Iroquois

Iroquois

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Iroquois were a Native North American confederacy of five nations whose aboriginal territory included much of upstate New York. The Iroquois thought of this territory as a longhouse, a rectangular multifamily dwelling with a door at each end and a series of hearths in the aisle that ran the length of the dwelling. Each of the five Iroquois nations occupied one of the five fireplaces in this metaphorical longhouse. From east to west these were the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. As the western-most nation in the Iroquois longhouse, the Senecas were considered the “Doorkeepers of the Confederacy” and the Mohawks are often styled the “Keepers of the Eastern Door.” Iroquois refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee (with variant spellings) meaning, roughly, “people of the longhouse,” a designation many contemporary Haudenosaunee prefer. Iroquois was the name utilized by the French; the English usually referred to the confederacy as the Five (later, Six) Nations.

At the time of contact with Europeans the Iroquois lived in large villages consisting of elm-bark longhouses, each housing a number of families. Surrounding the village were fields in which the women planted the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash. These crops were the staples of Iroquois diet.

Each of the Iroquois nations was divided into exogamous matrilineal clans. The Wolf, Bear, and Turtle clans were found in all five nations; five or six additional clans were found among the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The clans were further divided into matrilineages, each headed by a senior female, the lineage matron. Some of these lineage matrons enjoyed considerable political power. The Iroquois Confederacy Council consisted of fifty positions, each hereditary within a matrilineage. The lineage matron appointed a male member of her matrilineage to that position and had the right to depose him if he proved negligent or incompetent in that role.

Dean Snow estimated the Iroquois population as almost 22,000 in 1630, prior to their first experience of smallpox (Snow 1994, p. 110). Diseases introduced to North America from Europe took a terrible toll in Iroquoia, but these population losses were to some degree offset by the Iroquois practice of adopting war captives and incorporating refugee populations. One refugee group, the Tuscarora, arrived in the 1720s, and after their arrival the confederacy was often known to the English as the Six Nations.

Initially the Iroquois established a strong trading relationship with the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The Iroquois quickly adopted elements of European culture such as brass kettles and steel axes and knives. These economic and political ties continued after the English replaced the Dutch as governors of the colony, having renamed it New York.

Occupying a highly strategic position between the English colonies on the Atlantic Coast and the French in Canada, the Iroquois usually maintained neutrality between the two colonial powers. On occasion Mohawks took the field as allies to the British whereas the Senecas, close to the French trading post at Niagara, sometimes fought beside the French. There were several Mohawk colonies on the St. Lawrence River established by converts to Catholicism who were persuaded by their Jesuit priests to migrate to a locale remote from English influences. These people, from the founding of their communities in the 1670s, consistently fought as allies to the French.

By the outbreak of the American Revolution the Iroquois had largely abandoned the multifamily bark longhouses and were living in smaller houses, often log cabins. The Mohawks had converted to the Church of England. The Oneida were heavily influenced by the New England missionary Samuel Kirkland (1741–1808). Those nations farther to the west were not yet Christian, but their towns closely resembled those of the non-Indian inhabitants of the frontier.

The American Revolution divided the Iroquois Confederacy. The Oneidas and Tuscaroras aided the supporters of the Continental Congress; Mohawks, Cayugas, and Senecas (and later the Onondagas) fought as allies to the British. The treaty that ended that conflict in 1783 made no provisions for the Indian allies of the Crown, and Britain surrendered all interests in the Iroquois homeland south of Lake Ontario. Many Iroquois moved north of the new American border to lands secured for them by Quebec governor Frederick Haldimand. These lands included the Tyendinaga Mohawk Reserve (or Territory) on the Bay of Quinté and the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River, both in what is now Ontario. The latter was settled predominantly by Mohawks, Cayugas, and Onondagas. Most of the Senecas remained in New York State, and a series of treaties (Fort Stanwix [1784], Canandaigua [1794], and Big Tree [1797]) established several reservations, of which Allegany, Cattaraugus, Oil Spring, and Tonawanda remain in Seneca hands. The Onondaga Nation retains territory near Syracuse, New York, but Cayuga and Oneida lands in New York were purchased through treaties of questionable legality with the State of New York. The larger portion of the Oneidas migrated to lands secured in Wisconsin and Ontario early in the nineteenth century.

In 1799 a Seneca, Handsome Lake (1735–1815), experienced a vision that led him to preach a message of both nativism and reform that established the contemporary practice of traditional Iroquois (or Longhouse) religion. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s ethnohistorical analysis of these events formed the basis of anthropological understanding of revitalization movements (Wallace 1970).

In the 1840s Lewis H. Morgan pursued personal contacts, particularly through a bilingual Seneca youth, Ely S. Parker, among the Tonawanda Senecas to compile what has been touted as the first ethnographic monograph describing a Native North American culture (Morgan 1851).

Any estimate of current Iroquois population is subject to error, but a compilation of numbers of those formally enrolled in various Iroquois communities between 1990 and 2000 states that 16,829 are enrolled in New York Iroquois communities, 42,857 belong to communities in Ontario, 10,831 are enrolled in Quebec Iroquois bands, 11,000 belong to the Wisconsin Oneida community, and 2,460 belong to a Seneca-Cayuga group that resides in Oklahoma (Lex and Abler 2004, p. 744).

Some Iroquois communities have pursued land claims for nearly two centuries (see Vecsey and Starna 1988), seeking the return or compensation for lands felt to be fraudulently taken. These claims have led to violent clashes with authorities, as at Ganienkeh in northern New York in the 1970s and at Kanesatake outside Montreal in 1990. Legalized gambling and other economic activities have also deeply divided many communities, creating internal conflicts that have led in some cases to violence, arson, and even deaths.

SEE ALSO Native Americans

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fenton, William N. 1998. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Lex, Barbara, and Thomas S. Abler. 2004. Iroquois. In Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures, eds. Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, 743–754. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1851. League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. Rochester, NY: Sage.

Parker, Arthur C. 1968. Parker on the Iroquois, ed. William N. Fenton. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Shimony, Annemarie Anrod. 1994. Conservatism among the Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Snow, Dean. 1994. The Iroquois. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.

Vecsey, Christopher, and William A. Starna, eds. 1988. Iroquois Land Claims. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1970. Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf.

Thomas S. Abler