In an age when women were seldom recognized for their accomplishments, Hilletie van Olinda, a biracial Mohawk-Dutch woman who rose to become the official interpreter of the English Crown in the 1690s, received ample praise from both prominent Native American chieftains and the leading Euro-American government officials of her day. And yet, few people today know that a working Indigenous American woman played a pivotal role in the fate of empires during King William’s War, fought between England and France and their Native allies on the North American frontier from 1689 through 1697. However, everyone in America today should know the name of Hilletie van Olinda, for she was a game-changing female hero at a time when the world’s two most powerful empires battled for the control over North America, with the mighty Iroquois caught in the middle of the epic conflagration.
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A depiction of the 1690 Schenectady massacre. Source: Public domain, unknown, available here.
Hilletie’s Early Years in the Mohawk River Valley
Born in 1646, Hilletie van Slyck was the fourth child of the Iroquois matriarch Ots-Toch of the venerable Mohawk Wolf Clan and the peripatetic Dutch pioneer Cornelis Antonisen van Slyck. For the first eighteen years of her life, Hilletie lived with her mother’s people of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, “the People of the Longhouse,” in the Mohawk River Valley of modern-day upstate New York. The Five Nations, as the Confederation was known, included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, living in what is today the Albany-Schenectady region and most of New York State, northern Pennsylvania, and the eastern Great Lakes region. The Iroquois viewed the Confederation as a metaphorical Longhouse extending in a rectangular, east-to-west corridor from the Hudson River Valley to southeastern Lake Ontario. The Mohawks—the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka or “People of the Flint” as they called themselves—were the Keepers of the Eastern Door of the Five Nations’ symbolic Longhouse, while the Senecas were the Keepers of the Western Door.
Hilletie’s Dutch father Cornelis married to her Mohawk mother Ots-Toch was born in 1604 in Breuckelen in Holland’s Utrecht Province. One of the first Europeans to put down peaceful roots alongside the Mohawks in the lower Mohawk River Valley, he was living and trading in the pristine, densely forested region by 1641. Historians refer to Hilletie’s father as one of “the most interesting and important figures in early Mohawk Valley history”—and the colorful Hilletie followed in his footsteps as a cross-cultural bridge and facilitator immersed in, and sympathetic to, both Native and European cultures.
In the second half of the 17th century, Hilletie and her three siblings—Jacques, whose Indigenous name was Itsychoquachka, Martin, and Lea—grew up in the Iroquois village of Tionnontoguen, while making frequent trading visits to Schenectady where their Dutch father maintained a residence and earned the bulk of his income. Prior to his death in the Mohawk River Valley in 1676, Cornelis Antonisen van Slyck served not only as a skilled carpenter and mason but as an important trader, interpreter, community leader, and trusted cross-cultural liaison in securing peace and prisoner exchanges for more than thirty years. Both Hilletie and her brother Jacques went on to serve as important translators and liaisons to the Mohawks following their father’s death. Their skills as cross-cultural interpreters and diplomats made them invaluable in the eyes of their Native kin, and their prominent status on both their matrilineal-Mohawk-mother’s side and their pioneer-trader-father’s Dutch side, combined with their bilingual capabilities, ensured their continued importance to both the Iroquois and English.
The formal alliance between the Five Tribes of the Iroquois Nation and English America in the 17th and 18th centuries was known as the Covenant Chain. Initiated in 1677, the political arrangement established a series of treaties to stabilize relations with the Haudenosaunee by engaging in peaceful trading and community building within New York and bordering colonies. With the governments of New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia signing on to the treaties, the Covenant Chain alliance ensured cooperation between the People of the Longhouse and the four English colonies, and between the Iroquois and their traditional enemies, which included the Mahicans, Schaghticokes, Susquehannocks, and other Algonquins.
Raised in a matrilineal Mohawk society in which women exercised control over everyday village life, the appointment and removal of political leaders, the right to demand mourning-war retribution for lost lives, child rearing, horticulture, providing hospitality to outside visitors, and other communal powers, Hilletie was born and raised in a Native world in accordance with Indigenous—not European—customs, rituals, and notions of female roles. It was only in her late teens that she began to show an interest in the white European world beyond her village. By the age of seventeen, she became intrigued with the French Jesuit priests that traveled to Tionnontoguen and with whom she conversed during her trips to other Iroquois settlements. Over the next year, she became impressed with the teachings of the Holy Bible and the lofty words of the ministering priests. However, she was ridiculed and beaten for her interest in Christianity by her traditionalist mother, some of her Mohawk kin, and other tribal members.
In 1663, she moved to Schenectady at the age of eighteen to escape the abuse, became a household servant, was taught to read and write Dutch, received the sacrament of baptism in the Dutch Reformed Church, and eventually married the Dutch-born tailor and property owner Peter Danielse van Olinda. In the early 1680s, she became one of only a handful of Native Americans to receive baptism at Albany before the arrival of the Dutch reverend Father Dellius in 1683. Having emigrated from the Netherlands to take the pulpit at Albany, the thirty-year-old domine had an important influence on Hilletie. Soon after his arrival, he became popular with Albany’s Dutch residents, and earned the acceptance of anti-French League Iroquois, who were open to Christianity but feared the political power that the Canadian Jesuit missionaries exercised among the Five Nations. By the fall of 1689, Dellius had achieved success in cultivating several Iroquois religious and political allies by instructing, converting, and baptizing them as Protestant Christians. Soon thereafter, he and Peter Schuyler, the mayor of Albany, commander of the New York militia, and lead commissioner of Native American Affairs, began making use of Hilletie’s bicultural background and linguistic expertise, since the Dutch reverend had not mastered the Iroquoian language and required a full-time interpreter.
Although some Mohawks and Euro-Americans held her gender and biracial Native-European status against her and refused to accept her, Hilletie immediately began to play an important role in conferences between the Anglo-Dutch of Albany and Schenectady and Iroquois Anglophiles. Fluent in the Mohawk and Dutch languages and speaking passable pidgin English, she served as Father Dellius’s official translator and his loyal partner in his effort to peacefully bring Dutch Reformed Christianity to the Mohawks. As New York Province’s official Crown interpreter in council meetings between the English and Haudenosaunee for northeastern North America, she proved critical in helping her Native people and the settlers of Albany better understand and negotiate with one another. She also worked as a Protestant Christian religious text translator for the Iroquois and an important messenger between the People of the Longhouse and New York Native American Affairs officials.
The born-and-raised Mohawk Hilletie had three biracial sons with her Dutch husband, Peter Danielse van Olinda: Daniel, Jacob, and the nonspeaking or nonverbal Matthew. In the 1680s and 1690s, she and her husband lived with their still unmarried youngest son Matthew in a handsome Amsterdam-style home on their 600-by-1,100-foot property on Union Street between Church and Ferry Streets in the village of Schenectady. Located inside the wooden stockade, their house looked out onto the fast-flowing Mohawk River and its grassy and tree-lined floodplain.
The Schenectady Massacre
In late 1688, the Dutch Prince William of Orange and his wife Princess Mary of England seized the English throne with the aid of the Whig aristocracy and military leadership to become King William III and Queen Mary II. The coup d’état became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” Soon after seizing power, in May 1689, William III declared war upon France with the Dutch Republic as a critical ally. King William’s War, as it would become known in English America, would soon turn into a global contest fought for the next nine years in Europe, West Africa, the East and West Indies, and English and French North America. In England, the conflict was known as the “War of the League of Augsburg,” while in France and the Dutch Republic it was referred to as the “War of the Grand Alliance.”
When King William’s War came to colonial America in the summer of 1689, Hilletie was soon worked closely with the leaders of New York and the Five Nations to defeat the French, including both Father Dellius and the mayor and Native American Affairs commissioner Peter Schuyler of Albany, who took the leading role in the planning and administration in the fight against England’s ancient enemy. Their foremost adversary was Count Frontenac, the courtier-governor of New France (French Canada) and commander in chief of the French and Native American forces of the Canadian frontier. A brave and dedicated military man most of his life who has risen to the lofty rank of brigadier general, the aristocratic French count delivered the conflict’s first blow when he launched what became known as the “Schenectady Massacre.”
Situated in a rectangular township on the floodplain south of the Mohawk River, the village of Schenectady was enclosed by a ten-foot-high palisade of sharp-pointed wooden logs. On the frigid night of February 8, 1690, it was home to the forty-three-year-old Hilletie van Olinda, her husband Peter, their grown children and young grandchildren, and some 250 European settlers, most of Dutch extraction. Inside the fort, there were also thirty League Mohawks on a trading visit. Having traveled 220 miles on snowshoes from Montreal, Frontenac’s force of 114 battle-hardened French soldiers and French-Canadian bushfighters, eighty non-League Mohawks from the Kahnawake and La Montagne missions near Montreal, and sixteen Canadian Algonquins caught the sleeping village of 250 souls completely by surprise. With Frenchmen and Indigenous warriors pouring through front doors like floodwaters breaching a dam, only a few of the English settlers were able to crack off a shot with their preloaded muskets, or snatch up a sword or knife to grapple hand to hand.
Some awoke only to catch a terrifying glimpse of a swooshing Iroquois war club, a falling French hatchet, or the muzzle flash of a European trade musket. Others were dragged from their wooden abodes and slain on the snow-covered streets that crisscrossed the sleepy village. Still others perished in the leaping flames that spread through Schenectady like an inferno. Although most were cut down no sooner than they had jumped up from their beds, in all the fire, smoke, and confusion a surprising number were able to flee either unscathed or lightly wounded from the open gates of the stockade into the nearby woods.
By morning, fifty-six of the Schenectady settlers lay dead and only a handful of the eighty houses remained unburned and standing. Hilletie and her extended van Olinda and van Slyck family members were among those who survived the initial onslaught, and whose lives and wooden-log homes inside the stockade were spared by the French and the lead Native attacker, the Francophile Chief Togouiroui, and his Laurentian Iroquois warriors. Because Haudenosaunee descent was reckoned matrilineally, Schenectady families with Mohawk mothers or close ties by blood or marriage to such mothers were spared. Since Hilletie had been raised by her Haudenosaunee mother, Ots-Toch, in the Mohawk village at Tionnontoguen and since she knew Chief Togouiroui, known as the Great Mohawk, and several of the other Canadian Iroquois invaders personally, she and her family were not killed. Hilletie’s eldest brother Jacques Cornelissen van Slyck, her youngest sister Lea van Coppernol, and Lea’s Dutch husband, Claes Willemsen van Coppernol, also managed to survive due to their Mohawk kinship ties.
But most Schenectadians weren’t so lucky, as the French and Native America war party swept through the unsuspecting village in a flurry of bloodcurdling war whoops, stormed the log buildings, cut down the settlers, and dragged the terrified captives from the burning cabins and through the blood-streaked snow. Following the attack and burning of the stockade, the surviving prisoners like Hilletie van Olinda and her extended family were secured, sentinels posted, and the invaders ate and rested before the long journey back to Montreal. The sheer violence witnessed by Hilletie must have been shocking to her, even though she had witnessed frontier warfare up close many times before as a young Mohawk girl growing up in Tionnontoguen. The stunned survivors reported that pregnant women were “ripped up” and “children alive thrown into ye flames” and their “heads dashed in pieces against the doors and windows.”
Following the attack, the French and Native American war party set off for the long return journey to Montreal with twenty-seven men and older boys as prisoners. Major Peter Schuyler quickly dispatched the Mohawk war captain Lawrence, whom Hilletie knew well, and a war party of eighty Mohawks and Mahicans to chase down the enemy combatants before they reached Montreal. Despite the “extreme snow above knee deep” and the enemy’s nearly four-day head start, Lawrence caught up to rear of the retreating column north of Lake Champlain within three days of Montreal. With trade muskets, tomahawks, war clubs, and scalping knives, he and his braves pitched ferociously into the French soldiers lagging far behind their commander and the bulk of the withdrawing army. When it was all over, Lawrence and his warriors had dispatched and scalped twenty of the enemy, sixteen of whom were Frenchmen, while taking nineteen French soldiers and one Laurentian Mohawk as prisoners. They showed mercy to the Laurentian Mohawk auxiliaries, their Iroquois kin, whom they left unharmed throughout the pursuit, except for the one warrior they took captive. However, they failed to recover any of the captured Schenectady townspeople, who had been under close guard far ahead of the stragglers with the main column.
While Lawrence was up north seeking reprisal against the French, Hilletie played an important role in a condolence ceremony for the survivors of Schenectady. Horrified by the tragedy suffered by their New York compatriots, eight Mohawk headmen traveled to Albany to meet with Peter Schuyler, the Albany magistrates, and Hilletie, to perform a formal Iroquois mourning ceremony in honor of those who had perished, and to condole the beleaguered survivors. The sachems included the non-Christian traditionalist speaker Sanonguirese of the esteemed Bear Clan, a friend of Hilletie, and two leading members of the Mohawk Turtle Clan. The translation of the highly emotional ceremony that had brought the region’s war-traumatized settlers and the Iroquois together under the Covenant Chain in a time of mutual tragedy was performed by Hilletie.
Having grown up in her mother’s Mohawk Wolf Clan until her late teens, she had long engaged in such sacred ceremonies along with her eldest brother Jacques (Itsychoquachka) and her sister Lea. More importantly, she was deeply sympathetic to the Haudenosaunee with whom she had lived, traded, and interacted her entire life. Though she had eventually assimilated into her father’s and husband’s Dutch world at Schenectady, she was intimately familiar with Iroquois war customs and mourning rituals from the first two decades of her life in the western Mohawk River Valley.
English Crown Interpreter and Diplomat during King William’s War
Throughout the warfare in the 1690s and three-way clash between the English, French, and Iroquois empires, Hilletie proved invaluable as an interpreter in the government councils between the Five Nations and English, as a religious text translator, as a diplomatic go-between, and as an instructor in Indigenous protocols for New York’s colonial governors. She coached Governors Henry Sloughter, Richard Ingoldsby, and Benjamin Fletcher and other New York officials on the importance of respecting Iroquois diplomatic protocols, which revolved around the principles of reciprocal gift-giving, a respect for rhetoric, and the exchange of wampum belts consisting of sacred and valuable marine shells.
During the formal annual council meetings and the smaller informal conferences between the English and the Haudenosaunee, Hilletie played a critical role in ensuring congenial Anglo-Iroquois relations, in ironing out differences, and in furthering mutual support of the war effort. During these cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations, she did her best to protect her fellow Mohawks with whom she had spent the first eighteen years of her life, knowing that both the English and French were exploiting the Iroquois to further their own imperial ambitions in North America. However, at this stage of her life she saw the world more through a European lens than a Native one. Having married the Dutchman Peter Danielse van Olinda and raised their three biracial sons as European Christians, she maintained strong Protestant religious beliefs and fully embraced European culture.
However, throughout her adult life she did not fully trust white Europeans, whom she knew from hard experience could often not be trusted to do the right thing. While she believed that her fellow Mohawks could benefit from Protestant Christianity, this could only happen “if they were taught, as they seek to be, and had good examples set before them” by the English and Dutch and “were not so deceived and cheated by the Christians who ought to assist them.” Having observed firsthand the corruption among the Jesuits of New France, she was well aware that some Christians could not be trusted to look after the interests of the Five Nations and that strong guardrails needed to be in place to prevent abuses of power.
Thus, although both her late father and husband were of Dutch ancestry, she maintained a strong distrust of Euro-Americans, having witnessed firsthand their abuse, treachery, and bellicosity. While working as a housekeeper in the early 1680s before her second career as a translator, she had one day gently admonished some rough Dutchmen of Schenectady for their public drunkenness and foul language in her presence. In response, they bristled, “Well, how is this, there is a sow converted. Run boys, to the brewer’s and bring some swill for a converted sow.” Unable to see her as an equal, the Dutch bullies refused to believe that the “half-breed” standing before them could have transformed herself into a practicing Christian of her own free will. Instead, they considered her the chattel of the Dutch, who “could be sustained as much by the slop from the distillery—swill, the waste product commonly fed to hogs—as by the teachings of Christ.”
Due to her mixed blood, she also continued to be rejected by some of her fellow Mohawks. Like her mother Ots-Toch, who had beaten her for her interest in Christianity as a teenager when she was merely trying to find meaning in a rapidly changing world, a minority of the Iroquois in Tionnontoguen and other Iroquois villages regarded her allegiance to her late Dutch father and husband’s community as problematic. But her ability as a translator and strong Mohawk kinship ties ensured her a continuing strong “alliance in Haudenosaunee society” and the firm support of the tribal headmen. Throughout her life, she was held in high regard by both the Iroquois and the Anglo-Dutch of Albany and Schenectady for her strong-willed but affable nature, quick mind, honesty, and unrivalled skills as a translator. In fact, despite “her twin handicaps as a woman and a métis,” many people considered her to be a far better person than her Dutch tailor husband and believed that Peter Danielse van Olinda was fortunate to have married her. “She spoke with such feeling and tenderness, such depth of love,” wrote the Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts, “that I cannot describe it, and it affected me…. Her husband is not as good as she is, though he is not one of the worst; she sets a good example before him and knows how to direct him.”
During King William’s War, Hilletie van Olinda received praise and presents from esteemed Iroquois sachems, who rewarded her with highly public displays of veneration through gift-giving in the traditional Haudenosaunee manner of reciprocity. During one meeting in June 1691, the Mohawk headman Sanonguirese and Onondaga sachem Sadekanaktie made a special point of honoring her for her significant contributions to Anglo-Iroquois negotiations. Because of her “good service for the public” and being the “mouth and ears” of the Five Nations, they urged the governor to “take her as the daughter and provide for her that she may not want since she is so serviceable both to us and to you.” To show their respect, the chiefs presented her with four valuable beaver pelts in New York Governor Sloughter’s presence.
As assistant to Father Dellius and provincial interpreter for New York, Hilletie received a salary of £20 ($7,000 today) per year, but the kind words and presents publicly bestowed upon her by the Iroquois leaders meant far more to her. In a chauvinistic era in which women were seldom acknowledged for their accomplishments, the praise and presents from the venerable Iroquois headmen represented a tremendous honor. Aware of the difficulties she had faced growing up in Tionnontoguen and during her early transitional years in Schenectady when she was ridiculed by vulgar Dutchmen, the headmen were also compensating her for the ill treatment she had long endured in both worlds for being a mixed-blooded Native and Dutch European. However, despite having earned the respect of the sachems and many Albanians, the biracial Hilletie continued to be ostracized by some members of the Mohawk community and a smattering of Dutch settlers in Albany and Schenectady, who were envious of her “literacy, income, status, and privilege.”
Throughout her government employment as an interpreter from 1690–1707, she remained close to her fellow Mohawk Sanonguirese, the Onondaga leader Sadekanaktie, and other League Iroquois peace chiefs, who greatly valued her as a cross-cultural liaison and translator. With a strong personality and astute mind, she also retained a good relationship with Peter Schuyler and Father Dellius; the Mohawk war captain Lawrence, his wife Maria, and many other baptized Christian Mohawks; and the settlers who belonged to Albany’s and Schenectady’s Dutch Reformed Churches. Like the respected Iroquois sachems and the female leaders of the matrilineal Mohawk Turtle, Wolf, and Bear Clan family groups, the powerful first families of Albany and New York City— the Schuyler, Philipse, Livingston, and van Cortlandt families—all recognized her importance to mutually beneficial negotiations with the Iroquois and combating the French during King William’s War.
Throughout the 1690s, Hilletie also served as a “valuable informant” in wartime espionage on behalf of the English and Iroquois by passing along intelligence obtained from the Canadian Kahnawake Iroquois mission and the other mission communities in the St. Lawrence Valley of New France. The intelligence provided by Hilletie and other cross-cultural liaisons was used to support English incursions into Canada and defense against French invasion, but it was also used to sustain mutual nonaggression and promote peace between the kindred League and Canadian Iroquois. Her information also directly benefited New York’s colonial governors in protecting from French and Native American attacks along the Albany frontier and Iroquoia.
Hilletie also conducted baptisms with Father Dellius of Mohawk men, women, and children at the Dutch Reformed Church in North Albany. The Albany church was where the Dutch domine ministered regularly to the Schuyler, van Olinda, and other Euro- and Native-American families living in and around Albany. During one of these baptismal ceremonies, a Mohawk woman named Karehojenda showed her respect for Hilletie’s cross-cultural skill by taking “Hilletie” as her formal baptismal name during the sacred ceremony. The Mohawks embraced Protestant Christianity not to supplant their traditional culture but to find a middle ground between European and Iroquois religious custom, as a form of self-preservation in an increasingly dangerous, European-dominated world. They looked upon Christianity mostly as a means of protecting themselves and their people; bridging the gap between Europeans and Native Americans; and bringing a lasting peace between their people and their Anglo-Dutch neighbors, whose numbers were visibly growing.
Along with Lawrence the Mohawk and the Iroquois living in the Mohawk River Valley, Hilletie van Olinda played a crucial role in rebuilding Schenectady in the ensuing years after the 1690 disaster. According to historian Susan Staffa, the small village might not have even been rebuilt “were it not for the entreaties of Lawrence and other Mohawks. Between helping to rebuild and protect the village, to the condolence ceremonies and the burnishing of their symbolic silver chain, the Mohawks made it known that they were true allies.” Hilletie and her fellow Schenectadians reciprocated the “Two Row Wampum Belt agreement” by constructing two Mohawk longhouses in the revitalized village. With this symbolic exchange in the wake of a tragedy that had dramatically affected both peoples, no longer were the Mohawks and Anglo-Dutch of “skahnéhtati”—the beautiful place beyond the open pines as the Haudenosaunee called it—sailing separately down the river of life. Now they were “a united, amalgamated community.”
In her vital role as a bridge between the Indigenous world of her Mohawk Wolf Clan mother and the European world of her Dutch father and husband, she continued to win the respect and admiration of both parties due to her linguistic capabilities. She was successful due to her ability to draw upon her own personal experiences in both cultures and religious spheres. In deciphering and translating the words of her Indigenous people and the Anglo-Dutch of New York in complex diplomatic negotiations, she was not only invaluable in councils through her ability to effectively communicate, but she was able to follow up with important explanations and clarifications to ensure that there was no misunderstanding. Furthermore, due to her detailed understanding of frontier warfare and the languages and traditions on both sides, she was able to carefully explain what each side hoped to gain from negotiations. In the process, she time and again succeeded in bringing each side to a better understanding of the other, when other interpreters often struggled just to translate the verbal exchanges.
It is for these important reasons that at an important council meeting held between the League Iroquois and New York officials in June 1692, Hilletie was once again publicly honored. The venerated Oneida headman Ohede praised her in front of all those present. Not only did he insist that she receive adequate compensation from Governor Ingoldsby and the English for her services, but he gave her two fine beaver pelts in recognition of her invaluable contributions as a translator. “We desire you to take care of our Interpreter,” he declared to the English governor, “that she may have a sufficient maintenance. She is our mouth and takes great care to give you the true sense of our meaning, for if we should want her, it would cause a great confusion.”
Due to her effectiveness in bridging the cultural divide and promoting unity in defeating the French, on October 11, 1692, New York’s new colonial governor, Benjamin Fletcher, recognized her by renewing her annual fixed salary of £20 ($7,000 today) and making her an official government interpreter in his administration. Her salary was higher than the yearly earnings of many New York dockworkers, artisans, schoolteachers, and seamen of the age, and half the £40 ($14,000 today) suffrage requirement to be a freeholder (a servant who outlived their indenture contract). More important, the “Mohawk interpretess” Hilletie stands today as one of the few women to be referenced on a regular basis in a professional working capacity in the New York colonial documents of the late 17th century.
But it was in January of 1694 that Hilletie proved her true mettle when she set out from Albany with Major Peter Schuyler on horseback and snowshoes on a 240-mile round-trip journey in the middle of winter to Oneida, located in modern-day northwestern New York. Having received news of a forthcoming conference between the Five Nations and the French to forge a peace agreement—which New York’s officials believed would be conducted on Frontenac’s terms and hostile to English interests—Governor Fletcher dispatched his most trusted Native American Affairs liaison and his top translator to address the situation. But in the middle of a savage winter, it proved to be hard going for the thirty-six-year-old Schuyler and forty-seven-year-old Hilletie as they plodded through heavy snowdrifts and over icy trails. Although they only made it halfway to Oneida in the waist-deep snow and blizzard conditions and were forced to retrace their steps on their snowshoes back down the Mohawk River Valley to Albany, the truncated journey reveals the sheer toughness of Hilletie van Olinda.
Her granite foundation had been laid during the first two decades of her life growing up in the Mohawk Wolf Clan village at Tionnontoguen, where she and her siblings Itsychoquachka (Jacques), Martin, and Lea had spent considerable time in the cold rain and snow and backwoods country. As a young Mohawk girl, she had become intimately familiar with the network of trails of the Mohawk River Valley from her frequent excursions with her mother not only to neighboring villages, but to trade in Schenectady and Albany, both located more than forty miles downriver from Tionnontoguen. As handy with a knife and musket as a sewing needle and broom, she was well equipped to travel in hard country under harsh winter conditions without a whisper of complaint. Thus, she could fire a flintlock, skin a rabbit, and travel a hundred miles on snowshoes just as well as she could roast a haunch of venison in her great brick and Dutch ovens, prepare thick porridges of Native American corn, fire-sear and pickle pailfuls of Gowanus oysters, and bake cakes consisting of eggs, raisins, currants, brandy, and rum mixed in her wooden washtub.
The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, 1701 Grand Settlement, and Hilletie’s Later Years
In mid-December 1697, Hilletie learned of the October 30 signing of the Treaty of Ryswick, formally ending the grueling nine-year contest between France and the Grand Alliance of England, Spain, Austria, and the Dutch Republic. With the exciting news that the war was over, drums resounded in Albany and New York City, the bell of Father Dellius’s Dutch Reformed Church in Albany rang out, and cannons exploded from Fort Frederick in Albany and Fort William in New York City to exclamations of “God save the king!” But after nine years of savage warfare, the provincial European and Native field armies of French King Louis XIV and those of the League of Augsburg headed by King William III had essentially fought each other to a bloody, exhausting, money-draining draw. While England and their Haudenosaunee allies had thwarted France’s ambitions in the New World, the Iroquois and other Native American tribes that had been allied with England and France remained at war.
But three years later, the 18th century brought an end to a decade of warfare, disease, and misery and gave rise to a newfound sense of hope with a fresh “Tree of Peace” for Hilletie van Olinda’s Iroquois brothers and sisters. In July and August 1701, League Iroquois delegations negotiated simultaneous treaties with New France and English New York that would have long-lasting positive consequences for the Haudenosaunee through a policy of neutrality toward the two competing European empires. Under the terms of what became known as the “Grand Settlement of 1701,” the parallel treaties conducted in Montreal and Albany allowed the Five Nations freedom of movement in Iroquoia, provided neutrality in future conflicts between England and France, and secured improved trading status with both European powers.
The diplomatic council with English New York was held between July 10 and 21, 1701, at Albany’s City Hall. The negotiations were conducted between thirty-two headmen from all Five Nations, Peter Schuyler and Native American Affairs officials, and Hilletie, who acted as the official Crown interpreter of the historic proceedings. The Albany conference was a transformative moment in Anglo-Iroquois relations in early American history; not only did she have a front-row seat, but she carefully interpreted the words of the key decision-makers on both sides. The neutralist strategy of the Grand Settlement not only created a stable balance of power in Iroquoia but sealed the bonds of kinship between the Iroquois of New France and New York, more sharply delineated European colonial boundaries, and reaffirmed the efforts of Schuyler and Hilletie to strengthen the Covenant Chain. The Five Nations now possessed a counterweight to French influence in Iroquoia, while gaining an even closer tie to New York, but without binding obligations to either imperial power. Furthermore, while their arms were now linked with both the English and the French through neutrality, they were still a formidable military and economic power in North America and would remain so through the American Revolution.
Following the Grand Settlement of 1701, Hilletie served as the Crown interpreter of colonial New York until her death in 1707. Judging by how many petitions she had to file to collect her salary throughout her working career and how excruciatingly long it took to receive payment, it is clear that “New York government interpretess” was a thankless job. All the same, she served more than twenty-two years as a paid provincial council interpreter, religious document translator, and Mohawk language instructor to incoming Protestant ministers.
In 1702, she taught Albany’s new domine of the Dutch Reformed Church, Johannes Lydius, the Mohawk language so that he could better serve the Haudenosaunee in the work of the gospel. Due to her capable instruction, within two years Father Lydius became highly regarded by the Mohawks for his ability to communicate in his Protestant Christian mission work. In 1704, three Christian Mohawk headmen conveyed a small tract of land near Albany in her name for her religious and linguistic contributions over the decades, “affirming her continued importance to her mother’s kin.” In the deed, she is referred to as “Hilletie van Olinda one of the Natives,” underscoring her Mohawk roots.
The Enduring Legacy of Hilletie van Olinda
Throughout her life, the biracial Hilletie straddled two worlds, the Native American world of her Mohawk Wolf Clan mother and the European world of her Dutch father and husband. Time and again, she was compelled to draw upon her experiences in these very different and conflicting worlds in deciphering and translating the delicate diplomatic negotiations between the northeastern tribes and Euro-American public officials in both wartime and peace.
She was a strong-willed, intelligent, confident, energetic, and independent woman in a male-dominated world and, as one historian has written, she was “clearly a person to be reckoned with.” Though women maintained a strong position in both matriarchal Iroquois and Dutch society compared to English and other less tolerant European cultures, many Native headmen and Euro-American leaders still considered diplomacy to be the exclusive province of men. But through her skill, persistence, and strength of character, Hilletie was able to win over the Iroquois headmen and play a prominent role in the day-to-day workings of intercultural relations between the Five Nations and colonists of New York. Even more importantly, she served both communities through extremely challenging times characterized by outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, virtually constant warfare, and many broken or unfulfilled promises by the English Crown.
Hilletie van Olinda died in Albany on February 10, 1707, at the age of sixty-one. She left behind her husband, Peter, who would outlive her by nine years, and her three grown sons—Daniel, Jacob, and Matthew. Through her tireless efforts, she helped forge social, political, and economic connections and alliances in New York and Iroquoia that cut across ethnicity, race, religion, and political affiliation, and in the process, she helped form a distinctive “American” character. Through her tireless efforts, she helped blaze a new trail along with many of her contemporaries, providing the building blocks for not merely the New York we know today but a new, wondrous, multiethnic, and democratic United States of America—the first nation in world history founded expressly on the principle of freedom and the first to lead a successful mass rebellion against imperialism and colonialism.
Author Biography:
Samuel Marquis, M.S., P.G., is a professional hydrogeologist, expert witness, historian, and award-winning author ofEmpire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William’s War, 1689-1701, Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal, and twelve other non-fiction-history and historical-fiction books, covering the period from colonial America through WWII. His newest American history work, Franklin’s Sea Warriors: The Founding Father and his Patriot-Pirate Navy that won the American Revolution (Diversion/Simon & Schuster), will be published in May 2027.
