Iroquois Erotic

The Iroquois are better understood as a confederacy than a single people. Six nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and the Tuscarora who joined later in the early eighteenth century — bind themselves together under the Great Law of Peace, an oral constitution that predates the United States by some centuries and is widely credited with influencing the men who drafted that later one. They call themselves Haudenosaunee, "people of the longhouse," after both the bark-and-pole dwellings that once sheltered extended matrilineal families and the geographic metaphor of the confederacy itself: a long house stretching across what is now upstate New York, with the Mohawk keeping the eastern door and the Seneca the western.

The Iroquoian languages are a small family unto themselves, unrelated to the Algonquian tongues spoken by most of their neighbors — a linguistic island that mirrors a long-running political distinctiveness. Cherokee, far to the south, is a distant cousin. Within the confederacy, Mohawk and Oneida are close enough that speakers can muddle through; Onondaga sits at the center, both linguistically and ceremonially, since the Onondaga nation hosts the council fire and keeps the wampum belts that record confederacy history.

Clan membership and political standing pass through the mother. Chiefs are men, but they are nominated and, when necessary, removed by the clan mothers, and the title sits with the clan rather than the individual. This arrangement startled European observers from first contact onward and has been remarkably persistent through centuries of pressure to flatten it. The Longhouse Religion, codified in the early 1800s through the visions of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, folded older ceremonial cycles — the Midwinter, Strawberry, and Green Corn ceremonies among them — into a reform movement that addressed alcohol, family breakdown, and dispossession after the Revolutionary War devastated Iroquois country. It remains the practiced faith of a substantial minority, alongside various Christian denominations.

The American Revolution split the confederacy: most nations sided with the British, the Oneida and much of the Tuscarora with the rebels, and the council fire at Onondaga was ritually covered for the first time in memory. Today the Haudenosaunee are spread across reservations and reserves in New York, Ontario, Quebec, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, issue their own passports, and field a national lacrosse team that competes internationally — lacrosse being their game first, before it was anyone else's.