The Covenant Chain, Legal Traditions, and the Problem of Law Office History

Abstract References to the Covenant Chain—a diplomatic confederation of English colonies and Native groups—are found throughout the historical record of eastern North America. Over the past three decades, however, Canadianist scholars have reinterpreted the Covenant Chain within a contemporary legal framework, allegedly aligned with Indigenous legal traditions and intended to have application in a judicial system where Indigenous rights and sovereignty are being tested. Rather than acknowledging the decades-long consensus view that the Covenant Chain is fundamentally and for all purposes an assembly of alliances, a recent claim is that it is a treaty—a “meta-treaty”—of compelling consequence. The Covenant Chain and certain cultural artifacts, including the two row wampum and the idea of kaswentha, are argued by some to undergird a line of reasoning in the formulation of legal traditions. Yet imperfections in the understanding of treaty-making, complicated by distortions of the Covenant Chain’s history and interpretation, presentism, and the specter of law office history, highlight the need to address legal traditions commensurate with sound ethnological and historical truth-telling.