90 Facts About Iroquois

At its peak around 1700, Iroquois power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley.

Name Iroquois is purely French, and is formed from the [Iroquoian-language] term Hiro or Hero, which means I have said—with which these Indians close all their addresses, as the Latins did of old with their dixi—and of Koue, which is a cry sometimes of sadness, when it is prolonged, and sometimes of joy, when it is pronounced shorter.

Iroquois preferred the etymology from Montagnais irin "true, real" and ako "snake", plus the French -ois suffix.

At its peak around 1700, Iroquois power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley.

Alliance with the Iroquois offered political and strategic advantages to the European powers, but the Iroquois preserved considerable independence.

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Iroquois remained a large politically united Native American polity until the American Revolution, when the League kept its treaty promises to the British Crown.

The Iroquois Confederacy was the decentralized political and diplomatic entity that emerged in response to European colonization, which was dissolved after the British defeat in the American Revolutionary War.

In 1784, a total of 6, 000 Iroquois faced 240, 000 New Yorkers, with land-hungry New Englanders poised to migrate west.

The historiography of the Iroquois peoples is a topic of much debate, especially regarding the American colonial period.

French Jesuit accounts of the Iroquois portrayed them as savages lacking government, law, letters, and religion.

Eighteenth-century English historiography focuses on the diplomatic relations with the Iroquois, supplemented by such images as John Verelst's Four Mohawk Kings, and publications such as the Anglo-Iroquoian treaty proceedings printed by Benjamin Franklin.

Iroquois League was established prior to European contact, with the banding together of five of the many Iroquoian peoples who had emerged south of the Great Lakes.

Iroquois was offered the position as the titular chair of the League's Council, representing the unity of all nations of the League.

One British colonial administrator declared in 1749 that the Iroquois had "such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories".

The political cohesion of the Iroquois rapidly became one of the strongest forces in 17th- and 18th-century northeastern North America.

Around 1678, the council began to exert more power in negotiations with the colonial governments of Pennsylvania and New York, and the Iroquois became very adroit at diplomacy, playing off the French against the British as individual tribes had earlier played the Swedes, Dutch, and English.

Iroquois became well known in the southern colonies in the 17th century by this time.

At that time the Iroquois numbered about 10, 000, insufficient to offset the European population of 75, 000 by 1660, 150, 000 by 1680 and 250, 000 by 1700.

Between 1665 and 1670, the Iroquois established seven villages on the northern shores of Lake Ontario in present-day Ontario, collectively known as the "Iroquois du Nord" villages.

In 1649 during the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois used recently purchased Dutch guns to attack the Huron, allies of the French.

From 1651 to 1652, the Iroquois attacked the Susquehannock, to their south in present-day Pennsylvania, without sustained success.

From 1658 to 1663, the Iroquois were at war with the Susquehannock and their Lenape and Province of Maryland allies.

In 1663, the Iroquois were at war with the Sokoki tribe of the upper Connecticut River.

In 1667, the remaining two Iroquois Nations signed a peace treaty with the French and agreed to allow missionaries to visit their villages.

The French Jesuit missionaries were known as the "black-robes" to the Iroquois, who began to urge that Catholic converts should relocate to the Caughnawaga, Kanienkeh outside of Montreal.

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Around 1670, the Iroquois drove the Siouan-speaking Mannahoac tribe out of the northern Virginia Piedmont region, and began to claim ownership of the territory.

In 1672, they were defeated by a war party of Susquehannock, and the Iroquois appealed to the French Governor Frontenac for support:.

Some old histories state that the Iroquois defeated the Susquehannock but this is undocumented and doubtful.

In 1677, the Iroquois adopted the majority of the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock into their nation.

The Iroquois colonized the northern shore of Lake Ontario and sent raiding parties westward all the way to Illinois Country.

In 1679, the Susquehannock, with Iroquois help, attacked Maryland's Piscataway and Mattawoman allies.

In 1684, the Iroquois again invaded Virginia and Illinois territory and unsuccessfully attacked French outposts in the latter.

Fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors had been harassing Montreal defenses for many months prior to that.

Iroquois's tenure was followed by the return of Frontenac for the next nine years.

Iroquois decided to target the Oneida and Onondaga, instead of the Mohawk who had been the favorite enemies of the French.

The Iroquois claimed to have conquered this territory 80 years earlier.

Meanwhile, the Iroquois were negotiating peace with the French; together they signed the Great Peace of Montreal that same year.

In 1689, the English Crown provided the Six Nations goods worth £100 in exchange for help against the French, in the year 1693 the Iroquois had received goods worth £600, and in the year 1701 the Six Nations had received goods worth £800.

In 1721 and 1722, Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia concluded a new Treaty at Albany with the Iroquois, renewing the Covenant Chain and agreeing to recognize the Blue Ridge as the demarcation between the Virginia Colony and the Iroquois.

Tensions increased over the next decades, and the Iroquois were on the verge of going to war with the Virginia Colony.

The following year at the Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois sold Virginia all their remaining claims in the Shenandoah Valley for 200 pounds in gold.

The Iroquois hoped that aiding the British would bring favors after the war.

The Iroquois taught the Palatines how to grow "the Three Sisters" as they called their staple crops of beans, corn and squash and where to find edible nuts, roots and berries.

Johnson who become very rich from the fur trade and land speculation, learned the languages of the Iroquois and become the main intermediary between the British and the League.

The Canadian Iroquois informed Lery "if I absolutely wanted to die, I was the master of the French, but they were not going to follow me".

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Crucial difference between the European and First Nations way of war was that Europe had millions of people, which meant that British and French generals were willing to see thousands of their own men die in battle in order to secure victory as their losses could always be made good; by contrast, the Iroquois had a considerably smaller population, and could not afford heavy losses, which could cripple a community.

Iroquois warriors were brave, but would only fight to the death if necessary, usually to protect their women and children; otherwise, the crucial concern for Iroquois chiefs was always to save manpower.

Iroquois only entered the war on the British side again in late 1758 after the British took Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac.

The British historian Michael Johnson wrote the Iroquois had "played a major supporting role" in the final British victory in the Seven Years' War.

The Oneida and Tuscarora decided to support the American colonists, while the rest of the Iroquois League sided with the British and their Loyalists among the colonists.

One of these is simple proximity; the Iroquois Confederacy was too close to the action of the war to not be involved.

The Iroquois Confederacy was particularly concerned over the possibility of the colonists winning the war, for if a revolutionary victory were to occur, the Iroquois very much saw it as the precursor to their lands being taken away by the victorious colonists, who would no longer have the British Crown to restrain them.

The Iroquois had to determine whether their relationships with the colonists were reliable, or whether the English would prove to better serve their interests.

The United States and the Iroquois signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784, under which the Iroquois ceded much of their historical homeland to the Americans, which was followed by another treaty in 1794 at Canandaigua which they ceded even more land to the Americans.

The governor of New York state, George Clinton, was constantly pressuring the Iroquois to sell their land to white settlers, and as alcoholism became a major problem in the Iroquois communities, many did sell their land in order to buy more alcohol, usually to unscrupulous agents of land companies.

Traditionally, for the Iroquois farming was woman's work and hunting was men's work; by the early 19th century, American policies to have the men farm the land and cease hunting were having effect.

However, as late as the 1950s both the United States and New York governments confiscated land belonging to the Six Nations for roads, dams and reservoirs with the land being given to Cornplanter for keeping the Iroquois from joining the Western Confederacy in the 1790s being forcibly purchased by eminent domain and flooded for the Kinzua Dam.

Many Iroquois and Iroquois-descended Metis people living in Lower Canada (primarily at Kahnawake) took employment with the Montreal-based North West Company during its existence from 1779 to 1821 and became voyageurs or free traders working in the North American fur trade as far west as the Rocky Mountains.

Many Canadian Iroquois worked for both the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Company as voyageurs in the fur trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In 1884, about 100 Canadian Iroquois were hired by the British government to serve as river pilots and boatmen for the relief expedition for the besieged General Charles Gordon in Khartoum in the Sudan, taking the force commanded by Field Marshal Wolsely up the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum.

Iroquois captured by the Germans were often subjected to cruel treatment.

In contrast, the Iroquois Confederacy had been making treaties and functioning as a state since 1643 and all of their treaties had been negotiated with Britain, not Canada.

The bill for the Iroquois Confederation died in committee without further serious consideration.

One of the central features of traditional Iroquois life were the "mourning wars", when their warriors would raid neighboring peoples in search of captives to replace those Haudenosaunee who had died.

Death in battle was accepted only when absolutely necessary, and the Iroquois believed the souls of those who died in battle were destined to spend eternity as angry ghosts haunting the world in search of vengeance.

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The main weapons for the Iroquois were bows and arrows with flint tips and quivers made from corn husks.

The adoption of conquered peoples, especially during the period of the Beaver Wars, meant that the Iroquois League was composed largely of naturalized members of other tribes.

Those who attempted to return to their families were harshly punished; for instance, the French fur trader Pierre-Esprit Radisson was captured by an Iroquois raiding party as a teenager, was adopted by a Mohawk family, and ran away to return to his family in Trois-Rivieres.

At the time of first European contact the Iroquois lived in a small number of large villages scattered throughout their territory.

The Iroquois lived in extended families divided clans headed by clan mothers that grouped into moieities.

The main woods used by the Iroquois to make their utensils were oak, birch, hickory and elm.

Iroquois are a mix of horticulturalists, farmers, fishers, gatherers and hunters, though traditionally their main diet has come from farming.

Besides the "Three Sisters", the Iroquois diet included artichokes, leeks, cucumbers, turnips, pumpkins, a number of different berries such blackberries, blueberries, gooseberries, etc.

Reports from early American settlers mention Iroquois extracting corn syrup that was used as a sweetener for cornmeal dumplings.

Iroquois hunted mostly deer but other game such as wild turkey and migratory birds.

Fishing was a significant source of food because the Iroquois had villages mostly in the St Lawrence and Great Lakes areas.

The Iroquois used nets made from vegetable fiber with weights of pebbles for fishing.

The bodies and faces of Iroquois men were heavily tattooed with geometric designs and their noses and ears were pieced with rings made up of wampun or silver.

False Faces represent grandfathers of the Iroquois, and are thought to reconnect humans and nature and to frighten illness-causing spirits.

Iroquois societies are active in maintaining the practice of traditional medicine.

Iroquois have traditionally followed a matrilineal system, and hereditary leadership passes through the female line of descent, that is, from a mother to her children.

Generally, the Iroquois believed in numerous deities, including the Great Spirit, the Thunderer, and the Three Sisters.

The Iroquois believed in the orenda, the spiritual force that flowed through all things, and believed if people were respectful of nature, then the orenda would be harnessed to bring about positive results.

Saraydar suggests the Iroquois do not see the twins as polar opposites but understood their relationship to be more complex, noting "Perfection is not to be found in gods or humans or the worlds they inhabit.

Dreams play a significant role in Iroquois spirituality, providing information about a person's desires and prompting individuals to fulfill dreams.

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Iroquois ceremonies are primarily concerned with farming, healing, and thanksgiving.

The British historian Michael Johnson described the Iroquois artwork meant to be sold to whites in the 19th century as having a strong feel of "Victoriana" to them.

Iroquois have absorbed many other individuals from various peoples into their tribes as a result of adopting war captives and giving refuge to displaced peoples.

Consensus has not been reached on how influential the Iroquois model was to the development of United States' documents such as the Articles of Confederation and the U S Constitution.

Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy declared war on Germany in 1917 during World War I and again in 1942 in World War II.