A historically powerful and important northeast Native American people who formed the Iroquois Confederacy and today make up the Six Nations. Many prominent individuals are Iroquois or have Iroquois ancestry. A melting pot culture, vibrant today in language, culture, and independent governance. In 2010, more than 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people lived in Canada, and about 80,000 in the United States.
==Iroquois League==
The original Iroquois League, based in present-day upstate New York, was also known as the Five Nations, as it was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations. The Five Nations are believed to have emerged as distinct tribes by the 15th century or earlier. Each nation had a distinct territory and function within the League. Iroquois influence extended into Canada, westward into the Great Lakes and down both sides of the Allegheny mountains into Virginia and Kentucky. To reduce conflict, these people came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, which in their language was known as the League of Peace and Power.
The League is embodied in the Grand Council, an assembly of fifty hereditary sachems.
The Iroquois and most Iroquoian peoples have a matrilineal kinship system; descent and inheritance pass through the maternal lines, and children are considered born into their mother’s clan. Their clan mothers, or main women of the leagues, have considerable political power, helping determine chiefs within a warrior culture. The nations often took captives in warfare, adopting young survivors. Their adoptees included European captives as well as Native Americans; they were adopted by women into specific clans within each nation. Scholars suggest this practice helped the nations’ retain their power in decades of high mortality due to infectious disease and warfare.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, the Haudenosaunee were based in what is now the northeastern United States, primarily in what is referred to today as upstate New York west of the Hudson River and through the Finger Lakes region.
French, Dutch and British colonists in both Canada and the Thirteen Colonies recognized a need to gain favor with the Iroquois people who occupied a significant portion of lands west of colonial settlements. Thus, for nearly 200 years the Iroquois were a powerful factor in North American colonial policy-making decisions. Alignment with Iroquois offered political and strategic advantages. Simultaneously, the Iroquois were universally feared by colonial settlers. The Iroquois remained a politically unique, undivided, large Native American polity up until the American Revolution.
The Iroquois League has also been known as the Iroquois Confederacy. Modern scholars distinguish between the League and the Confederacy. According to this interpretation, the Iroquois League refers to the ceremonial and cultural institution embodied in the Grand Council, while the Iroquois Confederacy is the decentralized political and diplomatic entity that emerged in response to European colonization. The League still exists. The Confederacy dissolved after the defeat of the British and allied Iroquois nations in the American Revolutionary War. After the defeat of the British and their Iroquois allies in the American Revolutionary War, most migrated to Canada.
Other Iroquoian-speaking peoples had lived at various times along the St. Lawrence River, around the Great Lakes, and in the American Southeast, but they were not part of the Haudenosaunee. Some competed and warred with the Haudenosaunee. After extended colonial warfare against the Tuscarora an Iroquoian people in North Carolina, survivors migrated north in the early 18th century to join the Iroquois in New York. They were accepted as the Sixth Nation in the Iroquois League. Remnants of other, now extinct tribes, are known to have been absorbed over time into the Iroquois.
==History==
===Formation of the League===
The Iroquois League was established prior to major European contact. Most archaeologists and anthropologists believe that the League was formed sometime between about 1450 and 1600. A few claims have been made for an earlier date (See note 1). One recent study argues that the League formed shortly after a solar eclipse on August 31, 1142, an occurrence apparently related to oral tradition about the League’s origins. Anthropologist Dean Snow argues that the archaeological evidence does not support a date earlier than 1450, and that recent claims for a much earlier date “may be for contemporary political purposes”.
According to tradition, the League was formed through the efforts of two men, Dekanawida, sometimes known as the Great Peacemaker, and Hiawatha . They brought a message, known as the Great Law of Peace, to the squabbling Iroquoian nations, who were fighting, raiding and feuding with one another as often as they fought other tribes. The nations who joined the League were the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca.
Once they ceased most of their infighting, the political cohesion of the Iroquois rapidly became one of the strongest forces in 17th- and 18th-century northeastern North America. The editors of American Heritage magazine suggest the tribal spokesmen were politically sophisticated, and as manipulative as many a modern politician arguing in “The AMERICAN HERITAGE Book of INDIANS” (1961) that the five tribes rarely agreed on any one issue, and while externally cohesive, traded on their reputation to play the French, Swedish, Dutch and finally the British off against one another and to the detriment of less cohesive tribes, such as the Susquehannock or Lenape.
According to legend, an evil Onondaga chieftain named Tadodaho was the last converted to the ways of peace by The Great Peacemaker and Hiawatha. He became the spiritual leader of the Haudenosaunee. This is said to have occurred at Onondaga Lake near present-day Syracuse, New York. The title Tadodaho is still used for the league’s spiritual leader, the fiftieth chief, who sits with the Onondaga in council. He is the only one of the fifty to have been chosen by the entire Haudenosaunee people. The current Tadodaho is Sid Hill of the Onondaga Nation.
After becoming united in the League, the Iroquois invaded the Ohio River Valley in present-day Kentucky to seek additional hunting grounds. According to one theory of pre-contact history, the Haudenosaunee by about 1200 pushed Siouan-speaking tribes of the Ohio River valley, such as the Quapaw (Akansea) and Ofo (Mosopelea), out of the region; they migrated and settled west of the Mississippi River. The explorer Robert La Salle in the 17th century identified the Mosopelea as among the Ohio Valley peoples defeated by the Iroquois in the early 1670s, during the Beaver Wars.
By 1673, the Siouan-speaking groups had settled in the Midwest, establishing what became known as their historical territories. Just as the Siouan peoples were displaced by the Iroquois, they displaced less powerful tribes whom they encountered west of the Mississippi, such as the Osage, who moved further west.
===Expansion===
In Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, historian Diana Muir argues that the pre-contact Iroquois were an imperialist, expansionist culture whose cultivation of the corn/beans/squash agricultural complex enabled them to support a large population. They made war primarily against neighboring Algonquian peoples. Muir uses archaeological data to argue that the Iroquois expansion onto Algonquian lands was checked by the Algonquian adoption of agriculture. This enabled them to support their own populations large enough to have sufficient warriors to defend against the threat of Iroquois conquest.{page needed|date=September 2013}
The Iroquois may be the Kwedech described in the oral legends of the Mi’kmaq nation of Eastern Canada. These legends relate that the Mi’kmaq in the late pre-contact period had gradually driven their enemies – the Kwedech – westward across New Brunswick, and finally out of the Lower St. Lawrence River region. The Mi’kmaq named the last-conquered land Gespedeg or “last land,” from which the French derived Gaspé. The “Kwedech” are generally considered to have been Iroquois, specifically the Mohawk; their expulsion from Gaspé by the Mi’kmaq has been estimated as occurring c. 1535–1600.{page needed|date=September 2013}
Around 1535, Jacques Cartier reported Iroquoian-speaking groups on the Gaspé peninsula and along the St. Lawrence River. Archeologists and anthropologists have defined the St. Lawrence Iroquoians as a distinct and separate group (and possibly several discrete groups), living in the villages of Hochelaga and others nearby (near present-day Montreal), which had been visited by Cartier. By 1608, when Samuel de Champlain visited the area, that part of the St. Lawrence River valley had no settlements, but was controlled by the Mohawk as a hunting ground. On the Gaspé peninsula, Champlain encountered Algonquian-speaking groups. The precise identity of any of these groups is still debated.
The Iroquois became well known in the southern colonies in the 17th century. by this time. After the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia (1607), numerous 17th-century accounts describe a powerful people known to the Powhatan Confederacy as the Massawomeck, and to the French as the Antouhonoron. They were said to come from the north, beyond the Susquehannock territory. Historians have often identified the Massawomeck / Antouhonoron as the Haudenosaunee. Other Iroquoian-language tribes included the Erie, who were destroyed by the Iroquois in 1654 over competition for the fur trade.{page needed|date=September 2013}
Between 1665 and 1670, the Iroquois established seven villages on the northern shores of Lake Ontario in present-day Ontario, collectively known as the “Iroquois du Nord” villages. The villages were all abandoned by 1701.{sfnp|Jordan|2013|p=37}
Over the years 1670–1710, the Five Nations achieved political dominance of much of Virginia west of the fall line and extending to the Ohio River valley in present-day West Virginia. As a result of the Beaver Wars, they pushed Siouan-speaking tribes out of the Ohio Valley and reserved the territory as a hunting ground by right of conquest. They continued to claim it until 1722, when they began selling land in the area to British allies.{Citation needed|date=July 2010}
[[File:Early Localization Native Americans NY.svg|thumb|Map of the New York tribes before European arrival:{Legend|#f2d0ff|Iroquoian tribes}
===Beaver Wars===
Beginning in 1609, the League engaged in a decades-long series of wars, the so-called Beaver Wars, against the French, their Huron allies, and other neighboring tribes, including the Petun, Erie, and Susquehannock. Trying to control access to game for the lucrative fur trade, they put great pressure on the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast (the Lenape or Delaware), the Anishinaabe peoples of the boreal Canadian Shield region, and not infrequently fought the English colonies as well. During the Beaver Wars, they were said to have defeated and assimilated the Huron (1649), Petun (1650) the Neutral Nation (1651), Erie Tribe (1657), and Susquehannock (1680). The traditional view is that these wars were a way to control the lucrative fur trade in order to access European goods on which they had become dependent.{page needed|date=September 2013}{page needed|date=September 2013}
Recent scholarship has elaborated on this view, arguing that the Beaver Wars were an escalation of the “Mourning Wars,” which were an integral part of Iroquois culture. This view suggests that the Iroquois launched large-scale attacks against neighboring tribes in order to avenge or replace the massive number of deaths resulting from battles or smallpox epidemics.
In 1628, the Mohawk defeated the Mahican to gain a monopoly in the fur trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange, New Netherland. The Mohawk would not allow Canadian native peoples to trade with the Dutch. In 1645, a tentative peace was forged between the Iroquois and the Huron, Algonquin, and French.
In 1646, Jesuit missionaries at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons went as envoys to the Mohawk lands to protect the fragile peace of the time. Mohawk attitudes toward the peace soured while the Jesuits were traveling, and their warriors attacked the party en route. The missionaries were taken to the village of Ossernenon (near present-day Auriesville, New York), where the moderate Turtle and Wolf clans recommended setting the priests free.
Angered, members of the Bear clan killed Jean de Lalande and Isaac Jogues on October 18, 1646. The Catholic Church has commemorated the two French priests as among the eight North American Martyrs. In 1649 during the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois used recently purchased Dutch guns to attack the Huron, who were allied with the French. These attacks, primarily against the Huron towns of Taenhatentaron (St. Ignace) and St. Louis in Michigan, were the final battles that effectively destroyed the Huron Confederacy. From 1651 to 1652, the Iroquois attacked the Susquehannocks, located to the south in present-day Pennsylvania, without sustained success.
In the early 17th century, the Iroquois Confederacy was at the height of its power, with a total population of about 12,000 people. In 1653 the Onondaga Nation extended a peace invitation to New France. An expedition of Jesuits, led by Simon Le Moyne, established Sainte Marie de Ganentaa in 1656 in their territory. The Jesuits were forced to abandon the mission by 1658 as hostilities resumed, possibly because of the sudden death of 500 native people from an epidemic of smallpox, a European infectious disease to which they had no immunity.
From 1658 to 1663, the Iroquois were at war with the Susquehannock and their Lenape and Province of Maryland allies. In 1663, a large Iroquois invasion force was defeated at the Susquehannock main fort. In 1663, the Iroquois were at war with the Sokoki tribe of the upper Connecticut River. Smallpox struck again; and through the effects of disease, famine and war, the Iroquois were threatened by extermination. In 1664, an Oneida party struck at allies of the Susquehannock on Chesapeake Bay.
In 1665, three of the Five Nations made peace with the French. The following year, the Canadian Governor sent the Carignan regiment under Marquis de Tracy to confront the Mohawk and the Oneida. The Mohawk avoided battle, but the French burned their villages and crops. In 1667, the remaining two Iroquois Nations signed a peace treaty with the French and agreed to allow their missionaries to visit their villages. This treaty lasted for 17 years.
==== 1670–1701 ====
Around 1670, the Iroquois drove the Siouan-speaking Mannahoac tribe out of the northern Virginia Piedmont region. They began to claim ownership of the territory by right of conquest. In 1672, the Iroquois were defeated by a war party of Susquehannock. The Iroquois appealed to the French for support and asked Governor Frontenac to assist them against the Susquehannock.
Some{Which|date=July 2012} old histories state that the Iroquois defeated the Susquehannock during this time period. As no record of a defeat has been found, historians have concluded that no defeat occurred. In 1677, the Iroquois adopted the majority of the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock into their nation.
By 1677, the Iroquois formed an alliance with the English through an agreement known as the Covenant Chain. Together they battled to a standstill the French, who were allied with the Huron. These Iroquoian people had been a traditional and historic foe of the Confederacy. The Iroquois colonized the northern shore of Lake Ontario and sent raiding parties westward all the way to Illinois Country. The tribes of Illinois were eventually defeated, not by the Iroquois, but by the Potawatomis.
In 1679, the Susquehannock, with Iroquois help, attacked Maryland’s Piscataway and Mattawoman allies. Peace was not reached until 1685.
In 1684, the Iroquois invaded Virginia and Illinois territory again and unsuccessfully attacked French outposts in the latter. Trying to reduce warfare in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, later that year the Virginia Colony agreed in a conference at Albany to recognize the Iroquois’ right to use the North-South path, known as the Great Warpath, running east of the Blue Ridge, provided they did not intrude on the English settlements east of the fall line.
In 1687, Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, Marquis de Denonville, Governor of New France from 1685 to 1689, set out for Fort Frontenac with a well-organized force. They met with 50 hereditary sachems from the Onondaga council fire, who came under a flag of truce. Denonville recaptured the fort for New France and seized, chained, and shipped the 50 Iroquois chiefs to Marseilles, France, to be used as galley slaves.
He ravaged the land of the Seneca, landing a French armada at Irondequoit Bay, striking straight into the seat of Seneca power, and destroying many of its villages. Fleeing before the attack, the Seneca moved further west, east and south down the Susquehanna River. Although great damage was done to the Seneca home land, the Seneca’s military might was not appreciably weakened. The Confederacy and the Seneca developed an alliance with the English who were settling in the east. The destruction of the Seneca land infuriated the members of the Iroquois Confederacy. On August 4, 1689, they retaliated by burning to the ground Lachine, a small town adjacent to Montreal. Fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors had been harassing Montreal defenses for many months prior to that.
They finally exhausted and defeated Denonville and his forces. His tenure was followed by the return of Frontenac, who succeeded Denonville as Governor for the next nine years (1689–1698). Frontenac had been arranging a new plan of attack to lessen the effects of the Iroquois in North America. Realizing the danger of continuing to hold the sachems, he located the 13 surviving leaders of the 50 originally taken and returned with them to New France in October 1689.
In 1696 Frontenac decided to take the field against the Iroquois, although at this time he was seventy-six years of age. On July 6 he left Lachine at the head of a considerable force for the village of the Onondagas, where he arrived a month later. With support from the French, the Algonquian nations drove the Iroquois out of the territories north of Lake Erie and west of present-day Cleveland, Ohio, regions which they had conquered during the Beaver Wars. In the meantime the Iroquois had abandoned their villages, and as pursuit was impracticable the army commenced its return march on August 10. Under Frontenac’s leadership, the Canadian militia became increasingly adept at guerrilla warfare and took the war into Iroquois territory and attacked a number of English settlements. The result was that the Iroquois would never again be a peril to the French colony.{Cite EB1911}
During King William’s War (North American part of the War of the Grand Alliance), the Iroquois were allied with the English. In July 1701, they concluded the “Nanfan Treaty”, deeding the English a large tract north of the Ohio River. The Iroquois claimed to have conquered this territory 80 years earlier. France did not recognize the validity of the treaty, as it had some actual presence in the territory at that time and the English virtually none. Meanwhile, the Iroquois were negotiating peace with the French; together they signed the Great Peace of Montreal that same year.
===French and Indian Wars===
After the 1701 peace treaty with the French, the Iroquois remained mostly neutral. During Queen Anne’s War (North American part of the War of the Spanish Succession), they were involved in planned attacks against the French. Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, arranged for three Mohawk chiefs and a Mahican chief (known incorrectly as the Four Mohawk Kings) to travel to London in 1710 to meet with Queen Anne in an effort to seal an alliance with the British. Queen Anne was so impressed by her visitors that she commissioned their portraits by court painter John Verelst. The portraits are believed to be the earliest surviving oil portraits of Aboriginal peoples taken from life.
In the first quarter of the 18th century, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora fled north from the pressure of British colonization of North Carolina and inter-tribal warfare; they had been subject to having captives sold into Indian slavery. They petitioned to become the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. This was a non-voting position, but they gained the protection of the Haudenosaunee.
In 1721 and 1722, Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia concluded a new Treaty at Albany with the Iroquois, renewing the Covenant Chain and agreeing to recognize the Blue Ridge as the demarcation between Virginia Colony and the Iroquois. But, as European settlers began to move beyond the Blue Ridge and into the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730s, the Iroquois objected. Virginia officials told them that the demarcation was to prevent the Iroquois from trespassing east of the Blue Ridge, but it did not prevent English from expanding west. Tensions increased over the next decades, and the Iroquois were on the verge of going to war with the Virginia Colony. In 1743, Governor Gooch paid them the sum of 100 pounds sterling for any settled land in the Valley that was claimed by the Iroquois. The following year at the Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois sold Virginia all their remaining claims in the Shenandoah Valley for 200 pounds in gold.
During the French and Indian War (North American part of the Seven Years’ War), the Iroquois sided with the British against the French and their Algonquian allies, both traditional enemies of the Iroquois. The Iroquois hoped that aiding the British would also bring favors after the war. Few Iroquois warriors joined the campaign. In the Battle of Lake George, a group of Catholic Mohawk (from Kahnawake) and French ambushed a Mohawk-led British column.
After the war, to protect their alliance, the British government issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding white settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists largely ignored the order, and the British had insufficient soldiers to enforce it. The Iroquois agreed to adjust the line again at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), whereby they sold the British Crown all their remaining claim to the lands between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers.
===American Revolution===
During the American Revolution, the Iroquois first tried to stay neutral. Pressed to join one side or the other, the Tuscarora and the Oneida sided with the colonists, while the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga remained loyal to Great Britain, with whom they had stronger relationships. It was the first political split among the Six Nations. Joseph Louis Cook offered his services to the United States and received a Congressional commission as a Lieutenant Colonel- the highest rank held by any Native American during the war.
The Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant, other war chiefs, and British allies conducted numerous operations against frontier settlements in the Mohawk Valley, including the Cherry Valley massacre, destroying many villages and crops, killing and capturing inhabitants. The Continentals retaliated and in 1779, George Washington ordered the Sullivan Campaign, led by Col. Daniel Brodhead and General John Sullivan, against the Iroquois nations to “not merely overrun, but destroy,” the British-Indian alliance. They burned many Iroquois villages and stores throughout western New York; refugees moved north to Canada. By the end of the war, few houses and barns in the valley had survived the warfare.
=== Post-war ===
After the Revolutionary war, the ancient central fireplace of the League was reestablished at Buffalo Creek. Captain Joseph Brant and a group of Iroquois left New York to settle in the Province of Quebec (present-day Ontario). As a reward for their loyalty to the British Crown, they were given a large land grant on the Grand River, at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation. Brant’s crossing of the river gave the original name to the area: Brant’s ford. By 1847, European settlers began to settle nearby and named the village Brantford. The original Mohawk settlement was on the south edge of the present-day city at a location still favorable for launching and landing canoes. In the 1830s many additional Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, and Tuscarora relocated into the Indian Territory, the Province of Upper Canada and Wisconsin.
==Culture==
===Melting pot===
The Iroquois are a melting pot of other Native groups. League traditions allowed for the dead to be symbolically replaced through captives taken in “mourning wars,” the blood feuds and vendettas that were an essential aspect of Iroquois culture. As a way of expediting the mourning process, raids were conducted to take vengeance and seize captives. Captives were generally adopted directly by the grieving family to replace the member(s) who had been lost. This process not only allowed the Iroquois to maintain their own numbers, but also to disperse and assimilate their enemies. The adoption of conquered peoples, especially during the period of the Beaver Wars (1609-1701), meant that the Iroquois League was composed largely of naturalized members of other tribes. Cadwallader Colden wrote, “It has been a constant maxim with the Five Nations, to save children and young men of the people they conquer, to adopt them into their own Nation, and to educate them as their own children, without distinction; These young people soon forget their own country and nation and by this policy the Five Nations make up the losses which their nation suffers by the people they lose in war.” By 1668, two-thirds of the Oneida village were assimilated Algonquians and Hurons. At Onondaga there were Native Americans of seven different nations and among the Seneca eleven. They also adopted European captives, as did the Catholic Mohawk in settlements outside Montreal. This tradition of adoption and assimilation was common to native people of the northeast but was quite different from European settlers’ notions of combat.
===Food===
The Iroquois are a mix of horticulturalists, farmers, fishers, gatherers and hunters, though their main diet traditionally has come from farming. The main crops they cultivated are corn, beans and squash, which were called the three sisters and are considered special gifts from the Creator. These crops are grown strategically. The cornstalks grow, the bean plants climb the stalks, and the squash grow beneath, inhibiting weeds and keeping the soil moist under the shade of their broad leaves. In this combination, the soil remained fertile for several decades. The food was stored during the winter, and it lasted for two to three years. When the soil eventually lost its fertility, the Haudenosaunee migrated.
Gathering is the traditional job of the women and children. Wild roots, greens, berries and nuts were gathered in the summer. During spring, sap is tapped from the maple trees and boiled into maple syrup, and herbs are gathered for medicine.
The Iroquois hunt mostly deer but also other game such as wild turkey and migratory birds. Muskrat and beaver are hunted during the winter. Fishing has also been a significant source of food because the Iroquois are located near the St. Lawrence River. They fished salmon, trout, bass, perch and whitefish until the St. Lawrence became too polluted by industry. In the spring the Iroquois netted, and in the winter fishing holes were made in the ice.
===Traditional herbal medicine===
Plants traditionally used by the Iroquois include Agrimonia gryposepala, which was to treat diarrhea, and interrupted fern, used for blood and venereal diseases and conditions. Cone flower (Echinacea), an immune system booster and treatment for respiratory disease was also known and used.{Citation needed|date=July 2013|A Handbook of Native American Herbs (Healing Arts) = }
===Women in society===
The Iroquois are a Mother Clan system, which is gender equal. No person is entitled to ‘own’ land, but it is believed that the Creator appointed women as stewards of the land. Traditionally, the Clan Mothers appoint leaders, as they have raised children and are therefore held to a higher regard. By the same token, if a leader does not prove sound, becomes corrupt or does not listen to the people, the Clan Mothers have the power to strip him of his leadership.
When Americans and Canadians of European descent began to study Iroquois customs in the 18th and 19th centuries, they learned that the people had a matrilineal system: women held property and hereditary leadership passed through their lines. They held dwellings, horses and farmed land, and a woman’s property before marriage stayed in her possession without being mixed with that of her husband. They had separate roles but real power in the nations. The work of a woman’s hands was hers to do with as she saw fit. At marriage, a young couple lived in the longhouse of the wife’s family. A woman choosing to divorce a shiftless or otherwise unsatisfactory husband was able to ask him to leave the dwelling and take his possessions with him.
The children of the marriage belong to their mother’s clan and gain their social status through hers. Her brothers are important teachers and mentors to the children, especially introducing boys to men’s roles and societies. The clans are matrilineal, that is, clan ties are traced through the mother’s line. If a couple separated, the woman traditionally kept the children. The chief of a clan can be removed at any time by a council of the women elders of that clan. The chief’s sister was responsible for nominating his successor.
===Spiritual beliefs===
The Iroquois believe that the spirits change the seasons. Key festivals coincided with the major events of the agricultural calendar, including a harvest festival of thanksgiving. The Great Peacemaker (Deganawida) was their prophet. After the arrival of the Europeans, many Iroquois became Christians, among them Kateri Tekakwitha, a young woman of Mohawk-Algonquin parents. Traditional spirituality was revived to some extent in the second half of the 18th century by the teachings of the Haudenosaunee prophet Handsome Lake.
==People==
=== Name ===
As noted by Barbara Graymont in her 1972 work on the Iroquois, they referred to their League as Ganonsyoni, meaning “The Lodge Extended Lengthwise”, that is, a lodge that is “spread out far”. It referred to their lodges or longhouses, the traditional dwellings, and their total territory of the Five Nations.
Historians and anthropologists have estimated the Iroquois League was formed at dates ranging from 1450 to 1660. Iroquois tradition follows the earlier date, and they believe the League was formed by two men, both adopted into the Mohawk nation. Deganawida was a Huron adopted by the Mohawk. Hiawatha, his spokesman, was an Onondaga who was also adopted by the Mohawk.
The Iroquois call themselves the Haudenosaunee, which means “People of the Longhouse,” or more accurately, “They Are Building a Long House.” According to their tradition, The Great Peacemaker introduced the name at the time of the formation of the League. It implies that the nations of the League should live together as families in the same longhouse.
Traditionally, Kanien:kéhaka (Mohawk) are the guardians of the eastern door, as they are located in the east closest to the Hudson, and the Seneca are the guardians of the western door of the “tribal longhouse”, the territory they controlled in present-day New York. Onoñda’gega’ (Onondaga), whose homeland is in the center of Haudenosaunee territory, are keepers of the League’s (both literal and figurative) central flame.
The French colonists referred to the Haudenosaunee as Iroquois, derived from terms used by the Algonquian-speaking tribes they first encountered along the Atlantic Coast. The name has two possible origins, both deriving from Algonquian-speaking tribes, with whom the Haudenosaunee historically competed; they were enemies:
===Nations===
The first five nations listed below formed the original Five Nations (listed from east to west, as they were oriented to the sunrise); the Tuscarora became the sixth nation in 1720.
===Clans===
Within each of the six nations, people belonged to a number of matrilineal clans. The number of clans varies by nation,
Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois