When Champlain asked the name of these scrappers—almost certainly Mohawks—the Algonquin called them a word that sounded like “Iroquois,” which meant something like “real snakes.” It was an indignant term, but it held respect. Another possible derivation for the word Iroquois, pointed out by archaeologist Dean Snow, is “Hilokoa,” a pidgin Basque/Algonquin name meaning, “the killer people.” Then, as now, they were admired as warriors.
The Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, “People of the Long House.” They were a union of five, later six, nations who held most of New York state at the time the Europeans arrived.
The Iroquois were hunters, farmers, and warriors. They lived in small, semipermanent villages across most of what is now upstate New York. Their influence ranged far beyond. Their greatest arts were things they could carry with them: their songmaking, their storytelling, their language and their use of it. It was in the last capacity that the Six Nations folk so impressed the white world. The best of them were the greatest orators any European had ever seen.
The Iroquois were never numerous. Sir William Johnson estimated in 1763 that there might have been ten thousand of them. Two centuries later, Edmund Wilson figured that there were about double that number of mostly Iroquois people. In the 1995 New York census, 62,651 folks chose to call themselves Iroquois, which is still only about 0.3 percent of the state’s population.
Because of their political unity and prospects of empire building, the Iroquois were nicknamed “the Red Romans.” They may have been on their way to controlling a continent at the time the Europeans landed. Power brokers in all the colonial wars, the Iroquois helped shape the North America we see today. Their League of Six Nations has often been considered the model for today’s United States, and thus of democratic unions all over the world. It’s no stretch to suggest that the Iroquois were the most influential Native American political body that has ever been.
ORIGINS
The origins of the Iroquois are still debated. Until recently most historians envisioned the ancient Northeast along the model of Dark Ages Europe: a borderless, nationless land mass in which culturally distinct bodies of people—tribes—pushed each other around or ate territory whole. The Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker (1881–1955) thought this way at the start of the twentieth century, envisioning the boundaries of Iroquois Nations—Oneida, Cayuga—moving across the map of prehistoric New York like cloud shadows along a ridge on a gusty day.
A century later, we have dramatic new tools for understanding the past, among them linguistics and genetics. We also have different ideas about the Iroquois. To understand them we need to separate for a moment the idea of culture from that of people.
Culture—language, lifestyles, artifacts, religion, customs, ways of thinking—can develop within a population. Contact with new people can change it. It can be brought in with new people who take over territory. These models—it grew here, it came here, they brought it here—are not mutually exclusive when it comes to the roots of “Iroquois-ness.”
The first Iroquoians were named after a lake—Owasco Lake near Auburn, New York—where their oldest identifiable sites were found. Currently, there are two predominant models for the origins of the Owasco culture. The more popular of them is a mix of “it grew here” and “it came here.” In this scheme, the people who became the historic Iroquois were already in place. They were the indigenous folk of the Northeast Woodlands who may have been here since the last glaciers. They may have had an Iroquoian language—that we’ll never know—but the artifacts, customs, and lifestyles that go into what we consider Iroquois-ness developed among them later, maybe as recently as a thousand years ago.
In this picture, hunting-gathering bands of eighty or so people grew into more static villages of several hundred, probably due to the practice of agriculture spreading from Mesoamerica through the Mississippian Culture of the Midwest. Owasco artifacts and lifestyles developed as innovations and through contact with other groups, and spread around upstate New York. The Iroquois nations developed as cultural identities when these villages banded together for mutual support.
There is still another picture of Owasco origins: “they came here.” Some scholars believe the relatively sudden appearance of agriculture, longhouse-style buildings, and compact villages in upstate New York means that an influx of newcomers brought them. It may have been a complete takeover. If so, it was probably Iroquoians supplanting Algonquinspeaking aboriginals. Where did these Iroquoians come from?
Archaeologists have discovered what they take to be signs of an immigration from the St. Lawrence River Valley. Linguistic historians think the push could have come from the south through the Appalachians. Iroquoian languages were spoken in the Southeast by nations like the Cherokee, from whom today’s Iroquois may have broken off before the pyramids of Egypt were built.
The Iroquois have their own traditions, of course. National and religious creation tales feature them sprouting right out of the ground or from a single hill. Those are widely regarded as mythical. As for Iroquois storytellers, their only conflict with the archaeologists may be one of timing. The Iroquois carry tales of distinct nations wandering into ancient New York from other parts of the continent, usually the Northeast, the Southeast, or the Great Lakes. There are faint traditions of an old home in the American Southwest. This seems the least likely legend to be directly true; however, we think most of the ancestors of today’s Native Americans came from Asia. Thus North America was populated by groups migrating from the general direction of the west.
Even the pros admit that the choice between evolution and immigration is too
