In The Iroquois Century: kinship politics, borderlands violence, and the origins of the colonial Northeast, 1600-1701, I, Jackson Bergman Warkentin, combine analysis of captivity practices, Native diplomatic rituals, and Haudenosaunee folklore and oral histories to show how the Iroquois Five Nations built internal political cohesion through externally directed violence in the seventeenth century. Peaking in the 1650s-60s, the Five Nations overwhelmed their Indian enemies and transformed the political landscape of the Northeast. My study breaks with traditional interpretations that frame these seventeenth-century "Beaver Wars" as a reaction to European settlement, trade, and disease. Instead, I look at how violence and control of enemy bodies enhanced the power of the Iroquois, both individual clans as well as the Iroquois League as a whole, within the unique structure of their kinship-based political system. I argue that pre-contact rivalries between Native groups and the unifying power of warfare and captivity practices within the Five Nations drove borderlands violence in the Northeast throughout the seventeenth century.