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!
Iroquoian Family. A linguistic stock
consisting of the following tribes and tribal groups: the Hurons composed
of the Attiguaouantan (Bear people), the Attigneenongnahac (Cord people),
the Arendahronon (Rock people), the Tohontaenrat (Atahontaenrat or
Tohontaenrat, White-eared or Deer people),the Wenrohronon, the
Ataronchronon, and the Atonthrataronon (Otter people, an Algonquian
tribe); Tionontati or Tobacco people or nation; the Confederation
of the Attiwendaronk or Neutrals, composed of the Neutrals proper, the
Aondironon, the Ongniarahronon, and the Atiragenratka(Atiraguenrek); the
Conkhandeenrhonon;
the Iroquois confederation composed of the Mohawk, the Oneida, the
Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, with the Tuscarora after 1726; and
in later times the incorporated remnants of a number of alien tribes, such
as the Tutelo, the Saponi, the
Nanticoke, the Conoy, and
the Muskwaki or Foxes; the Conestoga or
Susquehanna of at least three tribes, of which one was the
Akhrakouaehronon or Atrakouaehronon; the
Erie or Cat nation of at least two
allied peoples; the Tuscarora confederation, composed of several leagued
tribes, the names of which are now unknown; Nottaway; the Meherrin; and
the Cherokee composed of at least
three divisions, the Elati, the Middle Cherokee, and the Atali; and the
Onnontioga consisting of the Iroquois-Catholic seceders on the St
Lawrence.
Each tribe was an independent political unit, except
those which formed leagues in which the constituent tribes, while enjoying
local self-government, acted jointly in common affairs. For this reason
there was no general name for themselves common to all the tribes. Jacques
Cartier, in 1534, met on the shore of Gaspé
basin people of the Iroquoian stock, whom in the following year he again
encountered in their house on the site of the city of Quebec, Canada. He
found both banks of the St Lawrence above Quebec, as far as the site of
Montreal, occupied by people of this family. He visited the villages
Hagonchenda, Hochelaga, Hochelayi, Stadacona, and Tutonaguy. This was the
first known habitat of an Iroquoian people. Champlain found these
territories entirely deserted 70 years later, and Lescarbot found people
roving over this area speaking an entirely different language from that
recorded by Cartier. He believed that this change of languages was due to
"a destruction of people," because, he writes, "some years ago the
Iroquois assembled themselves to the number of 8,000 men and destroyed all
their enemies, whom they surprised in their enclosures." The new language
which he recorded was Algonquian, spoken by bands that passed over this
region on warlike forays.
The early occupants of the St Lawrence were probably
the Arendahronon and Tohontaenrat, tribes of the Hurons. Their lands
bordered on those of the Iroquois, whose territory extended westward to
that of the Neutrals, neighbors of the Tionontati and western Huron tribes
to the north and the Erie to the south and west. The Conestoga occupied
the middle and lower basin of the Susquehanna, south of the Iroquois. The
north Iroquoian area, which Algonquian tribes surrounded on nearly every
side, therefore embraced nearly the entire valley of the St Lawrence, the
basins of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, the southeast shores of Lake Huron
and Georgian bay, all of the present New York state except the lower
Hudson valley, all of central Pennsylvania, and the shores of Chesapeake
bay in Maryland as far as Choptank and Patuxent rivers. In the south the
Cherokee area, surrounded by Algonquian tribes on the north, Siouan on the
east, and Muskhogean and Uchean tribes on the south and west, embraced the
valleys of the Tennessee and upper Savannah rivers. and the mountainous
parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Alabama. Separated from the Cherokee
by the territory of the eastern Siouan tribes was the area occupied by the
Tuscarora in east North Carolina and by the Meherrin and Nottoway north of
them in southeast Virginia.
The northern Iroquoian tribes, especially the Five
Nations so called, were second to no other Indian people North of Mexico
in political organization, statecraft, and military prowess. Their leaders
were astute diplomats, as the wily French and English statesmen with whom
they treated soon discovered. In war they practiced ferocious cruelty
toward their prisoners, burning even their unadopted women and infant
prisoners; but, far from being a race of rude and savage warriors, they
were a kindly and affectionate people, full of keen sympathy for kin and
friends in distress, kind and deferential to their women, exceedingly fond
of their children, anxiously striving for peace and good will among men,
and profoundly imbued with a just reverence for the constitution of their
commonwealth and for its founders. Their wars were waged primarily to
secure and perpetuate their political life and independence.
The fundamental principles of their confederation,
persistently maintained for centuries by force of arms and by compacts
with other peoples, were based primarily on blood relationship, arid they
shaped and directed their foreign and internal polity in consonance with
these principles. The underlying motive for the institution of the
Iroquois league was to secure universal peace and welfare (ne’'
skěñ'non') among men by
the recognition and enforcement of the forms of civil government (ne’'gā'i`hwiio)
through the direction and regulation of personal and public conduct and
thought in accordance with beneficent customs and council degrees; by the
stopping of bloodshed in the blood feud through the tender of the
prescribed price for the killing of a cotribesman; by abstaining from
eating human flesh; and, lastly, through the maintenance and necessary
exercise of power (ne" ga'shasdon"sa,'), not only military but also magic
power believed to be embodied in the forms of their ceremonial activities.
The tender by the homicide and his family for the murder or killing by
accident of a cotribesman was twenty strings of wampum, ten for the dead
person, and ten for the forfeited life of the homicide.
The religious activities of these tribes expressed
themselves in the worship of all environing elements and bodies and many
creatures of a teeming fancy, which, directly or remotely affecting their
welfare, were regarded as man-beings or anthropic personages endowed with
life, volition, and peculiar individual orenda, or magic power. In
the practice of this religion, ethics or morals, as such, far from having
a primary had only a secondary, if any, consideration. The status and
personal relations of the personages of their pantheon were fixed and
regulated by rules and customs similar to those in vogue in the social and
political organization of the people, and there was, therefore, among at
least the principal gods, a kinship system patterned on that of the people
themselves.
The mental superiority of the Hurons (q. v.) over their
Algonquian neighbors is frequently mentioned by the early French
missionaries. A remainder of the Tionontati, with a few refugee Hurons
among them, having fled to the region of the upper lakes, along with
certain Ottawa tribes, to escape the Iroquois invasion in 1649, maintained
among their fellow refugees a predominating influence. This was largely
because, like other Iroquoian tribes, they had been highly organized
socially and politically, and were therefore trained in definite
parliamentary customs and procedure. The fact that, although but a small
tribe, the Hurons claimed and exercised the right of lighting the council
fire at all general gatherings, shows the esteem in which they were held
by their neighbors. The Cherokee were the first tribe to adopt a
constitutional form of government, embodied in a code of laws written in
their own language in an alphabet based on the Roman characters adapted by
one of them (see Sequoya),
though in weighing these facts their large infusion of white blood must he
considered.
The social organization of the Iroquoian tribes was in
some respects similar to that of some other Indians, but it was much more
complex and cohesive, and there was a notable difference in regard to the
important position accorded the women. Among the Cherokee, the Iroquois,
the Hurons, and probably among the other tribes, the women performed
important and essential functions in their government. Every chief was
chosen and retained his position, and every important measure was enacted
by the consent and cooperation of the child-bearing women, and the
candidate for a chiefship was nominated by the suffrages of the matrons of
this group. His selection by them from among their sons had to be
confirmed by the tribal and the federal councils respectively, and finally
he was installed into office by federal officers. Lands and houses
belonged solely to the women.
All the Iroquoian tribes were sedentary and
agricultural, depending on the chase for only a small part of their
subsistence. The northern tribes were especially noted for their skill in
fortification and house building. Their so-called castles were solid log
structures, wish platforms running around the top on the inside, from
which stones and other missiles could be hurled down upon besiegers.
For the population of the tribes composing the
Iroquoian family see Iroquois, and the descriptions of the various
Iroquoian tribes.
