The historians cited below, some of whom are leading figures in the new Indian history movement, have tried with respect to the Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in the North American colonies) to uncover Native American perspectives in order to elucidate the actions and significances of the war more fully than previous scholarship had accomplished. They have merged methods and purviews of military, political, social, and cultural history in efforts to adequately account for the war's complicated causes, development, and consequences.

Francis Jennings has categorized France's wartime Indian allies in terms of their reliability. So-called "domesticated" Indians, who converted to Catholicism, left their tribes, and settled in French missions, were considered the most reliable. Potawatomis, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and other Indian groups who traveled long distances to join the fight were perceived as the next most reliable, as they could be counted on to remain after a battle and hold newly won territory rather than embark right away on the long trip home.

During the first four years of the war, however, Indian allies from the Ohio Valley region, most prominently the Delawares and Shawnees, became France's most important allies. They "unenthusiastically came to terms with the French," Richard White relates, when war began between the two European empires and especially after English General Edward Braddock failed to capture Fort Duquesne at present-day Pittsburgh. In that battle, most of France's Indian allies were Ottawas, Mississaugas, Wyandots, and Potawatomis fighting for captives and booty, according to Fred Anderson. After Braddock's defeat, the Ohio Indians, rebuffed by the arrogance of the British and fearing attack by the other tribes allied with the French, joined the latter in large numbers. Until they reached a separate peace with England in 1758, these Ohio Indians conducted devastating raids on frontier settlements in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

Shawnees and Delawares, originally "dependents" of the Iroquois, had migrated from Pennsylvania to the upper Ohio Valley during the second quarter of the 18th century as did numerous Indian peoples from other areas. Unlike the others, however, the groups arriving from the east came as "village fragments, families, even individual hunters," White notes, rather than as whole villages or tribes. They formed multiethnic villages, what White calls "the first republics," in lands claimed by both England and France, and were "trying to establish some basis for collective identity and action for the first time as the events of the war began to unfold," Eric Hinderaker relates. The Ohio Indians sought to "use the French to defeat the British," White contends, with the understanding that afterward, in the words of a Delaware, "we can drive away the French when we please."

In October 1758, the Ohio Indians reached a peace agreement with England stipulating that the British would relinquish claims to their lands on the Ohio, an agreement on which the British subsequently reneged. Without the support of the Ohio Indians, the French abandoned Fort Duquesne to the British, "a pivotal moment in American history," James H. Merrell has written. The Catholic Indians of the St. Lawrence missions remained allies of the French as the war continued, until the late summer of 1760, when the mission Indians ended their support of the French, and the latter shortly thereafter surrendered to the British. War between France and England, concluded in North America, continued elsewhere until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763.

“Conococheague” is a Delaware Indian phrase referring to a particular creek, the main branch of which begins in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and flows into Maryland. It crosses under the old Chesapeake & Ohio canal aqueduct near Williamsport, Maryland, and then into the Potomac River near Chambersburg. The name Conococheague, by extension, was later also applied to a mountain nearby.

The area drained in the watershed of the creek was the scene of fierce hostilities between the Delaware tribes and the early white settlers to the area that did not cease until a peace treaty was concluded in 1758.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) public database entry for Conococheague Creek, magnanimously gives the following daunting list of variant spellings: Canigotschik, Conecocheague, Conegocheek, Conegocheige, Conegochiegh, Conegoge, Conegogee, Conegogeek, Conigochego, Conigotoschick, Conijachola, Connatachequa, Connogocheague, Conocochego, Cunnaquachegue, Cunnatachegue, Cunnatichegue, and Guneukitschik.

Some people are determined that the word is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable—“Kahn-uh-kuh-JIG.” However, the bulk of the evidence gives pride of place to putting the accent on the second to the last syllable.

The accepted pronunciation, according to AllRefer.com is “KAH-no-KAH-cheek,” with the accent on the penultimate syllable. And, listening to the folks at the Conococheague Institute in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, pronounce it, I heard “KAH-no-KAH-cheeg.”

In 1822, the Moravian missionary, John Gottlieb Heckewelder (1743-1823), widely traveled among the Delaware Indians, sent to the American Philosophical Society a long descriptive list he had compiled of Indian names of geographical features. On his list (p. 373, as published by the American Philosophical Society in 1834) was “Conococheague,” which he then phoneticized as “Guneukìtschik,” with the accent on the penultimate syllable. He offered the translation as “long indeed, very long indeed.”

In 1644, the Rev. John Megalopensis, minister at a Dutch Church in New Netherlands, complained that Native American women were “obliged to prepare the Land, to mow, to plant, and do every Thing; the Men do nothing except hunting, fishing, and going to War against their Enemies. . .” Many of his fellow Europeans described American Indian women as “slaves” to the men, because of the perceived differences in their labor, compared to European women. Indian women performed what Europeans considered to be men’s work. But, from the Native American perspective, women’s roles reflected their own cultural emphases on reciprocity, balance, and autonomy. Most scholars agree that Native American women at the time of contact with Europeans had more authority and autonomy than did European women.

It is hard to make any generalizations about indigenous societies, because North America’s First Peoples consisted of hundreds of separate cultures, each with their own belief systems, social structures, and cultural and political practices. Evidence is particularly scarce about women’s everyday lives and responsibilities. However, most cultures shared certain characteristics that promoted gender equality.

Kinship, extended family, and clan bound people together within a system of mutual obligation and respect. Lineage was central to determining status and responsibilities, consent held communities together, and concepts of reciprocity extended to gender roles and divisions of authority.

Men were generally responsible for hunting, warfare, and interacting with outsiders, therefore they had more visible, public roles. Women, on the other hand, managed the internal operations of the community. They usually owned the family’s housing and household goods, engaged in agricultural food production and gathering of foodstuffs, and reared the children.

Because women’s activities were central to the community’s welfare, they also held important political, social, and economic power. In many North American societies, clan membership and material goods descended through women. For example, the Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroquois Confederation all practiced matrilineal descent. Clan matrons selected men to serve as their chiefs, and they deposed chiefs with whom they were dissatisfied. Women’s life-giving roles also played a part in their political and social authority. In Native American creation stories, it was often the woman who created life, through giving birth to children, or through the use of their own bodies to create the earth, from which plants and animals emerged.

Some scholars argue that, after contact, women’s authority steadily declined because of cultural assimilation. Euro-American men insisted on dealing with Indian men in trade negotiations, and ministers demanded that Indians follow the Christian modes of partriarchy and gendered division of labor that made men farmers and women housekeepers.

However, other scholars, such as SUNY Fredonia anthropologist Joy Bilharz and University of North Carolina historian Theda Perdue, argue that many indigenous women maintained authority within their communities. Matrilineal inheritance of clan identity remained important parts of many cultures long after contact, and women continued to use their maternal authority to influence political decisions within and outside of their own nations.

For example, as the United States increased pressure against the Cherokee nation to relinquish their eastern lands and move west, groups of Cherokee women petitioned their Council to stand their ground. In these communications, they sternly reminded their “[b]eloved children” that they had raised the Council members on that land which “God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions.” They admonished their children not to “part with any more lands.”

Another Cherokee woman wrote to Benjamin Franklin in 1787, advocating peace between the new United States and the Cherokee nation. She advised Franklin that political leaders “. . . ought to mind what a woman says, and look upon her as a mother – and I have Taken the prevelage to Speak to you as my own Children . . . and I am in hopes that you have a beloved woman amongst you who will help to put her children right if they do wrong, as I shall do the same. . . . ” American Indian women assumed that their unique positions in their societies gave them the right to play the mother card when necessary.