre trailer park on the edge of the city was a sovereign nation was incomprehensible [to him], in a way. So I interviewed him, I read the local newspapers, and I was able to piece together what was happening. And while doing that, I was also trying to remember how I felt at the time and what I thought at the time, and I put that into the book while trying to keep my emotions and knowledge from back then separate from what I think and know now. I tried to describe, for example, how I believed that the Oneidas were right: that their land was taken from them illegally and that there should be some sort of justice done. But at the same time, I didn’t want to lose our farm. I called this “the swirl of contradictions” I felt that I lived in, how I was sympathetic to my father and what he was going through, but how I frequently disagreed with him about the positions he was taking. This is probably why I have such strong memories of this time. It was really the first time in my life I separated my sense of things from that of my parents.
Rumpus: Who did you write this book for? For everyone? For yourself?
Brewer: I’d love for people to read [the book], but I really wanted to write this for the people of my hometown. And I wanted them to come to it at this time, with all the history behind, so they can see where [the conflicts] come from in a different way than they likely experienced them the first time. Everyone was in such separate camps, you know. I thought, “Maybe if they saw how everyone was so connected in the past, they might look at the history of the best land in a different way.” There really were two different histories of the places. The townspeople had theirs, and the Oneidas had theirs. And they didn’t see them as going together at all, whereas I see them as very much linked together.
Rumpus: Do you think it’s worth prompting everyone to really dig into their land’s untold histories?
Brewer: I hope so! Because I feel like this shows what a rich history is out there. I would love it if people read my book, and thought, “Well, what about my town? What’s that story?”
***
Author photograph by Chris Sanders
