While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Atotarho, who by tradition was an
Onondaga, is the great embodiment of the Iroquois
courage, wisdom and heroism, and he is invested with allegoric
traits which exalt him to a kind of superhuman character.
Unequalled in war and arts his fame spread abroad, and exalted
the Onondaga nation in the highest scale. He was placed at the
head of the confederacy, and his name was used after his death
as an exemplar of glory and honor. While like that of Caesar, it
became perpetuated as the official title of the presiding Sachem
of the confederacy. He was a man of energy and renown. And such
was the estimation in which he was held in his life time, and
the popular veneration for his character after death, that, as
above denoted, his name became the distinctive title for the
office, and is not yet extinct, although the tribes have no
longer war to prosecute or foreign ambassadors to reply to.
At the establishment of the
confederacy, fifty sachems were founded and a name assigned to
each, by which they are still known, and these names are kept as
hereditary from the beginning to the present time. There were
also fifty sub-sachems, or war chiefs that is, to every sachem
was given a war chief, to stand behind him to do his biddings.
These sachem ships were, and are still confined to the five
nations; the Tuscarora were admitted into the confederacy
without enlarging the framework of the league, by allowing them
their own sachems and sub-sachems, or war chiefs, as they
inherited from their original nation of North Carolina.
But how, it may be asked, is a government so purely
popular and so simple and essentially advisory in its character,
to be reconciled with the laws of hereditary descent, fixed by
the establishment of heraldic devices and bringing its
proportion of weak and incompetent minds into office, and with
the actual power it exercised and the fame it acquired. To
answer this question, and to show how the aristocratic and
democratic principles were made to harmonize in the Iroquois
government, it will be necessary to go back and examine the laws
of descent among the tribes, together with the curious and
intricate principles of the clans or tribal bond.
Nothing is more fully under the cognizance of observers
of the manners and customs of the Indians, than the fact of the
entire nation or tribe being separated into distinct clans, each
of them distinguished by the name and device of some quadruped,
bird, or other object in the animal kingdom. This device is
called by the
Tuscarora Or-reak-sa (clan).
The Iroquois have turned it to account by assuming it as the
very basis of their political and tribal bond.
A government wholly verbal must be conceded to have
required this proximity and nearness of access. The original
five nations of the Iroquois were, theoretically, separated into
eight clans or original families of kindreds, who are
distinguished respectively by the clans of the wolf, bear,
turtle, deer, beaver, falcon, crane and the plover. I find that
there is a little difference in the clans of the Tuscarora,
which are the bear, wolf, turtle, beaver, deer, eel and snipe.
It is contrary to the usage of the Indians that near kindred
should intermarry, and the ancient rule interdicts all
intermarriage between persons of the same clan. They must marry
into a clan which is different from their own. A Bear or Wolf
male cannot marry a Bear or Wolf female. By this custom the
purity of blood is preserved, while the ties of relationship
between the clans themselves is strengthened or enlarged.
The line of descent is limited exclusively in the
female's children. Owing to this arrangement, a chieftain's son
cannot succeed him in office, but in case of his death, the
right of descent being in his mother, he would be succeeded, not
by one of his male children, but by his brother; or failing in
this then by the son of his sister, or by some direct, however
remote, descendent of a maternal line.
It will be noticed that the children are not of the
same clan as their father, but are the same as their mother.
Thus, he might be succeeded by his own grandson, by the son
marrying in his father's clan, and not by his daughter. It is in
this way that the chieftainship is continually kept in a family
dynasties in the female line.
While the law of descent is fully recognized, the free
will of the female to choose a husband from any of the clans,
excluding only her own, is made to govern and determine the
distribution of political power, and to fix the political
character of the tribe. Another peculiarity may be here stated.
In choosing a candidate to fill a vacancy of the chieftainship,
made either by death or misconduct, the power is lodged in the
older women of the clan to choose the candidate, and then to be
submitted for the recognition of the chiefs and sachems in
council, for the whole nation. If approved, a day is appointed
for the recognition also of the Six Nations, and he is formally
installed into office. Incapacity is always, however, without
exception, recognized as a valid objection to the approval of
the council.
This site
includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These
items are presented as part of the historical record and should not be
interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes
implied .
Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations and History of the Tuscarora Indians
