For most people living in what is now the northeastern United States, and southeastern Canada, the word “Iroquois” conjures a number of romantic images: large palisaded villages composed of longhouses; magnificent warriors fighting colonial armies; flourishing fields of corn, beans, and squash. The Iroquois are seen as a strongly matrilineal and matrilocal people, meaning they traced their descent through the women, and when a man married, he went to live in his wife’s village.
The truth, however, is that Iroquoian culture was a great deal more varied and interesting. It is only over the last one thousand five hundred years that the Iroquois have moved from being patrilineal hunter-gatherers to the grand matrilineal agricultural people that we know today.
This transition was not a quick one. The Iroquois are a classic case demonstrating that matrilineages can and do develop slowly over time.
Historical documents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries demonstrate that closely related groups of Iroquoian peoples often handled matters of descent, marriage, and divorce quite differently.
For example, in 1624, Father Gabriel Sagard reported that before an Iroquois couple could marry, the man had to seek the consent of both parents, and that a father had complained to him about the obstinacy of his daughter with regard to one young man. Sagard also said that in
the event of divorce, all children, except for unweaned infants, stayed with the father. (A patrilineal trait.)
In 1724, Father Joseph François Lafitau wrote that while men were only allowed one wife, Seneca women took more than one husband. He also said that after divorce husbands claimed to have the right to the male children, and often came great distances to try to take them, but that women had the final say as to whether to let the children go or to keep them. (Apparently a time of transition between the old patrilineal system and an evolving matrilineal one.)
By 1851, Lewis Henry Morgan, in his book League of the Iroquois, reported that marriage was under maternal control, and that the Iroquois rejected all claims made by a father with regard to his children, either “to the custody of their persons or to their nurture.” (A matrilineal trait.) In fact, anthropologists use this classic “Iroquoian” kinship system as a model for evaluating other cultures.
We can see the roots of these changes in prehistory. People of the Masks is set at approximately A.D. 1000. This is a pivotal and very complex period of northeastern prehistory. We will be focusing on three different cultural traditions: the Princess Point (A.D. 500–1000) and Glen Meyer (A.D. 900–1250) traditions, in southern Ontario, and the Carpenter Brook phase of the Owasco tradition in New York State (A.D. 1000–1100).
House styles at this time show a great deal of variety, ranging from circular lodges, roughly fifteen feet across, to early forms of longhouses.
This period may mark the beginnings of the first matrilineages, for pottery styles are fairly homogeneous. When pottery styles stay the same for an extended time, the fact suggests that this knowledge is being passed from grandmother to granddaughter, and on down the line. A woman’s female descendants, then, are not leaving after
marriage, but seem to be staying in the village where they were born. These people are, therefore, probably matrilocal, and matrilocal peoples are almost always matrilineal.
Distinctive pottery styles may also survive in the long term because of internecine warfare, which isolates villages from one another.
This is certainly a time of expanding populations. Villages are becoming larger and more compact. Between A.D. 900 and 1000 the first palisades were constructed. When people start building walls around their villages, archaeologists ask: “Are they trying to keep something in, or something out?”
We know that historically many peoples built earthen walls or palisades to define the boundaries of holy ground, as in People of the Lakes—in such cases, then, the walls keep something in; they preserve sacred space. More often, however, palisades were erected to keep something out. Namely, enemy warriors.
Let’s look at what might have frightened them.
By A.D. 1000, Early Iroquoian peoples had been growing corn for at least four hundred years and maybe longer. They were in the middle of a warm, rainy climatic episode called the Neo-Atlantic. Whenever crops flourish, population generally follows. But these were not agricultural peoples, they did not plant vast fields and live year-round in one village. They were horticulturalists. That is, they planted small fields, and some villagers may have stayed behind to watch them through the growing season, but other members of the village were undoubtedly out hunting, fishing, and collecting wild foods to supplement the cultigens.
Northeastern North America is a rich environment. We know the Early Iroquoian peoples hunted deer, raccoon, black bear, red fox, skunk, woodchuck, rabbits, muskrat,
beaver, squirrel, chipmunk, passenger pigeons, ducks, shorebirds, bald eagles, geese, snakes, turtles, frogs, as well as fishing and collecting freshwater mollusks, to name a few of the species utilized. They also gathered blueberries, raspberries, sumac and strawberries, wild rice, elderberries, wild plums, wild grapes, marsh-elder seeds, goosefoot, sunflower seeds, lamb’s quarter, gourds, walnuts, hickory nuts, and acorns.
Despite the variety and abundance of these resources, as the population base increased, each of these cultures would have found themselves surrounded by people who also needed land for crops, as well as fishing, hunting, and gathering grounds. It must have created tension, but may also have spurred the establishment of some of the earliest alliances. On top of many Princess Point and Glen Meyer sites we see new house styles joining the old, and new types of pottery being used alongside the traditional pottery.
These early village mergers would set the stage for one of the most extraordinary alliances in history, the League of the Iroquois, established around A.D. 1450.
We will talk more about the League of the Iroquois in the afterword of this book. For now, suffice it to say that the foundations for our modern democratic world originated, not in Europe, but in the northeastern corner of North America.