Bureau of American Ethnology

Songs From the Iroquois Longhouse Bureau of American Ethnology

Fierce warriors and able statesmen, the Five Nations o£ the lroquois Confederacy were the acknowledged lords of the eastern woodlands of North America, Proud of their position, they loved singing only less than they exalted bravery and respected chiefship as attributes of superior men. Within the upper caste of ongwe'onwe, "men preeminently' they included only themselves: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes, less than 101000 souls who occupied a dozen villages along the trail leading across central New York from Schenectady to Rochester, When the Europeans arrived, the five tribes had banded themselves into a league of nations which they called "the completed longhouse,"' likening the member tribes to adjacent fireside families that lived as blood relatives beneath a single, extended roof. Their communal household had become a symbol for society. It was the woman who counted in Iroquois society. An old matron's house sheltered her children and her daughter's children, as well as those who had married in to form the joint household; but the children of the matron's sons belonged to the families of their wives' mothers. The matron and the earth were "mothers"; women and the cropsmaize, beans, and squashes-were sisters, and the women of the household formed a work party that labored at planting, hoeing, and harvesting and wood gathering under the supervision of the matron. Therefore, to woman belonged the land, the village, the house and its furniture. and all the fruits of her horticulture and gathering; even the venison which a man brought home was his wife's to distribute.