The Human Before the Political: Lenape Sovereignty, Pan-Indian Solidarity, and the Remaking of British North America, 1760-1763

Abstract

This thesis argues that Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, generated pan-Indian solidarity in 1760- 1763 through a mechanism fundamentally different from diplomatic alliance: the cosmological articulation of shared human suffering. Drawing on multi-source triangulation across four independent primary source accounts of Neolin’s vision (Robert Navarre’s journal of the siege of Detroit, John Heckewelder’s firsthand missionary account, James Kenny’s Quaker trader journal, and John M’Cullough’s captivity narrative), and employing process-tracing methodology applied to administrative correspondence from the Papers of Sir William Johnson, the thesis reconstructs the conditions of life in the Ohio Valley that Neolin’s prophecy addressed: material deprivation following the collapse of the French trade alliance, geographic displacement, the systematic denial of political standing through the weaponization of the Iroquois “women” designation, and the failure of existing diplomatic channels. The thesis demonstrates that Neolin’s vision constituted a complete governance framework, prescribing how communities should eat, drink, form families, conduct spiritual practice, and relate to outsiders. This framework generated solidarity across tribal boundaries not through negotiated interest but through shared recognition of common experience, as evidenced by the cascade of independent, simultaneous military actions in 1763 that occurred without centralized coordination. The uprising compelled the Proclamation of 1763 and the Plan of 1764, policy consequences wildly disproportionate to the formal political power of the communities involved. The thesis engages the scholarly traditions of Parkman, Peckham, White, Dowd, Cave, Richter, Edelson, and Holton, identifying their shared analytical commitment to institutional frameworks as a limitation that obscures the experiential dimension of political mobilization. The policy implications address the persistent gap between formal government-to-government consultation frameworks (NHPA Section 106, Executive Order 13175) and the experiential registers through which Indigenous community solidarity actually forms, drawing on the Standing Rock movement and the trajectory from the 1974 International Indian Treaty Council through the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of this eighteenth-century case.