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The Haudenosaunee

(Iroquois)

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What to do:

  • Carefully read through the following slides.
  • On Nearpod, respond to the Open-Ended question that follows the slideshow using evidence from the slideshow.

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Background

  • The Haudenosaunee (Ho-den-oh-sho-nee), or “they made the house” also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, has occupied its territory since around the 1100s. �
  • From east to west the original nations of the confederacy are Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. The Tuscarora nation joined the league after leaving their traditional territory in North Carolina and Virginia to become the sixth nation.�
  • The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is well-known for its organization and democratic system, one of the first of its kind. The Confederacy, also known as the league of nations, are five separate nations with an agreement to live under the Great Law as provided by the Peacemaker.

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The Haudenosaunee continue to practice their cultural traditions today.

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Life for Haudenosaunee women compared to Euro-American women: 1848

Haudenosaunee

  • Children are members of the mother’s clan
  • Violence against women not part of culture, and dealt with seriously when it occurs
  • Clothing fosters health, freedom of movement and independence
  • Each woman controls her own property
  • Mother Earth and women spiritually related
  • Responsible for agriculture and home life
  • Women choose their chief
  • Women hold office; i.e. clan mothers
  • Decision making by consensus

Euro-American

  • Children are sole property of their fathers
  • Husbands have a legal right to physically discipline their wives
  • Clothing favors aesthetic beauty over function; often restrictive and unhealthy
  • No right to own property, body, or children
  • Spirituality not connected to Earth, no female god or religious leaders
  • Responsible for home, but subordinate to husband
  • Illegal for women to vote
  • Women prohibited from holding office
  • Decision making by white men; majority rules

Resource: Sisters in Spirit, Sally Roesch Wagner, p.30-31

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In their words. . .

On matriarchal societies, such as the Haudenosaunee. . .

“Under their women, the science of government reached the highest form known to the world.”

-Women’s rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 1893

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In their words. . .

On interviews with Native women. . .

“As I have tried to explain our statutes to Indian women, I have met with but one response. They have said, “As an Indian woman I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.”

-Alice Fletcher, American ethnologist, anthropologist, and social scientist

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In their words. . .

After visiting the Cattaraugus (part of the Seneca Nation) . . .

“We witnessed their strawberry dance, and grotesque though the figures were, fantastic their appearance, and rude their measured steps, and unharmonious their music*, yet in observing the profound veneration of the hundreds present, some twenty of whom were performers, and the respectful attention paid to the speeches of their chiefs, women as well as men, it was far from me to say, that our silent, voiceless worship was better adapted to their condition. . .”

-Lucretia Mott, from letter to the Liberator, August 24, 1848

*Mott’s racism should be noted as part of the historical perspective.

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Open-Ended Question�Either respond on Nearpod if it is available, or on a separate sheet of paper

Explain the importance of the Haudenosaunee cultural influence on the 19th century women's rights activists around Seneca Falls, New York (such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Lucretia Mott) using examples from the slideshow.

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