THE LEAGUE OF SIX NATIONS
According to legend, for many centuries the Iroquois nations had no sense of kinship. They warred with each other continually. Then an Iroquois, possibly Mohawk, chief had a vision of a mighty tree that never lost its leaves, with Iroquois people sheltering under its boughs. His message of unity was not readily taken, and this visionary chief, usually called the Peacemaker, had many adventures as he spread his word. Eventually the five original nations accepted his guidance and banded together. Strong and supple like the fingers of a hand, their Confederacy had flexibility and reach. It could also draw together into a fist for attack or defense.
Some Iroquois historians set the Confederacy’s founding date between 900 and 1450 CE. A few white historians place it as recently as 1600. What’s clear is that by the time the Europeans were settling New England, this was the strongest native power on the continent.
Though the Confederacy was never a big body by the standards of the Old World or of Central and South America, it had an impressive form of representative government based not on cultural or ethnic factors, but political ones.
The semiofficial fracturing of the League came during the American Revolution. When the British and the colonials split, the Six Nations were understandably confused. To which set of English-speakers had they sworn their oaths? They covered the holy council fire at Onondaga, meaning that each Iroquois nation was free to decide for itself. Most Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Yanks. The other nations went with the British. The first blows one Iroquois nation had struck at another in centuries came at the Battle of Oriskany in 1777.
In the 1970s, a renaissance of Native American self-awareness and political power brought the League back into closer communication, and many other nations came with them. The League may never again be like it was, but the world around it has changed—and for the better—due to its influence.
THE LONGHOUSE
The Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, “People of the Long House,” and many today insist on the term. To those who think we should have used it instead of “Iroquois” throughout this book, we should explain. The term Haudenosaunee has not been used much in print until recently, and its spelling is still variable. There are four centuries of references to the Iroquois. Our point in commemorating these Longhouse Folk is lost if our readers don’t know who we are talking about. We should talk about the structure that is the source of their name.
Big stone buildings were nonexistent in the Northeast before the whites came. Most Native North Americans lived in single-family structures like teepees or wigwams.
A characteristic feature of Iroquois life was the use of rectangular, multifamily dwellings called longhouses. Wood framed and walled with skins and bark, these longhouses surely developed in response to the cold winters of the Northeast. Some longhouses were 100 feet long, 25 feet high, and 20 feet wide.
Families lived in close quarters in the longhouse. A central aisle usually ran through them, and people slept on hammock-like bunks on each side. At the center of the longhouse was a fire pit. A hole in the roof above it let out the smoke and fumes. This fire was the center of cooking, warming, socializing, and teaching. An entrance was usually at each end.
Longhouses weren’t intended to be permanent. Most Iroquois communities picked up and moved to another site within their national territory about every seven years. They had to. Their subsistence crops of corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters—exhausted the soil after a few seasons, and the fields took years to recover. Structures like long-houses have been found among other societies of the Northeast, but they are separate from the concept of “the Longhouse” found among the Iroquois.
The Longhouse is more than a signature building; it is the symbol of Iroquois identity. The inclusive, sheltering, protective image is a figurative way of looking at Iroquois society. Its physical form is even the outline of Iroquois territory in New York state.
We doubt that UFOs were taking Iroquois elders on periodic sky rides, but somehow the Longhouse folk came up with a correct impression of the shape of their traditional lands. It’s a breadloaf across the New York map, a rough rectangle whose longest sides stretched from the Hudson to the Alleghenies. Lake Ontario and the Pennsylvania border formed the lines of its northern and southern walls. This geographical figure is remarkably close to the shape of the longhouse, and since the spots in the material longhouse had their traditional associations, the Confederacy’s five original nations were nicknamed by the position of their territories.
The Genesee Valley Seneca and the Mohawk Valley Mohawk were Keepers of the Western and Eastern doors, respectively. Since the usual position of the firekeeper, storyteller, and teacher was by the fire at the middle, “Firekeepers” was one of the nicknames of the Onondaga, who held the center of Iroquois territory. Between the end and the middle in the material longhouse were stationed the children whose duties were to tend the fire. On the landscape-longhouse, these were the positions of the west-central Cayuga and the east-central Oneida, called “the Younger Brothers.”
THE NATIONS
The Iroquois nations spoke closely related languages. They shared customs, lifestyles, religion, and a body of cultural tales, as well as attitudes about the supernatural, the focus of our book.
The Iroquois were adopting societies, bringing many non-Iroquois people—thus genetic and cultural diversity—into their villages. Before the Europeans came, these would have been Native Americans of all Northeastern nations. In historic times, many white and black Americans were taken in by the Iroquois, too.
