IROQUOIS

any member of the Iroquois Confederacy or, more broadly, of the North American Indian tribes speaking a language of the Iroquoian familynotably the Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. The Iroquoian linguistic groups occupied a continuous territory around Lakes Ontario, Huron, and Erie, in present-day New York state and Pennsylvania (U.S.) and southern Ontario and Quebec (Canada). The Iroquois-speaking tribes were semisedentary, practiced agriculture, palisaded their villages in time of need, and dwelt in longhouses that lodged many families. Elm bark was used for sheathing these houses, for making such containers as dishes and barrels, and for building canoes. A village band of several hundred persons was the social and economic unit. Groups of men built houses, erected palisades, fished, hunted, traveled, traded, gamed, defended the village against attacks, and went on the warpath. Outside the towns, parties of women, each directed by a matron, worked fields of corn (maize), beans, and squash. After harvest, family deer-hunting parties ranged far into the forests to camp, returning home at midwinter. Spring runs of fish drew families to nearby streams and lake inlets. The longhouse family was the basic unit of Iroquois society. Households, or blood lineages, were projected into clans, clans into moieties (half tribes), moieties into tribes or nations, and nations into confederacies. Kinship and locality were the bases for political life. Each community had its council of adult males, who guided the village chief or chiefs. The Iroquois were fond of meetings, spending considerable time in council. Groupings for council were determined by locality, sex, age, and the specific question at hand; and each had its own protocol and devices for gaining consensus. An elaborate Iroquois cosmology was based on the myth of a woman who fell from the sky, and it featured deluge and earth-diver motifs. No other tribes showed such a preoccupation in their mythology with supernatural aggression and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism. This lore was relieved by occasional beautiful star myths and journeys to the otherworld. Their formal religion consisted of six agricultural festivals featuring long prayers of thanks. There were also rites for sanctioning political activity, such as treaty making. Much of this culture still survives. Warfare was ingrained in Iroquois society, and self-respect was dependent on achieving personal glory. War captives were often enslaved or adopted to replace dead kinsmen and made up much of the Iroquois population in the late 17th century.