Notes on the Iroquois / or, Contributions to the Statistics, Aboriginal History, Antiquities and General Ethnology of Western New-York

by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

[48] Mohawk.

[c.] Principles of the Iroquois Government.

No one has attended to the operations of the Iroquois government and polity, as they are developed in their councils and meetings for general consultation and action, without perceiving a degree of intricacy in its workings, which it is difficult to grasp. Or rather, the obscurity may be said to grow out of the little time and the imperfect opportunities which casual observers have to devote to the object. For, maturely considered, there is no inherent difficulty in the way. It seems clear that they came together as independent tribes, who, at an early age, had all proceeded from the same parental stock, but who, after an indefinite period of fightings and wars, became convinced of the short-sightedness of such a course, and fell on the plan of a confederation which should produce general action, and yet leave the several members free, both in their internal polity, and in the exercise of most of their co-tribal powers. It was clearly a confederation for common purposes of defence and offence, and not a perfect union. Each tribe, or more properly speaking, canton, was still governed by its own chiefs, civil and military. They came together in general councils, by sachems, exercising the power of delegates.

These delegates or sages came in their hereditary or elective character, as the case might be, or as the customs and laws of the tribe in its popular character had decided. But their voices were, in all cases, either prompted by prior expressions of the warriors and wise men, or were to be ratified by these known powers. However invested with authority they but spoke the popular will. The relative power of the cantons is denoted, and appears as a question that was already settled, at the first formal general council for the purpose of confederating. For we there see precisely the same tribal representation, which has obtained ever after and still prevails; that is to say, the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, and the Cayugas, had each one chief, and the Senecas two, making six supreme dignitaries or state counsellors. That their powers were merely advisory and interlocutory, and that they aimed to come to harmonious results, by the mere interchange of opinion, without any formal or solemn vote, is evident, from all that we know, or can gather from their still existing institutions. There appeared to have been no penalties—no forfeiture of rights—no binding or coercive power, to be visited on tribes or chiefs beyond that of OPINION. Popular disapproval was the Iroquois penalty here and elsewhere. It is equally clear, however, that a single negative voice or opinion, was of the highest efficacy. A unanimous decision, not a decision on the majority principle, was required. The latter was a refinement, and an advance in polity, which they had not certainly reached, although they seem inclined now to follow it; and herein we may perceive the great power and efficacy of their old decisions. These decisions were, in their effects, clothed with all the power of the most full popular will. For what each of the senatorial chiefs or delegates, and all the cantons, pronounced proper, there was no one, in a patriarchal community, to lisp a word against.

So little power was abstracted from each tribe, and conceded to the federative council as a fixed government, that it seems not without scrutiny, that we can perceive there is any. This is, however, certain. One of the six primary sachems, was selected to preside over the general councils. His power was, however, exclusively of a civil character, and extended but little beyond that of a moderator, but he was a moderator for life, or during the time he retained the right and full use of his faculties, or until just cause of dissatisfaction should bring the question of a successor before the council. This head officer, had also authority to light the council fire,—that is to say, he could send messengers, and was if so desired, bound to send messengers to assemble the general council. The act, and the symbol of the act were both in his hands. He summoned the chiefs, and actually lit the sacred fire, at whose blaze their pipes were lighted. Thus limited, and having no other administrative power, but to appoint his own Har-yar-do-ah, aid or pipe-bearer, and messengers, he enjoyed his executive dignity; but had little more power when the sessions were closed, than belonged to every leading chief of the component tribes. He was himself bound to respect the messages of the tribal chiefs, and receive the runners who were sent to him from the frontiers with news, and he thus performed merely and exactly the will of each tribe, thus expressed. He was never in advance of the popular will. The whole hereditary machinery was made subservient to this. And he was limited to the performance of these slender, and popular duties. He might, it is true, if a man of eloquence, talents or bravery, be also the ruling civil chief of his tribe, and furthermore, its war captain in the field. And such is known to have actually been the character and standing of Atotarho, the first presiding chief in their federative councils. He was a man of energy and high renown. And such was the estimation in which he was held in his life time, and the popular veneration for his character after death, that as above denoted, his name became the distinctive title for the office. Thus much is preserved by tradition, and the office and title of the Atotarho as presiding sachem, is not yet extinct, although the tribes have no longer wars to prosecute, or foreign embassadors to reply to.

But how, it may be asked, is a government so purely popular, and so simple and essentially advisory in its character, to be reconciled with the laws of hereditary descent, fixed by the establishment of heraldic devices, and bringing its proportion of weak and incompetent minds into office, and with the actual power it exercised, and the fame it acquired? To answer this question, and to shew how the aristocratic and democratic principles were made to harmonize, in the Iroquois government, it will be necessary to go back, and examine the law of descent among the tribes, together with the curious and intricate principles of the Totemic Bond.

Nothing is more fully under the cognizance of observers of the manners and customs of this people, than the fact of the entire mass of a canton or tribe’s being separated into distinct clans, each of which is distinguished by the name and device of some quadruped, bird, or other object in the animal kingdom. This device is called, among the Algonquins, (where the same separation into families or clans, exists,) Totem, and we shall employ the term here, as being already well known to writers. But while the Algonquins have made no other use of it, but to trace consanguinity, or at least, remote affinities of families, and while they have also separated into wild independencies and tribes, who have assumed new tribal names, and wandered and crossed each other’s track and boundaries in a thousand ways, the Iroquois have turned it to account by assuming it as the very basis of their political and tribal bond. How far fixity of territorial possession and proximity of location may have favored or led to the establishment of this new bond, need not be inquired into here, but, while we express no opinion favorable to the remote antiquity of their residence in the north, it must be evident that this tie would have lost all its binding force if the Alleghanies, the Great Lakes, or any other very wide geographical areas, had been interposed between them, and thus interrupted frequent and full intercourse and united action. A government wholly verbal, must be conceded to have required this proximity and nearness of access. The Senecas may be selected as an example of the influence of the Totemic bond. This canton is still the most numerous of the existing Iroquois tribes. By the recent census, the results of which accompany these papers, they number over two thousand four hundred souls. This population is, theoretically, separated into eight clans or original families, who are distinguished respectively by the totems of the wolf, the bear, the turtle, the deer, the beaver, the falcon, the crane and the plover. Theory at this time, founded doubtless on actual consanguinity in their inceptive age, makes these clans brothers. It is contrary to their usages that near kindred should intermarry, and the ancient rule interdicts all intermarriage between persons of the same clan. They must marry into a clan whose totem is different from their own. A wolf or turtle male cannot marry a wolf or turtle female. There is an interdict of consanguinity. By this custom the purity of blood is preserved, while the tie of relationship between the clans themselves is strengthened or enlarged.

But by far the most singular principle connected with totems, the sign manual of alliance, is the limitation of descent exclusively to the line of the female. Owing to this prohibition, a chieftain’s son cannot succeed him in office, but in case of his death, the right of descent being in the chief’s mother, he would be succeeded not by one of his male children, but by his brother;[49] or failing in this, by the son of his sister, or by some direct, however remote, descendant of the maternal line. Thus he might be succeeded by his own grandson, by a daughter, but not by a son. It is in this way that the line of chieftainships is continually deflected or refreshed, and family dynasties broken up.

[49] Thus Hendrick, who fell at the battle of Lake George, in 1755, was succeeded, in the Mohawk canton, by his brother Abraham, and not by his son.

While the law of descent is fully recognized, the free will of the female to choose a husband, from any of the other seven clans, excluding only her own, is made to govern and determine the distribution of political power, and to fix the political character of the tribe. Another peculiarity may be here stated. The son of a chief’s daughter is necessarily destined to inherit the honors of the chieftainship; yet the validity of the claim must, on his reaching the proper age, be submitted to and recognized by a council of the whole canton. If approved, a day is appointed for the recognition, and he is formally installed into office. Incapacity is always, however, without exception, recognized as a valid objection to the approval of the council.