Iroquois Indians formed a group of tribes that once occupied upper New York State. From east to west, the tribes included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. Iroquois were brave and skillful warriors. They obtained firearms from the Dutch in the early 1600’s, and soon subdued all the Indians from the St Lawrence River to Tennessee and from Maine to Michigan. They controlled the fur trade in the territory and boat travel on the great lakes. They had an agricultural economy, based mainly on corn, with supplementary crops of pumpkins, beans, and tobacco and later of orchard fruits such as apples and peaches. They made fine pottery, splint baskets, and mats of cornhusk and used wampum as a medium of exchange. Longhouse contained several long, bark covered compartments, and the central areas were used as social and political meeting places
The Iroquois called themselves the Ongwanohsioni. This name refers to their dwellings and means “we long house builders”. The Iroquois tribes became famous as the Five Nations, or Iroquois long house. The long house family was the basic unit of Iroquois society, household, or blood lineages, were protected 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’s males, who guided the village chief or chiefs. The Iroquois were fond of meetings spending considerable time in council. The federation was the most efficient North American Indian organization. The federation was formed by the early 1600’s. About 1722, the Tuscarora Indians joined the Iroquois league, which then became known as the Six Nations. The confederation of states that became the United States of America may have been patterned after the league.
Grouping for council was determined by locality, sex, age, and the specific question at hand. Each had its own protocol and devices for gaining consensus. An elaborate Iroquois cosmology was based on the Myths of a woman who fell from the sky, and featured deluged and earth diver motifs. No other tribes showed such a concern in their mythology with supernatural attack and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism. This wisdom was relieved by rare beautiful star myths and journeys to the other world. 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.
Women played an important part in Iroquois life. They nominated members of the trial council and removed them from office if they misbehaved. Each tribe sent a given number of its leaders to the great federation council. The language of the Iroquois belonged to a large language family, the Iroquoian.
In relations with white settlers, the Iroquois from the start played the role of an independence power.
During the colonial period they held the balance of power between the French and English. The last of the conflicts between Britain and France for control of North America was the French and Indian War. Each country fought for control of the continent with assistance of Native Americans and colonial allies. It began in the struggle for control of the Ohio Valley and previous confrontations, which were earlier wars were consider being mainly battles between small regular units of the Europeans powered by help from local militiamen.
The French and Indian war was part of “a great war for empire” , a determine and eventually successful attempt by the British to attain a dominant position in North America, the west Indies , and the subcontinent of India. Although the French and Indian War began in America, it expand into Europe as the Seven Years War. The French and Indian War last to (1756-1763). The war not only stripped France of its North American Empire, it also caused Britain to change its relationship to its colonies, a change that eventually led to the American Revolution.
Some historians say that if the French had been able to make allies of the Iroquois, they might have won the French and Indian War, and the United States might have become French. But the Iroquois, under such leaders as Mohawk Indian Thayendangea, also known as Joseph Brant, sided with the British, he eventually made secretary to the British Superintendent of Indian affairs in 1774. Later, however the league broke up over the question of whether to join the British or the Americans during the Revolutionary War in America during (1775-1783) .
All of the Indians tribes except the Oneida and Tuscarora took the British side. In 1779, general john Sullivan, under George Washington’s took orders on revenge on the Indians by destroying their villages.
According to the 1990 U.S. census, about 49,000 people belong to the Iroquois tribes. The present headquarters of the Iroquois confederacy are at Onondaga Reservation, South of Syracuse N.Y. This reservation contains the council houses, the home of the chief, and the grave of Handsome Lake, a Seneca prophet.
