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SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 149
SYMPOSIUM ON LOCAL DIVERSITY IN IROQUOIS CULTURE
EDITED BY WILLIAM N. FENTON
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LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, Bureau or AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY, Washington, D. C., September 1, 1950.
Sir: I have the honor to transmit herewith a manuscript entitled “Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture,” edited by William N. Fenton, and to recommend that it be published as a bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Very respectfully yours, M. W. Sriruine, Director.
Dr. ALEXANDER WETMORE,
Secretary, Smithsonian Institution.
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CONTENTS
. 1. Introduction: The Concept of Locality and the Program of Iro-
quoi: Research, by William IN. Fenton_.- 222-2 20. ----<.---
. 2. Concepts of Land Ownership among the Iroquois and Their
Noiwhbors, by George 8, Shyderman: <2. 55-522... s¢-~- 2 =
. 3. Locality as a Basic Factor in the Development of Iroquois Social
Steactare) by William IN; Bentom...2-...2% 2 e222 S sees oS
. 4. Some Psychological Determinants of Culture Change in an Iro-
quoian Community, by Anthony F. C. Wallace__-.-.---------
. 5. The Religion of Handsome Lake: Its Origin and Development, by
Merlewhler iD Card Orie. 2 Ape ee ee ae, Sen eee pee
. 6. Local Diversity in Iroquois Music and Dance, by Gertrude P.
. 7. The Feast of the Dead, or Ghost Dance at Six Nations Reserve,
Canada, by William N. Fenton and Gertrude P. Kurath-_-_------
. 8. Iroquois Women, Then and Now, by Martha Champion Randle--
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
Dance of the Society of the Medicine Men and Mystic Animals--_--_-- ease TReeMUANCG sh. oS ee eee ae Re a Se ns oe DEBT TD Uae IS ee ge alae ie hx ca. bands a eli Af dah aly cela anne a
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Onondarartonenouse...- memeber
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. ’Ohgi’we third concluding song, number 66, for men and women---- . ’Ohgi’we final song, number 68, for men, with women’s shuffle step_- . Carry-out-the-Kettle, dance pattern and last song, number 10_----- oIoONe Beales and rhythmic motifs: .-..-2--- 225.2 s2 32225. sees ese
PAGE
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SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 149
Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture
No. 1. Introduction: The Concept of Locality and the Program of Iroquois Research
By WILLIAM N. FENTON
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INTRODUCTION
THE CONCEPT OF LOCALITY AND THE PROGRAM OF IROQUOIS RESEARCH
By Wuu1am N. Fenton
The modern state, at all its levels, from the nation down to the community, is organized on the principle of where one lives, and neigh- bors seldom are related. At earlier times and in nonliterate societies neighbors are likely to be a group of kinsmen. If the modern state seizes the principle of coresidence, or local contiguity, and thus makes all its political and legal arrangements on a local or territorial basis, preliterate societies project the kinship units, which absorb local po- litical and legal functions, to the level of the tribe and state. Maine (1883, p. 124 ff.) discovered the two principles of kinship and ter- ritorial organization of politics, but overstated the case for an evo- lutionary sequence from the former to the latter. In earlier societies, he wrote, man fights for his kin, not his neighbors, but he neglected to state that they were often identical. According to Lowie (1948, pp. 10-11), Maine was wholly right in distinguishing the two principles of solidarity—kinship and coresidence—and he was also correct in stressing the predominance of kinship in simpler cultures, but he over- emphasized the point. In predominately kinship states like the Iro- quois, the local tie operated equally with kinship, and Iroquois society shows that a kinship group is fundamentally also a local group, and that both factors have been operative in the creation of a confederacy.
Morgan himself was aware of the localized character of much of Iroquois culture, and his description of the operation of the League indicated how certain matters were left to local autonomy. His mate- rials were derived mainly from the Tonawanda Band of Seneca, whom he befriended in their efforts to recover a reservation sold from under their feet by the Seneca council at Buffalo Creek, and his knowl- edge of the Seneca Nation, by that time resident at Cattaraugus and Allegany, derived from conversations with Nicholson Parker, the United States interpreter, and from correspondence with Rev. Asher Wright. So far as I know, Morgan never visited Allegany. The Onondaga at Syracuse were better known to him, and he went to
3
4 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. EB. Bull. 149
Grand River collecting for the New York State Cabinet of Antiqui- ties (Fenton, 1941). Perhaps, without his intention, his writings be- came generalized for all the Iroquois.
Morgan’s intense interest and prodigious contribution to the study of kinship systems have all but obscured his own affirmation of Maine. The relation of kin to locality was sharply focused in Mor- gan’s thinking: that clans arise from clans by a process of local seg- mentation, that clans were formerly associated with villages, and that clans lived together and tended to segregate their dead in burial grounds. Such were the questions which he addressed to Rev. Asher Wright and to which partial answers may be found in Morgan’s writ- ings (Stern, 19383; Morgan, 1878, 1881).
With a few notable exceptions, succeeding generations of anthropol- ogists carried on studies of kinship and left community studies to the sociologists (Murdock, 1949, p. 79). My own interest in the organiza- tion of social groups on a local basis stems from several sources: from Sapir’s sending me as a student to see Speck before going to the field, from a 2-year residence at Tonawanda while community worker for the United States Indian Service; from reading and teaching Linton’s work (1936); from conversations with Steward (after joining the “Bureau”) while writing for the Swanton volume (Fenton, 1940). Finally, the stimulus to attempt integration of the disciplines working on various aspects of the Iroquois problem came from a war-time ex- perience of surveying foreign area-study programs in the universities (Fenton, 1947). There resulted four conferences on Iroquois Re- search, held annually 1945-48 at Red House, N. Y., and by extension the present symposium, to which the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association devoted an afternoon session, New York City, November 17, 1949.
The Iroquois afford an opportunity to test the validity of the area- study approach to a culture which has local, tribal, and national levels.
1The Proceedings of the Conference on Iroquois Research have been prepared by participants and edited by me for publication in mimeograph and distributed to mem- bers of the Conference. Proceedings of the First Conference (11 pp.) were issued at the Administration Building, Allegany State Park, Red House, N. Y., and are now out of print. Proceedings of the Second Conference (6 pp.) were issued by Smithsonian Insti- tution, and notes appeared in the American Anthropologist (vol. 49, 1947, pp. 166-167) and in American Antiquity (vol. 12, 1947, p. 207). Proceedings of the Third Conference reached abundant proportions (24 pp.) and were issued for the Conference by the Pea- body Museum, Salem, Mass., following on Science (December 5, 1947, pp. 539-540) and the above professional journals. By 1948 the group had shifted from informal discussion to presentation of research papers and formal reports of field and museum investigations ; again Science (November 26, 1948, vol. 108, p. 611) carried a notice, and the Proceedings of the Fourth Conference, issued March 15, 1949, by the Smithsonian Institution, totaled 27 pages. (A limited number of copies of Proceedings 3—4 are available.) The meetings had reached such proportions and the topics so crowded the agenda of the Fourth Con- ference that it seemed advisable in 1949 to meet with all the anthropologists in New
York and devote a full 2-hour seminar in Ethnology to formal papers written around the theme of local diversity.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 5
Moreover, the long tradition of research in the Iroquoian field gives it rich materials for testing cultural historical depth. No ethnographic province in the Americas, indeed—if not the world—has a richer lode of published ethnological and historical literature than the Northeast, and the manuscript collections of historical materials bearing on the Iroquois alone in a number of libraries are rivaled only by the Hewitt papers in the Bureau of American Ethnology archives. These ma- terials present no challenge to the timid nor is the Iroquois problem a restricted area of inquiry. He who essays the Iroquoian problem tackles the history of northeastern North America from discovery to the present, for the Six Nations crop up near the center of every na- tional crisis down to 1840. Since 1851, when Morgan’s League appeared, they have become a classic people to ethnology.
The study of the local basis of Iroquois culture and the local organ- ization of Iroquois society has particular significance because the League isa kinship state. As opposed to a tradition of conquest states in Asia and Africa, in America north of the Rio Grande confederacies of related village bands prevailed. Quite the most famous of these, and justly so, was the democratic League of the Five Iroquois Nations, the so-called United Nations of the Iroquois. Its political history, in preparation (Fenton, 1949 b), shows how it grew out of what Franklin called a “League of ragged villagers.” Founded as a confederation of then village chiefs, its symbolisms were projected from a basic joint- household type of kinship structure to the Longhouse that was the League. Yet the Longhouse as a symbol for the state exhibited and tolerated a certain amount of local diversity at each of its five fires. Tribal languages have survived for study; tribal councils had locally different methods of counseling and sent different-sized delegations to confederate councils; and ceremonialism was a local concern. As may be expected, local folkways prevailed within the general framework of pan-Iroquois culture.
As if to augment local diversity, during the seventeenth century the Longhouse incorporated Iroquoian-speaking Erie, Neutral, Huron, and Conestoga captives—the Seneca alone gaining two whole villages in their role as Keepers of the Western Door; and a century later came the Tuscarora as the Sixth Nation, Siouan-speaking Catawba captives, the entire Tutelo and Saponi Tribes, and parts of the Algonquian- speaking Delaware and Nanticoke. All these tribal cultures found shelter within the Longhouse, a home in Iroquoia, and were gradually assimilated.
But Iroquois culture is not entirely a thing of the past. Much of it survives for study. Just how vigorous is the present-day culture may be judged from the symposium papers. They are based on
6 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Bull. 149
functional field work in the present communities, a viewpoint that we owe to the late Professor Speck, who first suggested it.
As early as 1933 Speck observed to me that each of the Rio Grande Pueblos has a distinctive local culture and that anthropology had progressed in the Southwest only after prolonged concentration by ethnologists working separately in each community. Speck’s own wide field experience, ranging from Labrador to the Southeast, which he brought over via Delaware to the study of Cayuga ceremonies at Sour Springs on Grand River (Speck, 1949), argued for community studies by ethnologists working independently on local Iroquois social organization and ceremonial life at each of the focal longhouse centers. While Speck continued at Sour Springs, I commenced among the Seneca, first at Allegany (Fenton, 1936), then at Tonawanda (1941). A wider range of field work became possible after coming to the Bureau in 1939.
Work with Hewitt’s materials on the League of the Iroquois took me to Grand River, where for a number of seasons down to 1945, only partly interrupted by the war, I pursued such topics as ethno- botany, the ceremonial cycle at Onondaga Longhouse, music, and social and political organization, which entailed translating the Deganawidah epic of the founding of the League (Fenton, 1944), ob- serving and describing its major institution, the Condolence Council (1946), and analyzing various mnemonic systems (Fenton and Hewitt, 1945, and Fenton, 1950).
Speck was responsible for directing a number of students to work in the area. John A. Noon spent the summer of 1941 on Six Nations Reserve exploring the law and government of the Grand River Iro- quois (Noon, 1949). Noon selected law and politics to exemplify the process of cultural change, showing how the institutions of the Con- federacy were adapted to the needs of local government in Canada. Another doctoral dissertation in the Iroquoian field at Pennsylvania was that of George S. Snyderman whose analysis of Iroquois warfare (1948) goes far beyond Hunt (1940) in supplementing economic de- terminism with an ethnohistorical perspective derived from field work among the Seneca.? Both E. S. Dodge, now director of the Peabody Museum at Salem, and John Witthoft, State anthropologist of Pennsylvania, were guided in their first Iroquoian field work by Professor Speck. Although Dodge is associated with northeastern Algonquian and Witthoft has worked most intensively on Cherokee, both have made important contributions, often in collaboration with Speck, to the ethnobiology of the eastern woodlands.
? A third doctoral dissertation thesis on the Warfare of the Iroquois and their northern neighbors by Raymond Scheele was submitted at Columbia in 1949.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON cf
Two additional community studies may be directly ascribed to the influence on Speck of the Conferences on Iroquois Research. Out of the first two meetings came definite recommendations as to future needs. One was for a study of the Tuscarora problem; another was for a community study of the Onondaga at Nedrow, N. Y. Aside from their implications for archeology, the Tuscarora, who were driven out of the Southeast in the first quarter of the eighteenth century and migrated north to join the League as the Sixth Nation, left a rich historical literature; they speak a divergent Troquoian tongue, their society and politics resemble other Iroquois, and as second-class citizens of the League they present interesting problems of personality orientation. This problem Speck dumped in the lap of Anthony F. C. Wallace, son of a distinguished historical biographer, student of both Speck and Hallowell, and himself a historical biographer in his own right (Wallace, 1949). The Onon- daga problem fell to Augustus F. Brown. Pennsylvania parties have spent two seasons now at Tuscarora, N. Y., and Onondaga.
Work among the Oneida of Wisconsin was begun under the aegis of the University of Wisconsin during WPA, in acculturation by Harry W. Basehart, and in linguistics by Lounsbury. Since the war Lounsbury has extended the analysis of Oneida to a study of com- parative Iroquoian, conducting field work in 1948 at Onondaga, Tuscarora, and at Six Nations Reserve on Cayuga, adding another Yale Ph. D. to the roster of Iroquoianists.
Apropos of linguistics, the Conference stimulated the work of the Voegelins and W. D. Preston on Seneca language (Preston and Voegelin, 1949). At the Summer Linguistics Institute, University of Michigan, 1947, Seneca was the piéce de resistance, and the students of Prof. Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania are at work on Onondaga and Cherokee in particular.
While Speck had students to direct into the Iroquoian field, the University of Pennsylvania shared the program with other univer- sities, and many of the projects funneled through the Bureau of American Ethnology. Yale, Columbia, Indiana, and Toronto Uni- versities have a stake in Iroquois studies.
Support has come from many sources—from participating insti- tutions, but principally from the American Council of Learned Societies, The Viking Fund, Inc., and the American Philosophical Society. The latter two, by grants to me, have contributed heavily to the Iroquois Research Fund at the Smithsonian Institution.
No over-all grants have been requested to finance a total program. Rather, the Iroquois Conference has avoided formal organization, taking the line that research foundations follow the policy of making
8 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Bull. 149
grants to individual working scholars, and the Conference has in- formally agreed to mutually endorse the applications of its partici- pants. Each scholar is responsible to his own institution, to the source of his research grants, and to himself to guarantee productive results. In this connection, members of the Conference have worked closely with the Committee on American Indian Linguistics, Eth- nology, and Archaeology of the American Philosophical Society.
While grants to predoctoral or postdoctoral fellows in universities have predominated, support has been managed for the nonprofessional scholar without institutional connection. Examples are the study of music, the dance, and ethnohistory. In 1936, while resident com- munity worker for the Indian Service at Tonawanda, I enlisted the cooperation of Martha Champian Huot,” then a graduate student at Columbia, to record Iroquois music. I rounded up the singers and took the texts; Mrs. Huot made the records. The Columbia collection of Iroquois records went to Indiana University with Prof. George Herzog and still awaits study. Mrs. Huot, however, in 1947 received a Viking grant and renewed an interest in Iroquois culture through intensive field work on acculturation in the Mohawk language (Huot, 1948) and personality development in children at Six Nations Re- serve. She has meanwhile made an analysis of Iroquois folklore, using the Waugh collection. The problem of Iroquois music has car- ried over to studies of the dance, to which it belongs by association.
It is fortunate, indeed, that Iroquois studies can claim two trained students of the dance. During the war Philippa Pollenz made a field study of Seneca dances, working almost exclusively with Cattaraugus informants. Her report, submitted first as an essay for the degree of master of arts in anthropology at Columbia University, is now await- ing publication as a monograph of the American Ethnological Society. Ethnologists are quite ill-equipped ordinarily to describe dances as part of ceremonialism. 'The need for an adequate choreographic tech- nique is quite as apparent as the need for musical annotation. Ger- trude Prokosch Kurath brings to the work an expert knowledge of music and the dance, and her symposium paper combines the techniques and methods of both fields of study. Her field study and analysis of the Fenton records in the Library of Congress collections were sup- ported by Viking grants and represent pioneering on new ground. She has worked intensively with Seneca at Allegany, thus comple- menting Pollenz’ work at Cattaraugus, and at Six Nations Reserve with Onondaga and Cayuga informants.
Topical studies are somewhat the antithesis of community studies, but need not be. Neither the dance, music, nor personality study has as yet brought forth an over-all picture of the Cattaraugus Seneca, but ethnohistory has done better by the Allegany and Cornplanter
2a Now Mrs. E. P. Randle.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 9
Seneca. Ethnohistory is, in last analysis, a kind of ethnography plus documentary research. History, moreover, has a tradition of glorious amateurism. It is natural, I suppose, that the local scholar, who first comes to notice as a correspondent of the Bureau of American Kthnology, as a critical reader of Smithsonian publications, may be induced to take up ethnology seriously. He has usually been attracted by his reading to cultivate Indian neighbors who are living descend- ants of deceased heroes of history. It is a natural transition from the border warfare of the Pennsylvania frontier and from such heroes as Cornplanter and Blacksnake to collecting Seneca folklore and cul- tivating such characters as the late Windsor Pierce and Chauncey Johnny John. The banker or lawyer in the small city near an Indian reservation has unusual opportunities for following ethnology as a hobby and combining with reading and writing systematic interviews of Indians who call on him daily. Such has been the growth of inter- est in the case of Merle H. Deardorff, who contributes the paper on the historical beginnings of the Handsome Lake Religion at Corn- planter, which is situated close to Warren, Pa., where Mr. Deardorff has been sometime superintendent of schools and banker for many years.
Ethnological studies at Allegany have received further stimulus from Hon. Charles E. Congdon of Salamanca who, like L. H. Morgan of Rochester, came out of the law. For many years Indians have been among his clients; they are daily callers at his law offices; and, as part of the local scene, they fall within a range of interests which embraces the history, fauna, and flora of southwestern New York. It is to Mr. Congdon, chairman of the Allegany State Park Commis- sion, that the Iroquois Conference owes its place of meeting annually at the Administration Building on Red House Lake. Every scholar who has worked at Allegany owes the Congdon family a debt of hos- pitality.
Viewed topically, the present symposium covers the land, language, society, personality, religion, and music. Every contribution starts from field work in a certain community; from there it moves out to comparative treatment of data from a second and third community; thence to generalized observations. We have avoided the temptation of overgeneralizing on single instances and insufficient data. To the extent that acute observations of local patterns of behavior may be observed to hold for several communities they may be considered pan-Iroequois culture norms. Thus the observation of Lawson for the eighteenth-century and Wallace for mid-twentieth-century Tuscarora that they evidently have no fear of high places is supported by the predilection of the Mohawk for work in “high steel,” and structural steel working is virtually an Iroquois national monopoly. Yet the
10 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. B. Bull. 149
method of science requires that until parallel studies are made of other Iroquois communities the study of personality in the Tus- carora community be not generalized for all the Iroquois. ‘To the ex- tent that this study is sound, of which it gives every evidence, Wallace can generalize from later field work and the results of parallel studies by Doris West at Cattaraugus, A. F. Brown at Onondaga, and M. C. Randle at Six Nations.
Similarly, Kurath’s dance materials present every indication of be- ing generalized behavior. In the case of songs and dances which are widely diffused and participated in by several Iroquois communities, the general culture patterns stand out in sharp relief while local dif- ferences are niceties of which the Iroquois are acutely aware and the observer comes only gradually to distinguish.
Concepts of land ownership seem to be widely diffused among the Iroquois and their neighbors. One is struck by an over-all familiar- ity with a common philosophy toward the land by all Eastern In- dians, and the historical sources often fail to yield local distinctions no longer obtainable through field work. The changes in this phi- losophy owing to White contact have peculiar timeliness just now for assessing claims arising out of treaties. In fact, ethnohistory has already joined hands with the law and become a branch of applied anthropology, claiming the research time of several anthropologists.
Historical sources frequently deal with the Indians of a particular place at a given point of time. The village with its chief and council of old men is a recurring theme in Iroquois political mythology; and the chiefs of particular places who were the leaders of local vil- lage bands appear as signers of treaties. By constantly keeping local- ity in perspective and being on the alert for cultural differences that arise locally we can assess the documents and understand what hap- pened in history. We shall see that people who lived together in a certain place, and were thereby related according to structural princi- ples outlined below, retained an overriding sense of loyalty not shared for kinsmen who had moved away. And those who had left the long- house fireside to dwell outside its walls soon became kindred aliens. The time perspective for cultural history moves from the ethnological present to the historic past. Spatially, the method proceeds from the local community to tribe, nation, and confederacy. Recognizing that feuds and factions develop locally and are the frequent cause of band fission today, the same process can be seen at work in history to pro- duce splinter movements and the dismemberment of kinship states.
Focal factors, on the other hand, are language, village agriculture, the mutual-aid work party, the projection of kinship patterns of soli- darity to persons in other towns, tribes, and nations, implemented per- haps by ceremonial friendships, lacrosse leagues, intertribal political and religious councils, and the Condolence Council by which the
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 5 ha |
chiefs of one set of towns installed candidates in another set of towns, and the current exchange of Handsome Lake preachers.
We have included in this symposium two other papers: a joint ac- count of the Feast of the Dead among two Grand River groups by Mrs. Kurath and myself, because it illustrates what kind of data the ethnologist can still collect among the Iroquois, and the paper illustrates a combination of ethnological reporting supplemented by transcription and analysis of recorded music and choreography ; and a discussion of the status of Iroquois women in the past and present by Martha Champion Randle.
There’s life in the Longhouse yet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FENTON, WILLIAM N. 1936. An outline of Seneca ceremonies at Coldspring Longhouse. Yale Univ. Publ. Anthrop. No. 9. New Haven. 1940. Problems arising from the historic northeastern position of the Iro- quois. Smithsonian Mise. Coll. vol. 100, pp. 159-251. 1941. Tonawanda Longhouse ceremonies: Ninety years after Lewis Henry Morgan. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 128, Anthrop. Pap. No. 15, pp. 139-165. 1944. Simeon Gibson: Iroquois informant, 1889-1948. Amer. Anthrop., vol. 46, pp. 231-234. 1946. An Iroquois Condolence Council for installing Cayuga chiefs in 1945. Journ. Wash. Acad. Sci., vol. 36, pp. 110-127. 1947. Area studies in American universities. Amer. Council on Education. 1949 a. Seth Newhouse’s traditional history and constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. 93, pp. 141-158. 1949 b. Collecting materials for a political history of the Six Nations. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. 98, pp. 233-2388. 1950. The roll call of the Iroquois chiefs: A study of a mnemonic cane from the Six Nations Reserve. Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 111, No. 15. FENTON, WILLIAM N., and HEewirt, J. N. B. 1945. Some mnemonic pictographs relating to the Iroquois Condolence Council. Journ. Wash. Acad. Sci., vol. 35, pp. 301-315. HUNT, GEORGE T. 1940. The wars of the Iroquois. Madison, Wis. Huot, MartHA CHAMPION. (See also RANDLE, this vol.) 1948. Some Mohawk words of acculturation. Int. Journ. Amer. Ling., vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 150-154. LINTON, RALPH. 1986. The study of Man. New York. Lowik, ROBERT H. 1948. Social organization. New York. Martins, H. S. 1883. Ancient law. New York. Morean, L. H. 1878. Ancient society. New York. 1881. Houses and house-life of the American aborigines. Contr. N. Amer. Ethnol., vol. 4.
905645—51
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12 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B.A.B. Bull. 149
Murpock, GEORGE PETER. 1949. Social sturucture. New York. Noon, JOHN A. 1949. Law and government of the Grand River Iroquois. Viking Fund Publ. in Anthrop., No. 12. New York. PRESTON, W. D., and VOEGELIN, C. F. 1949. Seneca lI. Int. Journ. Amer. Ling., vol. 15, pp. 23-44. SNYDERMAN, GEORGE §. 1948. Behind the tree of peace: A sociological analysis of Iroquois warfare. Bull. Soe. Pa. Archaeol., vol. 18, Nos. 3-4. Philadelphia. SPECK, F. G. 1949. Midwinter rites of the Cayuga Long House. Univ. Pa. Press. Phila- delphia. STERN, B. J., EDIToR. 1933. The letters of Asher Wright to Lewis Henry Morgan. Amer. Anthrop., vol. 35, pp. 188-145. WALLACE, ANTHONY F. C. 1949. King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763. Univ. Pa. Press. Philadelphia.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 149
Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture
No. 2. Concepts of Land Ownership Among the Iroquois and Their Neighbors
By GEORGE S. SNYDERMAN
13
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4
CONCEPTS OF LAND OWNERSHIP AMONG THE IROQUOIS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS ?
By Grorcr S. SNYDERMAN
There are several valid reasons for an article dealing with concepts of landownership among the American Indians. First, it is highly desirable that the problem be reworked and restated in the light of ethnohistorical facts which may not have been fully utilized in the past. Second, it is important that the Indian be allowed some space to express his thoughts on the matter; and third, we should attempt to understand the so-called “primitive” feeling for the land and in- quire whether any of these feelings have survived.
It is impossible to exhaust either the source material or to answer with finality the many questions involved. I therefore quite arbi- trarily limit my discussion to exploration of the following:
(1) Basic Indian philosophy toward the land.
(2) The relationship of various segments of the society to landownership.
(8) Changes in philosophy wrought by White contact.
(4) Indian reactions to White conquest.
That land is neither an item of booty to be won or lost nor a com- modity to be bought or sold is still clearly seen at this date in the philosophy of Seneca informants at Coldspring on Allegany Reser- vation, New York. Land is viewed as a gift from the “Maker”—a gift which is necessary for survival. The earth itself is revered as the mother of man for she furnishes sustenance in the form of animals and plants. These plants and animals allow themselves to be taken so that man can continue to thrive and dwell on the earth. Out of the earth’s body come the pure springs from which man can refresh himself. Moreover, the earth supports man as he walks over her body—she does not allow him to fall. Man himself, although he may take what he needs to live, must give thanks to the “Maker” for the use of the plenty provided for him by the earth, and also to the plants and animals for letting him use them. The tobacco burned in the
11 gratefully acknowledge the many suggestions of the late Dr. F. G. Speck, Dr. W. N. Fenton, Dr. A. I. Hallowell, and M. H. Deardorff. Thanks are also due to the Coldspring Seneca, who extended themselves in my behalf. My wife was a constant source of encour- agement. Field work was made possible by a grant-in-aid from the Anthropology Depart- ment of the University of Pennsylvania.
15
16 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B.A.BE. Bull. 149
ceremonies among the Seneca is the vehicle used to carry these thanks to the “Master of Life and All Spirit Things.”
This basic attitude was indicated in the Shawnee statement to the Governor of Pennsylvania on February 8, 1752:
... the God that gave us all the Beasts of the Field for our Food and the Water for our Drink and the Wood for our Fire, and threw.down Fire from Heaven to kindle our Wood ... [Prov. Council Pa., Minutes, vol. 5, p. 569.]
Black Hawk’s statement in his Autobiography is also quite clear on this point:
We thank the Great Spirit for all the benefit he has conferred upon