The Mohawk are also called the Elder Brothers, possibly because they were the first nation to accept the Great Law of Peace. Indeed, the Mohawk language was the first one learned by important Iroquois of other nations, since it may have been the language used at the Great Council and at important pan-Iroquois religious events. Another Mohawk nickname is Keepers of the Eastern Door, since they protected the Confederacy from trouble at the eastern entrance to the heartland. The Mohawk River was the spine of their territory. Their conquest of the Hudson Valley inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British and French fought over control of North America. Mohawk land lay between French outposts at Quebec and British ones at Albany. The Mohawk were generally skilled at working political situations, though they picked the wrong side in the Revolution, and the cards fell from there. Most Mohawk moved to Canada after the war.
Mohawk war parties distinguished themselves in the War of 1812. In 1813, Mohawk, British, and French-Canadian forces defeated Americans near Montreal during a small campaign some Canadians like to call “the American invasion.” At the 1813 skirmish at Beaver Dams on the Niagara Frontier, the Mohawk contingent was credited with beating the Americans single-handedly.
The great Peacemaker who unified the Iroquois tribes is generally considered a Mohawk. The Freemason and war chief Joseph Brant (1743–1807) and the religious leader Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680) are two of the most famous historic Mohawks, the latter blessed by the Vatican and possibly on her way to becoming a saint. Brant’s son John Brant and half-Scottish Mohawk John Norton were major players in the War of 1812 on the Niagara Frontier. One of the most curious figures of the nineteenth century was “Lost Dauphin” Eleazar Williams (1787–1858), rumored to be the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, spirited out of France during the Reign of Terror and raised in an American Mohawk community. The most famous Native American in the history of television was the Lone Ranger’s sidekick Tonto, played by actor Jay Silverheels (1912–1980), born on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. Contemporary Mohawk of note include the storyteller, healer, and community founder Tom Porter and Robbie Robertson, founding member of Bob Dylan’s former backup band, the Band.
Today, the Mohawk live in a handful of major communities, several of them in Canada. Many twentieth-century Mohawk worked in steel and construction, particularly on skyscrapers. It was noticed in the early twentieth century that few Iroquois—and no Mohawk—have any fear of heights. Many Mohawk walk a six-inch beam twenty stories up as comfortably as most readers would walk one resting on the ground. One of them explained the national nonchalance: “If you slip, the result is the same if it’s fifty or five thousand feet.” The Mohawk seem to like the challenge of the work—and the danger.
The Oneida
Oneyoteaka is what the People of the Standing Stone (sometimes “People of the Boulder”) used to call themselves, and you can see it Anglicized in the word Oneida. Like the Scots and their Stone of Scone, the Oneida treasured a special boulder that was kept near the main national settlement. Each Oneida village had its own lesser rock by which local ceremonies were held.
The Oneida heartland was the high ground southeast of Oneida Lake, between today’s cities of Utica and Syracuse. Their hunting lands stretched from Pennsylvania to the St. Lawrence River. Possibly the smallest of the Iroquois nations, the Oneida were considered the most arrogant by some missionaries.
Some Oneida historians saw their folk as spin-offs of the Onondaga, their neighbors to the west. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests closer ties to their eastern neighbors the Mohawk. In one of their own traditions, the Oneida sprouted right out of the ground. Their website proclaims that the People of the Standing Stone have stood on their land for 10,000 years. Who are we to argue? The coming of the Europeans, though, would be disruptive.
While other Iroquois nations sided with the British, the Oneida—with a plucky band of Tuscarora—stuck by the American colonies. The 1777 Battle of Oriskany, New York, was a traumatic moment for the Confederacy, the first time in centuries that Iroquois nations had fought one another.
The Oneida may have saved the Revolution through a delivery of 600 bushels of corn to George Washington that wicked winter at Valley Forge. The Continental Congress praised the Oneida, their love “strong as the oak,” and their fidelity, “unchangeable as truth.” The Congress promised to love, honor, and protect the Oneida “while the sun and moon continue to give light to the world.” Nice words.
The Oneida paid for backing the Americans in the Revolution. Other Iroquois, particularly the Mohawk, attacked Oneida forts and villages. The Oneida lashed back in spades. Many Christian Oneidas took off with a Mohawk preacher to eastern Wisconsin in 1820. Another so-called pagan faction settled on the Thames River near London, Ontario. A third group stayed on the Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, while a fourth hung on to a few acres outside Sherrill, New York. The state of New York gnawed into Oneida lands throughout the nineteenth century until even their stone was lost. It wasn’t until 1985 that the U.S. Supreme Court would listen to them.
By 1987, the Oneida were down to thirty-two acres of the Onondaga Reservation. The Turning Stone Casino, which opened in 1993, may be turning things around for them. The Oneidas have bought back 3,500 of their former New York acres and have a thriving community today.
Two of the most memorable Oneida may be women. The fearless Polly Cooper stayed with Washington’s troops at Valley Forge to show them how to use and ration the Oneida corn. She may have taken water to soldiers in battle. Our contemporary Joanne Shenandoah is a Grammy-nominated composer, singer, and performer. The Revolutionary-era Oneida chief Hanyerri had many adventures in the service of the United States and seems to have engaged in a lifelong feud with the formidable Mohawk Joseph Brant. The valiant old Oneida chief Hanyost Thaosagwat bears honorable mention. A guide to the 1779 Boyd-Parker mission in the Genesee Valley, Thaosagwat lost his life in the Revolutionary War incident remembered as “the Torture Tree.”
Many world cultures have a central stone that represents the world navel, the center of things. It’s surprising that the other Iroquois nations don’t have an object or place as concentrated as the Oneida stone. Maybe non–Native Americans just haven’t heard about it yet; maybe the other nations don’t need it, with the Oneida holding the crystalline heart for all the rest.
The Tuscarora
The Tuscarora call themselves Skaruren, meaning something like “Gatherers of the Hemp,” or “The Shirt-Wearing People,” possibly because they wore woven hemp shirts. They are the only Iroquois nation whose name for themselves doesn’t come from an earthly feature. Whatever this might say about them, these shirt-wearers were the latest addition to the Confederacy.
The Tuscarora were an Iroquoian-speaking nation whose home was around today’s city of Raleigh, North Carolina. How Iroquoians wound up in North Carolina is lost in prehistory, but Iroquoian language and culture ranged far afield. The Cherokee, an Iroquoian-speaking people we think of as western, hailed from the Carolinas.
By 1700, their homeland was getting hot for the Tuscarora. They were pressured and affronted by the incoming whites. (Tuscarora children may have been taken from their parents and sold into slavery.) Other Native nations of the region used white contact as an opportunity to chip away at them. The same thing happened to the Aztecs, and with better reason. The Tuscarora took about all they could and lashed back, but the odds were against them. The wars they fought with the English and other Native nations ate into their lands and population. By 1713, most Tuscarora had left the Southeast.
The story of their adventures en route to their new home would be a real saga, could it ever be written. Eventually they took refuge in Oneida territory and were admitted to the League in 1722 at Oneida sponsorship. At first the Tuscarora settled in several areas about New York—the Hudson Valley, the Genesee Valley, and midstate.
Maybe because
they knew something about a fight for independence, most Tuscarora sided with the young United States in its first struggle with the British Empire. A few joined the Iroquois allies of the British and lived after the Revolution in Ontario. Those who stayed in the States established a national home by buying their lands near Lewiston, New York.
Memorable nineteenth-century Tuscarora include the historians David Cusick (1780–1831) and J. N. B. Hewitt (1857–1937). A major figure in this book is the late twentieth-century activist, celebrity, and medicine man Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927–1985). His friend, and another of coauthor Michael Bastine’s tutors, was the late author and medicine man Ted Williams (1930–2005). Our contemporary, the tobacco tycoon “Smokin’ Joe” Anderson, is a powerful, influential figure.
By the early nineteenth century, many Tuscarora were Christians, and most of the nation is Christian today. Among some of them is a feeling that those Tuscarora who took up the Longhouse religion of Handsome Lake from the beginning may be “the real Indians.” No Tuscarora should have a need to envy anyone.
“The Shirt-Wearing People” fought like tigers in 1813 for their new neighbors, the whites of Lewiston, after the fall of Fort Niagara. That December massacre of unarmed civilians would have been a lot worse had not a small force of Tuscarora roused the village, sheltered refugees, and held the line just long enough against the British and Native American storm coming up from the Niagara River.
IROQUOIS LANGUAGES
Iroquois refers to a language family. It’s a lot like the word Celtic in that regard. There are Iroquoian language speakers who are not members of the Confederacy. There are Celtic speakers who aren’t Irish—or Welsh or Scottish.
Each of the six Longhouse nations has its own distinct language. To a linguist, the languages are very similar, sharing many word roots and grammatical principles. That doesn’t mean the speakers can understand each other. In fact, pronunciation, accent, and other variables make many Iroquoian languages as mutually unintelligible as German and English. (“Mohawk is really weird,” said one of our Seneca confidants.)
The sounds of Iroquois languages are so non-European that any attempt to transcribe Iroquois words into everyday English is doomed. Two whites could hear an Oneida word and spell it so differently that you wouldn’t recognize it. This situation accounts for a lot of confusion in the general reader looking over historic sources.
In this book, we try to keep things simple. We try to render Iroquois words into pronounceable syllables and leave the technicalities to specialists.
IROQUOIS RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES
This is not a book about Iroquois religion or anything else we knew was sacred enough to be sensitive. Not only is that not our purpose, but, as a Mohawk friend said recently to me, “If it’s sacred, you don’t know it.” And coauthor Michael Bastine would not reveal it. But lines between spirituality and supernaturalism are not always easy to draw, and many developments in this book will be incomprehensible without a little primer.
The old Six Nations religion featured a head god often called the Good-Minded One. He had legions of helpers, including demigodly figures like the Thunder Beings. Not everyone agrees that he was a separate figure from the Creator, the Great Spirit. The two names are often used interchangeably.
The Good-Minded Spirit also had a powerful, ambiguous sibling with his own legion of helpers. You may see him referred to as “the Evil-Minded One,” and no one mistakes him for the Creator. Actually, his name in the various Iroquois languages could mean a number of things, including “circuitous” or “indirect.”
While the impulse of any westerner is to presume that this character was the Iroquois Devil, things might not be so clear-cut. We should remember that the writings of the Christian missionaries give us our first glimpse of the Iroquois, and they have shaded centuries of interpretation after. It would have been a reflex for the Jesuits to look for a Devil. But few world religious systems are as dramatically “dualist”—good guy vs. loathsome bad guy—as Christianity, and it would be remarkable if things with the Iroquois plugged right into any other model.
The Iroquois Evil-Minded One might be more Loki than Satan, more of a trickster than a lord of demons. He just doesn’t do things transparently and straight up. It’s his nature to be subtle, indirect, and devious. The natural world has room for a lot of things and beings like this. The Evil-Minded One might be the Bacchus/Dionysus figure of the classical world. He’s the opponent of order and clarity. In the Asian way of looking at things, he could represent the yin side of existence—diffuse and less definite but not evil. For the Iroquois he might even symbolize an alternative principle to the light and the domestic. He could represent the shadowy, forbidding, and craggy places in the landscape.
There were echelons of other supernatural beings, too, ranging from figures legendary to all Iroquois (like Little People and Great Flying Heads) to localized individual bogies that might have been unknown outside the folklore of a certain swamp or creek valley in the territory of a single nation. There were mortal culture heroes, too. Figures like Hiawatha and the Peacemaker were virtually deified, much like the Greek Hercules or Roman Aeneas. This ancient, indigenous tradition survives today partly in supernatural folklore and in the dances and chants that are as sacred to many Iroquois as anything in life.
Many Iroquois today are Christians. It’s a miracle. The early missionaries often hit brick walls. (The Iroquois thought “the Black Robes” might be witches, and not without reason. One of the prime witch job descriptions is to be the bringer of plagues, which the first Europeans certainly were.) Only when they respected the Iroquois as they were did the missionaries start to reach them. Today the Christian Iroquois are often guarded about old supernatural traditions.
A third major influence upon the Iroquois was their own prophet, Handsome Lake. A half brother of the Seneca war chief Cornplanter, Handsome Lake was troubled by the deterioration of Iroquois society due to alcohol, relocation, and the loss of traditions. A series of famous visions led Handsome Lake to create a code of conduct or Gaiwiio, which means, “the good word.” In 1913, Arthur C. Parker published and annotated the Gaiwiio in The Code of Handsome Lake. The prophet’s code adapts the old traditions to a new way of life, seemingly including Christian influences. This Longhouse religion is still quite influential. Handsome Lake the man became known as a witch finder, and you will find many of your most serious witch-dreaders today among his followers.
INTO THE WOODS
Traditions
The old Iroquois historians kept a significant body of myth and legend, but none of it was written. The first European visitors were more interested in proselytizing and grabbing resources than in preserving native traditions, and it took centuries for the Iroquois material to be written down. Most sources consider the nucleus of it to be at least four centuries old.
Some of the whites who saw the Iroquois before the Revolution considered them the most avid storytellers on Earth and suspected that the body of their tales would dwarf that of any other society. Even in the early twentieth century it was said that whenever parties of Iroquois met, sessions of storytelling followed the initial greetings. Few, though, would tell their tales within earshot of outsiders, which may be why this tradition is not better understood.
We should be aware from the start that we have only parts of the body of legend that was once that of the Iroquois. No source anywhere is considered a bible of preserved Iroquois tales and stories, either.
We should also remember that folklore everywhere is a plastic art, always growing and absorbing. Iroquois storytellers used elements and even motifs—story outlines—from other societies, including ones brought to them by whites. The church had a big hand in this, and it’s no wonder that biblical elements occasionally appear, including the Western Devil.
The “golden age” of Iroquois folklore has been said to be from 1880 to 1925. Hope Emily Allen, William Beauchamp, Harriett Maxwell Converse, Jesse Cornplanter, Elias
Johnson, Arthur C. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry Schoolcraft, and others had the advantage of talking to Iroquois folk when the traditional wisdom stories were still strong. A lot may have been lost quickly thereafter, and the Iroquois have been notably quiet since. There is also a living supernaturalism on the reservation and among Iroquois folk everywhere. Most non–Native Americans would be stunned to know the prevalence and survival power of this ancient tradition.
Never forget that there are people who talk about the subjects of these stories as if they are true. They will look you in the eye and tell you about an experience of the Little People, a curse, a witch light, a magic charm, or a visionary dream. And not all of them are Native Americans; New Yorkers of any origin describe things they still see on the Iroquois homeland that could have stepped right out of ancient Iroquois legend. Take tales like these with no less respect than you would give to a UFO report, a Bigfoot sighting, a ghost story, or any psychic or religious experience. We want to show where it all came from and how it so gloriously survives today.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 3