“Eight clans or gentes composed the Huron people and were found in different proportions in all the tribes. These clans, called by the Algonquians ‘totems,’ all bore the names of certain animals, with which the Indians held themselves to be mythologically connected—the bear, wolf, deer, porcupine, snake, hawk, large tortoise and small tortoise. Each clan was more numerous in some towns than in others, as it was natural that near kindreds should cluster together.
“The five Iroquois nations also had eight clans.... The Iroquois league is spoken of in their Book of Rites as kanasta-tsi-koma, ‘the great framework’ and the large, bent frame-poles of their council-house, the exact original shape of which is not known, were named kan-asta.”
An examination of the signs woven in the famous wampum belts of the Hurons and Iroquois reveals some curious facts.
One of these treaty belts, described by Horatio Hale, commemorates an alliance formed between four nations. It exhibits four squares (fig. [54], a) “which indicate, in the Indian hieroglyphic system, either towns or tribes with their territory.”[49] This mode of representing a nation is of utmost interest, not only because it coincides with the Maya conception of “the quadrated” earth but because it also reveals that, in North America, the Indians associated a tribal organization with a quadriform. What is more, an older belt, which is unfortunately incomplete, exhibits a central oval (fig. [54], b) between a bird and a quadruped and three crosses with a circle uniting their branches. The cross and circle, being a native symbol for “an integral state,” as definitely proven by the Maya map, justifies the suggestion that this symbol on the wampum belt may have had the significance of “nation” and central government. It is remarkable that the Iroquois central capital, Ho-che-laga, can be analyzed in the Maya tongue, as meaning five=ho, tree=ché or hoch=vase (symbol of centre) whilst the terminal laga might possibly be a form of lacan=banner, an object so frequently associated with names of towns in Mexico, where it yields the sound pan and means on or above something.
Figure 54.
It will be interesting and important to learn what “Hochelaga” means in the Iroquois language. The resemblance between the Maya and Iroquois symbols for nation and tribal territory and of the names for capital might even be overlooked and treated as a coincidence merely, if the Iroquois name for the confederacy, kan-asta-tsik-o-ma did not also begin with the word kan, the Maya for four and for serpent. The same particle recurs in the Iroquois name for the town=can-ada, a word which, in Maya, would describe a metropolis divided into four quarters.
The question naturally suggests itself whether the affix can, frequently met with in Mexico combined with names of localities, was not of Maya origin and expressed also a centre of quadruple [pg 199] government. It occurs in the Nahuatl name for metropolis to-tec-ua can and in Teoti-hua can, for instance. The Nahuatl scholars have rendered its meaning as “place of.”
Mr. Hale tells us that, amongst the “Five Nations,” the tradition exists that the confederacy was originally divided into “seven tribes,” each of which was composed of 2×4=8 gentes or clans. Another wampum belt he figures exhibits a heart between 2×2=4 squares, a symbol which would be interpreted by a Mexican or Maya as well as by a Huron or Iroquois, as meaning “four nations, one heart,” the latter being as common a symbol for union of rule or government or for chieftain, as a “head.”