New Iroquois Nation

In 2028, the remaining ancestors of the indigenous Iroquois Nation, regained “ownership” of millions of acres of wild and largely uninhabited land including: the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, a narrow corridor across the tops of what were once the states of Vermont and New Hampshire, and the entire northern half of what was once the state of Maine, beginning at the Longfellow Mountains.

For a while these areas remained legally a part of the New Vermont and the new USA state of Massachusetts, but within a few years virtually all the white inhabitants of these areas had migrated to the southern part of the new USA or to the more densely populated shorelines of Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence River, where it was still possible for them to work and live.

As word of the abandonment of these remote areas spread, small numbers of people of Iroquois ancestry began to move in from other parts of the former USNA, learning to live off the land as their forbears had once done. Eventually these Iroquois resettlers claimed these lands for the Iroquois Nation, operating under the original Iroquois Constitution that some say once served as the model for the Constitution of the United States.

Both New Vermont and Massachusetts quite willingly gave up their claims to the remote and uninhabitable northern lakes and timberlands, which had become prohibitively expensive to log without petroleum-powered equipment. In its treaty with the Iroquois nation, New Vermont's granted the Iroquois full rights to live, hunt, and fish in the northern corridor and the Adirondacks, as well as “home rule” under their own Constitution. as long as they did not build permanent settlements, pollute the air and waters, or over-hunt the animals in the Adirondack Preserve. For their part, the Iroquois Nation was to recognize the right of the New Vermont Hunting and Fishing Authority to monitor the populations of game in the preserve and to set annual quotas for the taking of game by both the Iroquois and authorized hunters from New Vermont. The Iroquois were also to permit free access to authorized New Vermont hunters, so long as they did not bring alcohol onto the domain of the Iroquois Nation.

The treaty worked out quite well for about forty years, largely because the population of Iroquois living in the huge area under their dominion was estimated to be at somewhat less than five thousand, hardly enough to seriously impact the environment or game population. However, by 2075, relations between the two groups had become increasingly strained because of several unpublicized, but well-known incidents on both sides of what had been, until about five years before, a highly permeable border.