The Iroquois Confederacy III. the Current Resurgence

NOT FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT WRITER'S CONSENT INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS W-I4 he Iroquois Confederacy III: The Current Resurgence Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona July, 1973 Mr. Richard H. Nolte Institute of Current World Affairs 3 Fifth Avenue Few York, New York I0017 Dear Mr. Nolte: Before European contact, the Iroquois men hunted and the women farmed. As the game disappeared the men grew idle. Christian missionaries had some success shaming the men into working the fields with their women, and by the end of the nineteenth century most Iroquois were farmers. In this century, the Iroquois have turned from farming to wage work to supFort themselves, although most families still living "on the res" have kitchen gardens. The children today go to local, in some cases all-Iroquois elementary schools, then on to white secondary schools. One in six goes on to higher educstion. In these terms, the New York Iroquois differ little from other low-income, rural Americans. Then what is still distinctively Iroquois about the Iroquois? Little boys walk back and forth across the topmost iron span of the old bridge across the St. Regis River on the Mohawk Reservation. Three of them were up there one day in late May when I drove down out of the Adirondacks and across the bridge. Nobody chases them down. The accpeted anthropological explanation of the Iroquois penchant for high-iron work draws a parallel between the traditional hunting and warring parties of the Iroquois and the modern iron-work teams. Two hundred years ago, the Iroquois men contributed to the maintenance of the family and the security of the nation almost entirely through his efforts away from home. Ordinarily the women went along on the long winter hunt, but they sayed behind in the base camp while the men were off for days at a time doing the actual stalking and killing. At the end of the hunt, the women and children returned to the home villages, and the men took the skins, furs, and meat to white settlements. There they traded for supplies and whiskey. When they returned, there were celebrations that, in the nineteenth century, often turned into drunken brawls. For the two-month summer hunt the men of a village went off without the women., WW-14 2 In the months not taken up with hunting, the men would visit other villages of their own nation or the Central Council Fire at Onondaga for meetings lasting weeks at a time. During the 300 years ending with the War of 1812, Iroquois military campaigns were carried out far from the home villages by small bands of warriors similar to the hunting parties in composition. The campaigns sometimes lasted as long as a year. The warriors' return with spoils, captives, and tales of conquest occasioned feasts, torture, and ceremonies of adoption. Iroquois men began high-iron construction work when the first bridges were built across the St. Lawrence River in Mohawk country in the 1880's. An official of the company that built the first bridge on which Iroquois were employed has written: "It was our understanding that we would employ these Indians as ordinary day laborers...,They were dissatisfied with this arrangement and would come out on the bridge itself every chance they got. It was quite impossible to keep them off. ...If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters." By the 1930's, the Iroquois of all Six NationS had established a reputation as "naturals' for high-ir0n work. Teday perhaps one Iroquois man in five either is or has been an ironworker. Like their hunter-warrior ancestors, ironworkers usually travel in small bands from job to job doing risky, skilled, highly lucrative work. They determine their own schedule of work and vacation through the year. Periodically a gang returns to Iroquoia with earnings and stories enough to make life back "on the res" comfortable and dignified until the next expedition. .Wnile I was visiting a lacrosse coach in his small, thin-walled house on one of the reservations this spring, a grown son came home from Rochester for the weekend. He drove up in a 1973 Pontiac pulling a camper. His Seneca wife walked behind him with one of their three soall children. When he came through the door the interior of the house was thrown into darkness. He is well over six feet tall, broad and well- musculed like a wrestler. He works the high iron. His nephews and a younger brother.hung On him as he talked, and next day neighbors from all over the reservation came to a great picnic at' the house. There is more to the hi,h-iron propensity than this one parallel between the aboriginal warrior's lifestyle and the itinerant, high-risk life of a nlodern ironworker. After all, military service, which has been popular with other Indians since World War II, offers some of the same opportunities, but the Iroquois generally avoid the armed services. (One writer has observed, however, 1 This map shows the locations of the Iroquoi territories in New York today. .. I. Akwesasne Mohawk (St. Regis Reservation) 2. Oneida Territory 3. Onondaga ation / 4. Tonawanda Band of Seneca / 5. Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca Nation) 6. Allegany Reservation (Seneca Nation) / 7. uscarora Nation that those Tuscarora who do join up prefer the Air Force and parachute troops.) The standard explanation does not answer the most intrisuing question, to me at least about the Iroquois ironworkers: do the Iroquois have a congenital tolerance of heights, or is there something about the work that attracts them despite their normal fears? Psychiatrist A. F. C. Wallace maintains that they do have a "psychological predisposition" for high work from birth. He says it is part of the Iroquois culture, and offers this quotation from an eighteenth-century white man writing about the Tuscarora while they were still in what is now North Carolina: "They will walk over deep Brooks a'd Creeks, on the smallest poles, and that without any Fear or Concern. Nay, an India will walk on the Bidge of a Barn or House and look down the Gable-end, and spit upon the Ground, as unconcern'd as if he WW-14 were walking on Terra firma." Iroquois ironworkers do not incur fewer casualties than non-Iroquois ironworkers, and death from accidents in construction work have visited every Iroquois village and clan. As a population, then, the Iroquois suffer a disproportionate number of work-related deaths. Yet they keep going up on the high steel. The very risk of death appears to increase the allure of the work. Talking about a bridge collapse (he refers to it as "the disaster") that killed 35 Mohawk, an old ironworker told an investigator in 1949: "The little boys in Caughnawaga used to look up to the men that went out with the circuses in the strainer and danced and war-whooped all over the States and came back to the reservation in the winter and holed up and sat by the stove and drank whiskey and bragged. That's what they wanted to do. Either that, or work on the timber rafts. After the disaster, they changed their minds-- they all wanted to go into high steel." The-high risk of death may have always attract-ed Iroquois men. To elaborate the standard parallel: an Iroquois warrior flouted death, and so does his modern descendant. He shaved his head bare but for a lo4 top-knot, so that an enemy could get a good hold on his scalp. Wnen captured, Iroquois warriors were reputed to sing during the torture, which customarily ended in death. Also, the Iroquois warriors were apparently the last North American natives to cook and eat the flesh of their enemies. (This was still done in the eighteenth century.) The Iroquois flirtation with death today may be an expression of the warrior's bravado inten- sified under the stress of modern Indian life. One old Seneca man I talked to, who has been working bridges all his life, from the little one fifty yards from his birthplace to the Golden Gate, said "I never cared about falling because I didn't care that much about dying." As a group, Indians in the United States resond to the domination of an alien culture in charscteristic, often self-destruCtive ways. Alcoholism and suicide, it is well known, occur among them at four times the national average. There are no separate statistics for suicide among the Iroquois, but they have grown up in the same social conditions as other Indians-- poverty, discrimination, educational programs destructive of their Culture, and so on. It should not be remarkable that the possibility of a sudden, honorable death adds to the appeal of high steel for Iroquois men. WW-14 5 Driving through Iroquois territory from Montreal to Niagara Falls, if the weather is fair one sees few women and girls outside, some men, and lots of boys. They are either gathered together sticking their heads under the hood of one of the ailing cars that dot Iroquois yards, or practicing lacrosse. The cars-- rusted, stripped, irreparable, some of them, and others partly restored-- are not distinctively Iroquois. In fact, I was once instructed by a federal agency to con- sider the number of derelict cars to be a dependable short-cut index of the degree of impoverishment of any ghetto in the U.So, black, white, or Indian, urban or rural.

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