Around 1500, the Mohawk chief, Hiwatta, immortalized by the poet Longfellow, created the League of Iroquois, better known as the "Five Civilized Nations", which first grouped the Mohawks, Cayuses, Oneidas, Onondagas and Senecas. , all of whom lived in what is now New York State. The Tuscaroras came to join them, and the whole became "the Confederation of Six Civilized Nations".
The Iroquois undertook particularly savage wars. They were without a doubt the most bellicose warriors in all of North America. Very hard in the fights, they largely exterminated the Algonquins, whose survivors, to survive, had to emigrate towards the West, as well as the Hurons and the Crees.
The Iroquois tried to elsewhere to impose themselves in the West but were contained by the Chippeways. They then turned to the south, where they were repelled by the Cherokees, then to the north, where they faced the French without insisting too much.
They declare war... but forget to sign the peace!
The Iroquois have always considered themselves an independent nation. When the United States went to war with Germany in 1917, the Iroquois sent a formal declaration to Berlin. The funny thing is that they never signed the peace
The Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) also known by the expression Five-Nations actually include five and then later six Native American nations of Iroquois languages living historically in northern New York State in the United States, south of Lake Ontario. and the St. Lawrence River. Most of the approximately 125,000 Iroquois today live in Ontario, Canada and New York State. Others live in Wisconsin, Quebec and Oklahoma. Only a small minority of the Iroquois today speaks one of the Iroquois languages, including nearly 1,500 Mohawk speakers in the Kahnawake village, south of Montreal.
Denomination
The origin of the word "Iroquois" is obscure, but this name could come from a phrase often used at the end of Iroquois speech, "hiro kone" (I said it). Others believe that the word comes from the name given to them by their enemies, the Algonquins:“Irinakhoi” (rattlesnakes). It is also possible that the word comes from the Basque fishermen who nicknamed the Hilokoa people ("the killers") who would have passed into the Algonquin language, which does not pronounce the "r", in hirokoa, the French would simply have francized the ethnonym . However, the Iroquois call themselves Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouses).
Origins
Iroquois is represented on this map of New Netherland from 1655. Note Lake Champlain, Lacus Irocoisiensis ofte Meer der Irocoisen and the Rivière aux Iroquois, which the French named the Richelieu.
Their homelands lie between the Adirondacks and Niagara Falls. Traces of settlement are attested from the 10th century BC. AD In the 14th century, the cultivation of maize was introduced. According to Iroquois tradition, at that time there was only one tribe, living on the St. Lawrence River, to whom the Algonquins taught agriculture. The formation of the various tribes is uncertain.
During the French Regime
We know that an Iroquois league was created in 1570 under the name of the Five Nations League. In 1722, the Tuscaroras entered the league, which became the Six Nations. The population of the Iroquois is estimated at 22,000 individuals at the beginning in 1630 and drops to 6,000 at the beginning of the 18th century.
In the 17th century, wars with the French, allied with the Algonquins, the Montagnais (Innu) and the Abenakis, and the British, forced them to return to the limits of their ancestral lands, or, in the case of the Iroquois Christianized by the Jesuits and persecuted by their compatriots, in Canada, mainly in Quebec.
In 1648-1653, the Iroquois attacked the Hurons, the Algonquins and their French allies. They end up weakening the confederation of Hurons which disperses. Some prisoners were adopted (they became Iroquois) while others were tortured (in particular, their fingernails were pulled out before being burned alive, on a slow fire) or beaten with sticks. The warriors ate the organs of the vanquished. In 1660, a few hundred Iroquois won the Battle of Long Sault against 17 French and 48 Amerindian allies.
When Colbert became responsible for New France, the Iroquois had already been devastating the colony for 25 years to divert the Huron and Ottawa fur trade with New France; the Iroquois want to profit from this trade as intermediaries with Albany4.
In 1667, the Mohawks and the Oneidas agreed to conclude peace.
The war resumed by order of the Minister of Marine Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain on June 13, 1687:the expedition against the Iroquois left Montreal, with 832 men from the troops of the navy, 900 men from the militia and 400 allied Amerindians. The vanguard captured several Iroquois along the river. At Fort Frontenac, Intendant de Champigny, who had anticipated the main body of the expedition, seized Cayugas and Oneiouts to prevent them from carrying to the Iroquois villages south of the lake the news of the approach of the French army.
Another group of Iroquois, supposedly neutrals, who lived in a village near the fort, were also captured for the same reasons. In all, 50 to 60 men and 150 women and children were taken to Montreal. Governor Jacques-René de Brisay shipped 36 of the 58 Iroquois prisoners to France, but made it clear that he would have preferred not to.
After the Glorious Revolution of November 1688 which overthrew Jacques II, the ally of Louis XIV, the Iroquois learned from the English of Albany that England and France were at war and abandoned any idea of peace. The Lachine massacre took place on August 5, 1689:approximately 1,500 Iroquois warriors descended on the village of Lachine, at the gates of Montreal, near the rapids of the same name. Twenty-four settlers were killed, 70 to 90 taken prisoner, of whom 42 never returned. Of 77 houses, 56 were razed by the Iroquois and their allies of the Five Nations Confederacy. The Lachine massacre and its aftermath claimed the lives of one out of ten Quebecers.
In 1690, the Abbé de Choisy wrote to Bussy:“The English were seen with forty-eight sails at the entrance to the St. Lawrence River. There are strong fears for Quebec because Mr. de Frontenac went with what troops he has to defend Montreal against the Iroquois and against several French Huguenots who joined them. »
Beginning in 1756, the main entrance to Fort Niagara was established at the South Bastion, on the side of the Niagara River. The French named this gate the Five Nations Gate in honor of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Article XV of the Treaties of Utrecht places the Iroquois under the protectorate of the British crown.
Seven Years' War
During the Seven Years' War, the Iroquois broke neutrality and allied with the British, ensuring their victory on land, in addition to their maritime supremacy.
From the American Revolutionary War to the present day
During the American War of Independence, the Iroquois decided to ally again with the British, who had made promises to the Amerindian nations concerning the respect of borders. However, this decision proved disastrous for them:in 1779, George Washington sent an army to invade their ancestral lands. Most of these Iroquois were pushed back to Ontario. In the 19th century, a small group left to trade fur in Alberta.
The Iroquois who remained in the United States were forced to cede their lands. Most of the tribes managed to avoid the deportation of the 1830s, except the Oneidas, who in 1828 left for a reservation in Wisconsin. The Cayugas sold their New York lands in 1807 to join related tribes in Ohio.
Nowadays
The Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora still live on reservations in New York State today.
Political organization
The five nations (later known as the six nations) were bound together by a common constitution called Gayanashagowa or "great law of unity". It has been passed down for several centuries in the form of maxims recited by heart. Written in 1720, it is composed of 117 paragraphs and prefigures the constituent writings of the founding fathers of modern America.
the Cayugas are also called Goyogouins in French, Guyohkohnyo (people of the great marsh) in their own language;
the Mohawks, who today refer to themselves by this Anglo-French name meaning " eaters" in the language of their Abenaki rivals, were called Mohawks by the French colonists, the native term being Kanienkehaka meaning people of the stars (sparks of flint);
Oneidas are also called Onneiouts in French;
the Onondagas are also called Onondagas in French;
the Sénécas (Senecas in English), formerly the Seneca in French, are also called Senecas d 'after their native name;
the Tuscaroras (the Sixth Nation, 1722), have no other name in use.
Culture
The Iroquois are an agricultural and semi-sedentary people. They grow wheat, sunflowers and the three sisters:corn, beans and squash. They supplement their diet with fishing, in the spring, and hunting. The men leave in the fall and return in the winter.
The Iroquois are also skilled craftsmen. They wear animal skin clothing sewn with porcupine quills and decorated with shells and various patterns. They use moccasins.
The Iroquoian house, or “longhouse,” was constructed of intertwined tree trunks and covered with bark. Native Americans also grew hemp which they used to bind the frames of houses together, making them very strong. Inside, there were two rows that included rooms separated from each other. An alley in the middle was used to circulate and to make fires. Five to ten families lived in these houses. The longhouses were grouped into villages of one to two thousand inhabitants. The village, which was often surrounded by a palisade, was often near a stream. The longhouse was 5 to 7 meters wide by 50 to 100 meters long by 7 meters high. The doors were very low. During the winter, the doors were closed with animal skins.
The Iroquois also used hemp for their rituals, they mixed small quantities with tobacco and aromatic plants. Very quickly the Amerindians realized that the Whites liked this product very much and they used it as currency.
Social organization
The social organization is matrilineal and matrilocal:it is the mother who determines the lineage, and the women own the land. After his marriage, the man moves in with his wife, and his children become members of the mother's clan. The women also choose the clan leaders.
A French Jesuit father who encountered the Iroquois in 1650 described Iroquois society as egalitarian. The Iroquois Confederacy stretched from the Adirondack Mountains to the Great Lakes, in what is now Pennsylvania and upstate New York. The land is owned and worked in common. Hunting is done in groups and the catches are shared among the members of the village. The notion of private ownership of land and dwellings was completely foreign to the Iroquois. Women play an important role:the lineage is organized around its female members whose husbands come to join the family. Extended families form clans, and a dozen or more clans can form a village. The eldest women in the village nominate the men entitled to represent the clan on the village and tribe council. They also designate the 49 chiefs who make up the grand council of the Confederacy of the five Iroquois nations. The women oversee the harvests and administer the village when the men are out hunting or fishing. They provide moccasins and food for war expeditions, and have some control over military affairs.
In 1744, the Governor of Virginia invited the Iroquois to send six young men to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg for their education. The leader of the Iroquois Nation, Conassatego, replied in elegant terms that he understood the generosity of this offer, but that, in turn, the whites had to understand that the Iroquois were different and had a different outlook.
Iroquois diplomacy
Here is what Louis de Buade de Frontenac relates about the conference with the Iroquois at Cataracoui in 1673:
"You would certainly have been surprised, Monsignor, to see the eloquence, the finesse with which all their deputies spoke to me, and, if I were not afraid of appearing ridiculous to you, I would tell you that they made me somewhat reminiscent of the manners of the senate of Venice, although their skins and coverings are very different from the robes of the procurators of St. Mark. »
Fierce warriors
An 18th century witness, Moreau de St-Méry, relates that to compensate for their numerical inferiority, the Iroquois were the first tribes to practice cannibalism and to inflict painful tortures on their prisoners, in order to subjugate their enemies by terror9. The Iroquois of the New York area were known to be terrible warriors; prisoners of war could be eaten, as sometimes in armies short of supplies. However, cannibalism as a last resort is to be distinguished from ritual (pagan) cannibalism. The Iroquois used the same weapons as for hunting:the tomahawk, bow and arrows, clubs. From the colonial wars between France and England, certain Iroquois warriors wore one or more scalps around their necks11, proof required by the colonists of their combat value, the ear necklaces serving as currency imposed by the occupiers fighting most often by interposed tribes in a logic of extermination of indigenous peoples.
The Iroquois, an indigenous people, were great warriors, but not the deadliest. Indeed, if it is true that the Iroquois killed relatively few French people, it also seems indisputable that the first settlers and the various native peoples felt an acute fear and that, for them, the Iroquois were real monsters, generators of fear among all. They used their war techniques to frighten other peoples, but above all, their torture techniques. The worst thing that could happen to a colonist or a native was to be captured by the Iroquois, they knew then that a long time of pain and atrocity was committed for them, to live until death. then.
Montreal, victim of fear
The Iroquois instilled fear in their victims by the techniques they used against those they captured. The Iroquois were renowned for being petty warriors and known for using cunning and stealth to capture their prisoners. Most of the time they would follow their favorite tactics, they would come as close to their victims as possible, making sure they weren't seen, and making noise to make their victims panic and instill fear in them, before to swoop down and capture them. During the first twenty years of Montreal, formerly Ville-Marie, these attacks, and captures, were one of the main causes of death of the French population there. On the other hand, as soon as the city was well established, the Iroquois ceased their attacks, rendered useless because they knew that the French were already too frightened of them to attempt anything against them
To instill this fear on Montreal, the Iroquois had to show the French what they were doing somehow. This is why the Iroquois gave the chance to certain captured missionaries to write a letter to their colleagues, this letter was then left with the corpse at the place where this person had been captured, either on country roads or in Woods. “After five or six days of walking, when we were exhausted from the journey, they approached us, without any more anger, coldly tore off our hair and beard and deeply dug our nails, which they wear very sharp, in the most delicate and sensitive parts of the body. They burned one finger and crushed another with their teeth:they dislocated those that had already been crushed by severing the nerves so that now that they are healed they remain horribly deformed. All this was made more cruel by the multitude of fleas, lice and bedbugs, from which severed and mutilated fingers made it difficult to escape. Returned to the place of captivity, the prisoners must face new violence. They greeted us with sticks, punches and stones. As they have an aversion to sparse and short hair, this storm was particularly unleashed on me and on my bald head, I had two fingernails left; they tore them out with their teeth and they stripped bare to the bone, with their very sharp nails, the flesh which is underneath. »
Prisoner of fear
Father René Goupil who wrote this letter was killed on September 29, 1642, with an ax to the back of the neck, when he had just made the sign of the cross on the head of a child. The Iroquois preferred to instill fear in their opponents rather than confront them.
The Iroquois still had a kind of respect for their prisoners. If the prisoners were silent and tolerated the suffering and the various tortures inflicted on them, they were granted a quicker and less painful death. Moreover, as they had proven their courage during the tortures, their hearts were eaten by the Iroquois. They did this to transfer the courage of their victims into their bodies. On the other hand, if the victims complained during their torture, they continued to be tortured until they stopped complaining or died. So all peoples, Natives or French, knew that if the Iroquois captured you, you were guaranteed to die, but the speed of your death depended on your resistance and your acceptance of the certain death that awaited you.