Well before the crowned heads of Europe turned their eyes and their dreams of empire toward North America, a great military power had emerged in the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York State. The Iroquois Confederacy, dubbed by whites the "League of the Iroquois bound together five Indian nations the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondaga the Cayugas, and the Senecas.
According to Iroquois legend, it was founded in the late 1500s by two leaders, Deganawidah and Hiawatha. This proud and potent league vied initially with neighboring Indians for territorial supremacy, then with the French English, and Dutch for control of the fur trade. Ultimately, infected by the white man's diseases, intoxicated by his whiskey, and intimidated by his muskets, the Iroquois struggled for their very survival as a people.
The building block of Iroquois society was the longhouse. This wooden structure deserved its descriptive name.
Only twenty-five feet in breadth, the longhouse stretched from eight to two hundred feet in length.
Each building contained three to five fire places, around which gathered two nuclear families consisting of parents and children. All families residing in the longhouse were related, their connections of blood running exclusively through the maternal line.
A single longhouse might shelter a woman's family and those of her mother, sisters, and daughters-with the oldest woman being the honored matriarch.
When a man married, he left his childhood hearth in the home of his mother to join the longhouse of his wife.
Men dominated in Iroquois society, but they owed their positions of prominence to their mothers' families.
As if sharing one great longhouse, the five nations joined in the Iroquois Confederacy but kept their own separate fires.
Although they celebrated together and shared a common policy toward outsiders, they remained essentially independent of one another.
On the eastern flank of the league, the Mohawks, known as the Keepers of the Eastern Fire, specialized as middlemen with European traders, whereas the outly ing Senecas, the Keepers of the Western Fire, became für suppliers.
After banding together to end generations of vio lent warfare among themselves, the Five Nations vanquished their rivals, the neighboring Hurons, Eries, and Petuns. Some other tribes, such as the Tuscaroras from the Carolina region, sought peaceful absorption into the Iroquois Confederacy.
The Iroquois further expanded their numbers by means of periodic "mourning wars," whose objective was the large-scale adoption of captives and refugees.
But the arrival of gun-toting Europeans threatened Iroquois supremacy and enmeshed the confederacy in a tangled web of diplomatic intrigues.
Throughout the seventeenth and 18th centuries, they allied alternately with the English against the French and vice versa, for a time successfully working this perpetual rivalry to their own advantage.
But when the American Revolution broke out, the confederacy could reach no consensus on which side to support.
Each tribe was left to decide Independently, most, though not all, sided with the British.
The ultimate British defeat left the confeder acy in tatters. Many Iroquois, especially the Mohawks, moved to new lands in British Canada; others were relegated to reservations in western New York
Reservation life proved unbearable for a proud people accustomed to domination over a vast territory.
Morale sank, brawling, feuding, and alcoholism became rampant. Out of this morass arose a prophet, an Iroquois called Handsome Lake. In 1799 angelic fig ures clothed in traditional Iroquois garb appeared to Handsome Lake in a vision and warned him that the moral decline of his people must end if they were to endure. He awoke from his vision to warn his tribes people to mend their ways.
His socially oriented gospel inspired many Iroquois to forsake alcohol, to affirm family values, and to revive old Iroquois customs. Handsome Lake died in 1815, but his teachings, in the form of the Longhouse religion, survive to this day.