IROQUOIS

IROQUOIS. The Iroquois of the seventeenth century were a confederation of five closely related but separate nations: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. Around the year 1500, these were independent nations speaking related languages that were arrayed in the order given from east to west across what became upstate New York. They were related to other Iroquoian-speaking nations and confederacies of the interior Northeast, namely the Neutrals, Petuns, Hurons, Wenros, Eries, and Susquehannocks. Even closer linguistic relatives, the Tuscaroras and Meherrins, lived in interior North Carolina. Iroquoians began expanding northward into what are now New York and Ontario beginning around a.d. 600. They were horticulturalists attracted by improved climatic conditions and fertile glacial soils, and they absorbed or displaced the thinner hunter-gatherer populations they encountered. The expansion also cut off the Eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Northeast from the Central Algonquians of the Great Lakes basin.

Iroquois Communities

The ancestral Iroquois depended upon maize, beans, and squash as staples. Wild plant and animal foods supplemented this diet and deer hides provided most of their clothing prior to the introduction of trade cloth. Communities appear to have been organized along matrilineal lines from an early date. Communal households were led by senior women whose sisters and daughters comprised its social framework. Men moved to their wives' houses when they married. This household form eventually led to the emergence of the classic Iroquois longhouse, a segmented structure that accommodated pairs of nuclear families that shared common hearths in individual compartments. A single long aisle connected compartments,

which were added to the ends of the longhouses as new marriages required.

Iroquois longhouse villages of the seventeenth century were compact and densely populated communities that could hold up to two thousand people before becoming politically unstable. They were lived in year round, but were designed to last only a decade or two. Without large domesticated animals and the fertilizer they might have provided, fields became unproductive after a few years. In addition, local firewood supplies became exhausted and longhouses were strained by changes in family age and composition. These pressures led to relocations, often to places just a few miles away. If displaced by warfare, Iroquois villagers moved much greater distances, a practice that accounts for their colonization of new regions and the clustering of village sites around those destinations as the result of subsequent shorter moves.

Warfare and the League of Iroquois

Both archaeology and oral tradition point to a period of internecine warfare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

By the latter part of the sixteenth century, the League of the Iroquois (Hodenosaunee) developed as a mutual nonaggression pact between the five Iroquois nations. This did not stop regional warfare, but it allowed the Iroquois nations to redirect their aggression toward other nations and emerging confederacies in the region. The Iroquois numbered around 22,000 by this time. By the middle of the seventeenth century, they had destroyed or dispersed the Huron, Neutral, and Erie confederacies as well as the independent Petun and Wenro nations. The Susquehannocks held out only a few years longer.

The Iroquois League, and the political confederacy that it eventually became, was founded on existing clan structure and funerary ritual. Leading clan segments from each of the five constituent nations provided league chiefs (sachems) who met frequently to maintain internal peace and discuss external affairs. Much of the earlier violence had been predicated on the shared assumption that most deaths were deliberately caused by enemies. Even what might otherwise have been considered natural deaths were usually attributed to witchcraft, which prompted cycles of revenge violence. Thus, a principal activity of the league chiefs was mutual condolence designed to stop cycles of revenge-motivated warfare. The vehicle for this was elaborate funerary ritual and the prompt raising up of new leaders to replace deceased ones. Replacements assumed the names of the deceased, providing both continuity and comfort to the bereaved.

Relations with Europeans

Smallpox and other diseases devastated the Iroquois beginning about 1634. The nations survived by taking in large numbers of refugees. Some of these were displaced from New England and other parts of the eastern seaboard that were experiencing European colonization. Many others were the remnants of nations that the Iroquois had defeated in war. The immigrants replaced lost relatives, often taking on their identities.

The Iroquois became the principal native power brokers in the colonial Northeast, treating first, in 1615, with the Dutch on the Hudson River and the French on the St. Lawrence River. After the English seized New Netherland in 1664 they forged a "covenant chain" with the Iroquois, principally through the Mohawks, who lived closest to Albany. French Jesuit missionaries established missions in several Iroquois villages. When the Jesuits retreated back to New France in the face of English expansion they took many Mohawks, Onondagas, and some other Iroquois with them.

The Iroquois also made peace with the French at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and successfully played the two colonial powers off each other until the English expelled the French from North America in 1763, after the French and Indian War. The Iroquois survived the war politically intact despite the fact that while many were allied with the English, Catholic Mohawks and other pro-French Iroquois fought with the other side. By that time, the Iroquois had absorbed many native refugees, both individually and as whole nations. The Tuscaroras moved north in the early part of the eighteenth century to become a sixth member of the confederacy. A large fraction of the Delawares were absorbed as a dependent nation in the mid-eighteenth century. The Tutelo refugees took shelter in New York under Iroquois protection at about the same time, with other refugee communities doing the same soon after. By this time, the traditional longhouses had been replaced by dispersed communities of individual cabins.

The American Revolution shattered the Iroquois confederacy. Most Oneidas sided with the colonists while most other Iroquois aligned with the British. The Mohawks soon fled to Canada and large fractions of western Iroquois communities were eventually also displaced by the fighting. The League of the Iroquois was dissolved.

After the League's Dissolution

Many Iroquois took up residence on Canadian reserves awarded to them after the war by a grateful English government. Others remained on new reservations in central and western New York, under the protection of the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 and other agreements. While the Tuscaroras and four of the five original Iroquois nations achieved reservation status, the Mohawks did not return. Their only presence in New York was on the small St. Regis (Akwesasne) reservation-reserve, which straddles the New York, Ontario, and Quebec boundaries.

The League of the Iroquois was recreated both at Onondaga in New York and on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, but neither revival could hope to wield much power in the face of the U.S. and Canadian governments. Poverty and alcoholism on the reservations prompted a native religious revival in 1799. The prophet of the updated revival of Iroquois traditional belief was Handsome Lake, a Seneca. The Handsome Lake religion eventually spread to most other Iroquois communities and continues to provide both a rallying point and a source of controversy in many of them.

Iroquois reservation lands were reduced through the course of relocations and land deals in the nineteenth century. The legality of some these cessions were still being argued in courts in the early twenty-first century. A few gains were also realized by the Iroquois, and by the end of the twentieth century, there were even two new Mohawk communities in eastern New York. The Senecas remained on three reservations in western New York, while the Tuscaroras, Onondagas, and Oneidas had one each. The Cayugas had a small presence and claims on a larger one. The Oneidas, who had close relatives on a reservation in Wisconsin and a reserve in Ontario, pursued a land claim and had business success in casino operations. Many other Iroquois lived on reserves in Canada.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fenton, William N. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. For the serious reader, a masterpiece by the dean of Iroquoian scholars.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Iroquois. New York: Corinth Books, 1962. Originally published in 1851 as League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois.

Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell, 1994. The best place to start for the general reader.

Sturtevant, William C., gen. ed. The Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15, Northeast. Edited by Bruce G. Trigger. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. This volume is the best single source for the Algonquian and Iroquoian speaking tribes of the Northeast.

DeanSnow

See alsoArchitecture, American Indian ; French and Indian War ; Indian Economic Life ; Indian Land Cessions ; Indian Languages ; Indian Policy, Colonial ; Indian Policy, U.S.: 1775–1830, 1830–1900, 1900–2000 ; Indian Political Life ; Indians in the Revolution ; Tribes: Northeastern ; Warfare, Indian ; Wars with Indian Nations: Colonial Era to 1783 ; andvol. 9:The Origin of the League of Five Nations ; Treaty with the Six Nations, 1784 .