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 tr