Iroquois Political Systems

Iroquois Political Systems John Beatty

Before going further in a discussion about a possible interpretation and reconstruction of the structure and behavior of political system of the Iroquois, it is necessary to consider the problems of reconstruction.

To Whom (or What) Does Iroquois Refer?

The term Iroquois refers to too many entities, among these is the language family (sometimes referred to as "Iroquoian"). This language family now classed as a part of macro Siouan has both a Northern and Southern branch. The people who speak Iroquoian languages are also known collectively as the Iroquois, although the most famous member of Southern branch, Cherokee is generally not thought as one of the "Iroquois nations". This is in part because several of the Iroquoian speaking groups in the North, formed a league or confederacy known as the League of the Iroquois. The confederacy consisted initially (from West to East) of the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida and the Mohawk. Later they were joined by the Tuscarora. Aside from the Confederacy members, there were other Northern Iroquoian speaking peoples (some of whom had their own league like the Huron). The term Iroquois also refers then to the League as well as the language and the Iroquoian speakers in general as well.

Some Problems of Historical Reconstruction

Clearly one of the problems in dealing with political systems of societies whose early histories are documented only by others is that data are either insufficient or distorted by the people documenting the system as to make an actual analysis suspect. The Iroquois political system is plagued with such problems. Although some data seem clear enough, there are serious problems concerning other parts. Relying on the idea that a culture is a collection of institutions which somehow or other are integrated tend toward being an ex post facto event much as it is in historical linguistics.

In historical linguistics it is all well and good to point out that historically certain sounds changed ion certain environments – for example the letter "c" in early Latin was pronounced /k/ while in late Latin "c" before the front vowels "i" or "e" became /tš/ ( like "ch" in English "chain") as it did in Italian "cento". While it seems evident that the front vowels palatalized the /k/ to /tš/ it is not clear why it did it when it did it. Certainly not all /k/ sounds in all languages make such a change. English has a perfectly good /k/ in front of both /i/ and /e/ in words like "kin" and "Ken".

Similarly the arguments for a systemic integration fail in that the system may be integrated in many ways – and to a large degree, anthropology has not developed any terms to indicate kinds of integration except perhaps for Durkheim’s organic and mechanistic solidarity

In speaking with one of the Mohawks who was arguing against Indian marriages with non Indians, he said "The eagle doesn't marry the hawk". Aside from the obvious problem that eagles and hawks don't marry, it is, in fact, the case that they don't mate. Of course in the Iroquois kinship system with its clan structure the eagle does in fact marry the hawk – or at least the turtle marries the bear. That is people are required to marry outside of their animal named clans forcing in effect animals from one species to mate with those of another. The problems of metaphorical use become obvious here in that metaphors may be extended in several different directions at different times to stress specific points of interest at the moment.

Something About Iroquois Social Structure

The Iroquois social structure is, none-the- less integrated although the integration is no more predictable than when /k/ will become /tš/ in any given language.

First of all, the Iroquois have a clan system. A clan is typically defined as a unilineal exogamous descent group. This means the clan is inherited from one side of the family only (unilineal) and people must marry outside of the clan (exogamous) and that the clan is past down from generation to generation (descent) and persists beyond any member. The Iroquois are matrilineal which means that a child is placed in the same clan as the mother. One can argue that descent is therefore traced through the mother’s or through the men in the mother's clan. The number of clans varies from tribe to tribe, the Mohawks having the least (3 – wolf bear and turtle) while others have as many as nine. The interpretation seems to depend more on what the analyst is trying to prove more than anything for which there is any definitive proof .

There has been a tendency of late to confuse matrilineality with matriarchy which it most certainly is not. Lineality has to do with descent and –archy has to do with political power, which is in and of it itself is hard to define. There are have been some who have argued that political power has to do with the ability of a group to deal with outsiders, whereas others have felt this idea to be to restrictive and hold political power has to do with any decision making processes.

These are both distinct from the concept of locality which has to do with residence patterns and here too, the forms matri- and patri- can be prefixed yielding matrilocal and patrilocal just as happens with matrilineal/patrilineal and patriarchal/matriarchal.

So with all of this confusion what is known about the Iroquois system? It would appear that in terms of descent that the Iroquois are matrilineal and matrilocal. A person would be in the same clan as their mother and that their mother and father would be in different clans. In Mohawk (used here because of the low number of clans only three options would be open (although if one added gender there would be six possibilities)

A Turtle marries a Wolf A Turtle marries a Bear A Wolf marries a Bear.

Male Female

Turtle Bear Turtle Wolf

Bear Wolf Bear Turtle

Wolf Bear Wolf Turtle

The clan inheritance patters would be

I Turtle♂ = Bear♀ | Bear

II Turtle♂ = Wolf♀ | Wolf

III Bear♂ = Wolf♀ | Wolf

IV Bear♂ = Turtle♀ | Turtle

V Wolf♂ = Bear♀ | Bear

VI Wolf♂ = Turtle ♀ | Turtle

The Iroquois lived in longhouses, the husband moving into his wife's house. Hence a longhouse could be labeled as belonging to one of the three clans. In any longhouse one would find a husband and wife (from different clans), their unmarried children and their married daughters with their husbands

Consider then a "Wolf house" in which the senior married couple is Bear♂ and Wolf♀. (Members of the Wolf longhouse are in BOLD those who have moved out are not)

WOLF HOUSE TURTLE HOUSE

Bear♂=Wolf♀ Wolf♂=Turtle♀ ______|______|______| | | | Wolf♂ Wolf♀=Bear♂ Wolf♀=Turtle♂ Wolf♂ = Turtle♀ (members of Turtle longhouse) (Wolf♂ married Turtle♀)

In effect, any longhouse could have in it potentially members of all the clans, although one clan is likely to dominate. The political structure of the tribes is tied to the aforementioned confederacy known as the League of the Iroquois founded by two men – Deganawidah (Tekanawitah) and Hiawatha (as is usually the case these names are found in a variety of spellings). There is little if any evidence for what the political structure of the various members of the League was before the formation of the League. We will here concern ourselves only with the time period recorded by the earliest European observers when the League was already functioning

The political structure of the league was such that each member had a specific number of representatives or sachems. The Mohawks for example had nine: three were Wolf clan members, three came from the Turtle clan and three represented the Bear clan. We can not know what the political. The representatives were elected but it appears that suffrage was not universal, but in fact only clan mothers could vote. Clan mothers appear to be the women in the clan who had children. Obviously this would exclude girls (pre-pubescent females) as well as those women who did not have children and all males. Complicating matters though is that the women were only allowed to vote for men.

An additional aspect of the political structure deals with the notion that on occasion a child would be voted in as a chief and that a clan mother would serve as regent acting on the child's behalf until the child reached adult status. This raises several questions. The first deals with the possible restriction on the men who could serve as sachems. It seems hard to believe that there would not be a single adult male member of a clan and that the only possible candidate would be a child unless there were some restriction on which males could actually be elected. One possibility is that within the clan there were specific lineages from which the leaders could be drawn and that there existed the possibility that there were no adult males in one of those lineages at that time. This would seem possible if in fact warfare was endemic and many adult males in population had been killed. If a sufficient number came from a single "royal" lineage then the possibility that only a child would be available might make some sense. (The idea of a "royal" lineage might even account for some of the use of the term "princess" being used by European settlers at the time).

Further evidence for the limited royal families is found in the Peace Tree Chiefs - these were people who became politically powerful through warfare, not election. The later history of the Iroquois shows constant tension between Peace Tree Chiefs and the elected members of the council. Men often pushed for warfare so as to gain political status as Peace Tree Chiefs, since they were not in the "royal" families from which Sachems were actually drawn. Another question raised in the system is whether the sachem served for life or until deposed something which is reported again as a function of the women in the clan.

This leaves many unanswered questions: How often were children elected as sachems? Did sachems serve for life? How long had this system been in effect? What other aspects of the society might have supported the system? How was voting actually done?

One thing seems evident however and that is if men were elected to office by specific women in their clan (i.e. the clan mothers), then in all likelihood the men would not be living in the houses belonging to their clans. In a kind of reversal of residency requirement Iroquois sachems would in all likelihood be living in a place belonging to another clan, and hence would be representing people with whom he was not living. This is the reverse of the U.S. where the representative of the district must live within the district. In a sense, this would lead to a different kind of sensitivity to problems. The sachem would vote on matters in such a way to improve his clan's position but would also have to be sensitive on how such a decision would impact on the clan with whom he was living. This would make "pork barrel legislation" a bit difficult.

A further complication arises in that some information exists that after the women voted the name was presented to the council would could accept or reject the vote. This would imply that the stated method of how elections were carried out might be at variance with what actually happened. How much influence might a brother have on his sister's vote?

Although somewhat speculative, the Iroquois warfare at the time might indeed be responsible for a good deal of the development of the system. The Iroquois were known for their military skills and their ability to mount campaigns some distance away – in fact as far as Oklahoma. The Mohawks (sometimes regarded rather tactlessly as "the Iroquois goon squad") would have had to travel more than 1600 miles to whip a troublesome tribe into line.

Since warfare seems to have been a dominant theme in Iroquois culture and it has been pointed out that the pattern itself has survived. In traditional war parties, groups of men would travel great distances to do highly dangerous work, return home with the fruits of their battles and get to boast about their deeds. Current patterns have been held to be similar with high steel work substituting for warfare. Still groups of men travel down from the reservations hundreds of miles to engage in dangerous work and return home to give the rewards of their labor (in this case salary) to their families and to brag about heir work in high steel.

This would imply that a group of men traveling together in a warfare context for some time and over great distances in hostile terrains could have within the group several men who were potential sachems. Internal disagreements between potential contenders and voters could easily jeopardize the potential solidarity necessary for completing the military mission. In a sense, by having the women vote for men removes some of the reason for potential tension among members of war parties. This would in effect indicate why a growing involvement in warfare might have had an impact on the way political structures were handled among these peoples.

Such a pattern requires tight bonding between the men involved (certainly in warfare) where men's lives often depend on their abilities to trust one another. The process of "fraking" or killing one's own officers because of disagreement which occurred in Viet Nam can lead only to disastrous results. Anything which minimizes friction between the men and maximizes solidarity is preferable.

If two men are in competition for a chieftainship, that is difficult enough, but if all the men now have to vote to decide on one over the other, the situation becomes more perilous as open factionalism and rivalry begin to take place. Hence, one possible solution would be to remove the onus of voting from the men and give it to the women, who might well be influenced by their brothers and uncles in making the decision. Hence the role of women in voting in Iroquois may reflect more an attempt to control hostility between the men and enable them to maintain a strong show of solidarity.

This has, as one can imagine, become a crucial area for study for people interested in matriarchy, gender studies, feminism and the like. It has been argued that the system was in effect only shortly before the arrival of the Europeans and some of the more unusual aspects (women alone being able to vote) were the result of an intensive warfare situation precipitated by the French and English involvement in hostilities already existing between the Iroquoian speakers and the neighboring Algonkin tribes. (Similar questions have been raised about the Yanamamo of the Amazon and the impact of intensive warfare and population movement have had on them) This is just an indication of some of the problems of working with a system that is not well known from pre-contact times nor what changes may have occurred and the reasons for such changes. The Iroquois Indians of the Northeast Woodland cultures are one of the more dramatically matrilineal-matrilocal peoples ever described. The fact that women alone could vote has made many people think of them as matriarchal, although only men could be the actual chiefs.

The problem of chieftainship is a complex one in Iroquois. Although only women voted and only men were chiefs, there are some examples of Iroquois chiefs being children and women acting as regents. This tends to support some claim for some “matriarchal” focus.

In addition to being able to vote, the women also held the power to depose a chief. Chiefs could be removed from office (or dehorned) by having the women after several admonitions, remove the antler horns which marked the political position.

On the other hand, the Iroquois maintain that while the women voted, when their choice was made known to the council in general, the council either accepted or rejected the decision made by the women.

Iroquois social structure is matrilineal. A person is born into the clan of their mother (or mother's brother). Lines of decent in matrilineal societies are usually traced through the men on the mother's side rather than the men on the father's side of the family.

Each of the original five nations that formed the League of the Iroquois, the Seneca on the west, the Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawks (moving eastward) had a specific number of clans. Mohawks have three main clans, "bear", "turtle" and "wolf". Each of these three clans supplies three chiefs to the Mohawk council (which consisted of nine chiefs) and who also represented the Mohawks at the League with it's fifty "Sachems". These positions were all named after the original chiefs and anyone assuming the chieftainship of a clan took on the specific name of his predecessor.

Clan mothers, that is women in the clan who had children, were eligible to vote, although it appears that only specific lineages were "royal". For this reason, occasionally small children were elected (presumably because no adult male could be found in that lineage). One suspects in some instances at least the number of people from whom the chief could come may have been rather small.

Two factors appear here as significant. One is the war oriented nature of the Iroquois. In fact, so restrained and pro-Indian a writer as Oliver LaFarge refers to the Iroquois as "Mothers and Torturers" in his Pictorial History of the American Indian. Mothers refers to the strong matri- component in the culture and torture to the extreme degree of apparent violence done to prisoners1.

Warfare seems to have been a dominant theme in Iroquois culture and it has been pointed out that the pattern itself has survived. In traditional war parties, groups of men would travel great distances to do highly dangerous work, return home with the fruits of their battles and get to boast about their deeds. Current patterns have been held to be similar with high steel work substituting for warfare. Still groups of men travel down from the reservations hundreds of miles to engage in dangerous work and return home to give the rewards of their labor (in this case salary) to their families and to brag about heir work in high steel.

Here is the crux of the system in terms of chiefs sympathies being split. In most American (and perhaps other electoral systems), candidates must live in the area they represent. In Iroquois exactly the reverse occurs.

A typical residence was a long house in which there lived a husband, a wife and their unmarried children, married daughters and their husbands. Since Iroquois clans (like all others) require marriage outside the clan (exogamy), it follows that the women of the clan would be voting for a man who lived elsewhere. Men lived in their wives houses, or the houses of their wives parents.

Let us suppose that in a particular long house the father is a member of the bear clan and the mother a member of the wolf clan. All the children of this couple are wolves (taking their clan membership in a matrilineal descent group from the mother's side of the family). When one of the sons is old enough he marries - and must per force marry someone from outside the wolves (i.e. a bear or turtle woman). At that point he goes and lives with her and her family. When the wolf clan mothers vote, they elect a man who is not living with the wolves but with the bear or turtles. Thus the result is that the elected chief must be doubly sympathetic - once to the clan he belongs to and which elected him, and once to the clan in whose house he is living. In so far as any decision he make is likely to effect the entire tribe, both clans would have to be mollified in any decision.

In this way men might be able to influence votes in two clans - both through sisters and wives and thereby effect the outcome of 6 different elections (3 of his own clan chiefs and 3 of his wife's) rather than simply the three of his own.

1 An interesting comparison might be made between Chagnon's description of the highly aggressive Yanamamo with their wife beating and the Iroquois with their high regard for women.