Mohawk

(Due to the overlap between the Mohawk and the Iroquois, most of the information can be found in the Iroquois section. I have however, copied the pertinent info from the Iroquois to minimize hassles! Any new facts will be seen in this color.)

• Occupied the land east of the St Lawrence River and west of Lake Champlain. They dwelled northeast of the Oneida and west of the Mahican. They lived in large fortified villages. Moving from time to time, they used fire to clear land for crops and to keep the forests open, a practice that encouraged the growth of brushy browse for deer and other animals.
  
  These people also shared a tradition of warfare that centered on taking prisoners and either adopting them into the captor's society or, more often, sacrificing them. Evidence that enemeies raided each other's towns regularly appears in distinctive pottery styles found at different sites-the work of captive women who continued to make their highly personalized pottery after being forcibly resettled.
  
• The major Northeastern nations might have destroyed each other in due course, but around the 15th century AD-dates and details differ in tribal traditions-a peacemaker came among them, and rival Iroquois tribes formed a political confederation. Leaders thereafter met regularly in a ceremonial longhouse, where they negotiated their differences and agreed upon policies for the near future. So effective was this union that when Europeans came in numbers to North America, they encountered a league of nations that was a viable political force, one they would have to reckon with for generations.
  
  
• The Indian peoples who dwelt in the broad expanse of shoreline and woodlands reaching south from present-day Quebec to Chesapeake Bay thought of their homeland as the center of the world. It had been the land of the ancestors longer than anyone could remember. They recoutned how the world had grown into being from a blob of mud on the back of a giant turtle. Each landmark had a story: An enormous boulder in Lake Champlain, for instance, contained the spirit of the giant Odzihozo, who in his birth pangs had gouged out the basin that held the lake's waters. These stories, told by firelight during long winter evenings, reminded people of why things were the way they were, and of their own place in the world around them.
  
• Life followed a natural rhythm of hunting and fishing, agriculture, and food gathering. As the men tracked deer, moose, and other game, the women combed the woodlands for wild fruits, berries, nuts, and other plants. There were onions and fiddlehead ferns, strawberries and raspberries, beach blums and beech nuts, lily roots and grapes, cranberries, elderberries, and more. In early spring, when the maple sap started running, the women would boil it down to make sugar.
  
• Between Lake Huron and the Hudson River, the inhabitants spoke Iroquoian, a language group as different from Algonquian (the other language of the northeastern tribes) as English is from Chinese. The Huron, Erie, Tobacco, Petun, and other residents of the upper St. Lawrence Valley were all Iroquoians, as were scattered groups to the south, among them the Tuscarora of North Carolina. But the most famous were five tribes that dwelt in what is now upper New York State: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. Outsiders referred to them as the Five Nations-or, because of their ferocity, as the iriakoiw, an Algonquian word that meant "rattlesnakes." To themselves they were the Haudenosaunee-the People of the Longhouse-and they constituted the single most powerful confederation of native North Americans in recorded history.
  
  
• Long before, in a dark time of troubles, the Iroquois had fought among themselves in a destructive cycle of killing and retribution. A dispute might break out between two villages over hunting rights, for example; angry words would lead to blows; and in the end one of the villages would be mourning the loss of a young warrior. The dead man's relatives, seeking conpensation, would launch a raid on the offending village. The object was to take captives, but as often as not, more blood would be spilled and the deadly cycle would spin out of control.
  
  No one wanted to become an Iroquois captive. Led back to the enemy village, the prisoner would be beaten, sometimes bitten, and forced to run naked through a gauntlet of alternately angry and festive villagers. If he stood up bravely to this abuse, he might be adopted into a family who had lost a son in battle. Otherwise, his fate was sealed.  His captors would tear his hair, pull out his fingernails, burn his flesh with hot coals, break his bones. At the end he would be put to death. Sometimes the villagers would eat bits of his flesh in a sacrificial rite designed to appropriate the victim's wisdom and strength.
  
  Bringing an end to these blood feuds was a matter of self-preservation. At the dawn of time, the Master of Life had commanded all people to live in love and harmony. Clearly the message had been forgotten, so the Master decided to repeat it. According to most versions of the story, his spokesman was a Huron holy man, Deganwidah-the Peacemaker-who set out across Lake Ontario in a stone canoe.  Landing on the southern shore, the holy man came upon Hiawatha, a clan leader of Mohawk descent who had lost all his daughters to tribal strife. Deganawidah offered words of condolence that lifted Hiawatha's grief and dried his tears; the same consoling words would later be repeated at Iroquois council meetings to promote good feelings and open minds. Then the prophet described a great Tree of Peace under whose branches the tribes would meet to resolve their differences. He enunciated principles of justice and equality; bloodshed would yield to a new sense of botherhood among the people.
  
  Deganawidah was a man of powerful vision; Hiawatha possessed the gifts of oratory and persuasion. Together the two men traveled the length and breadth of Iroquois country, forging alliances, teaching the Great Law of Justice, and spreading the gospel of the Tree of Peace. Finally, so legend tells it, only an Onondaga chief named Atotarho resisted. Atotarho was a fearsome wizard-his body crooked, his mind twisted, his hair a mass of tangled snakes-but eventually even he was persuaded to embrace the accord.
  
• The Five Nations that entered the league retained full control over their own affairs. But matters of mutual importance-peace and war, for example-were debated by a Grand Council, which met periodically on a hilltop at Onondaga. The first meeting took place, according to tribal lore, under a giant evergreen tree where an eagle perched, its eyes scanning the horizon for signs of approaching trouble. Fifty chiefs attended, selected from each tribe by its leading older women, the clan mothers (in later years only 49 clan representatives would take part because no one was deemed worthy of filling the seat originally occupied by Hiawatha). Each tribe had one vote, and decisions were always unanimous, reached by consensus usually after lengthy discussion. No one was obliged to accept a conclusion he did not agree with.
  
  Much the same system prevailed within the tribes themselves, down to the village level. The basic unit in Iroquois life was the "fireside," consisting of a mother and all her children. Related families lived together in sturdy wooden longhouses, some of which reached 400 feet in length. A dozen or more family groups might share a single longhouse, residing in compartments on either side of a central aisle and sharing a central hearth with the family opposite them. Each longhouse bore above its door the symbol of the clan to which its inhabitants belonged. There were ten clans in all, each named for the animal considered to be the clan members' original ancestor.
  
  Ultimate power, both within the longhouse and beyond it, rested with the leading older women. Clan membership passed through the female line: A woman who was a member of the Turtle clan had children who were Turtle Clan. A husband generally moved into the longhouse of his wife's clan, where the senior clan mother held sway. Women named the male delegates to clan and tribal councils and also the tribal representatives to the league's Grand Council at Onondaga.
  
  The Iroquois conceived of their league as a great longhouse stretching from the Mohawk Valley almost to the Pennsylvnia border in the west. In it the five tribes gathered around five fires. The Mohawk guarded the eastern side; to their west were the Oneida, then the Onondaga, who tended the central hearth; following them were the Cayuga and then the powerful Seneca, keepers of the western door. The Iroquois Trail, spanning the length of what is now upstate New York, provided moccasined runners with easy access to any part of the longhouse.
  
  Like a domestic longhouse, the league could be extended to shelter other peoples. In 1722, Tuscarora refugees from war with the English migrated north from the Carolinas and were soon accepted as a Sixth Nation. During the course of the 18th century other refugees filtered into Iroquois country, and several new communities of displaced peoples grew up under the protective Tree of Peace.
  
• Armed with new metal weapons obtained from the Europeans, Montagnais and Algonquin warriors north of the St. Lawrence fought with Mohawks and other Iroquois to the south, turning the once populous and prosperous region into a no-man's-land. In the past, most intertribal warfare had been relatively modest in scale, with opponents meeting to settle local disputes or to boost tribal prestige. Warriors often went into battle wearing armor made of wooden slats, and stood in ranks to engage the enemy in ritualistic combat with stone-tipped arrows and wooden clubs. That had quickly changed, the fighters gave up their bows for muskets, and their war clubs for steel-headed tomahawks. Shedding their wooden armor, they ventured forth in mobile bands to stage surprsie raids on enemy villages, hijack trading parties, and generally spread terror and mayhem.
  
  One early confrontation took place when the explorer Samuel de Champlain, in search of beaver, ventured into Iroquois territory with a party of Indian allies. Champlain had made earlier trips to the Northeast, following Cartier's route up the St Lawrence toward the Great Lakes.  Along the way he had made friends with the Algonquin, the Huron, and the Montagnais, forging trade pacts and exchanging furs and wampum. In the spring of 1609, accompanied by some of his new allies, Champlain headed south through upstate New York and "discovered" the lake that bears his name. At the lake's far end they came upon a group of Mohawk warriors, traditional enemies of the Huron. French musket fire sent the Mohawks fleeing.
  
  This brief skirmish helped draw lines of combat that prevailed for the next two centuries. In battles that followed, the Huron and northern Algonquian tribes generaly sided with the French. Against them were the Five Nations of the Iroquois League.
  
  Searching for trading partners, the Iroquois turned first to the Dutch along the Hudson River and then to the English. At the same time, threatened by an encircling French alliance of traditional rivals-all determined to exclude them from the beaver trade-they went on the offensive.
  
• Mohawk and Mahican warriors clashed in a bloody four-year dispute that by 1628 destroyed the latter's trade monopoly with the Dutch at Albany.
  
• In the winter of 1703-04, a raiding party of French, Abenaki, and Mohawk fighters from the Catholic mission village Caughnawaga, near Montreal, made a grueling snowshoe trek across the Green Mountains of Vermont and south into Massachusetts. Their target: the English settlement of Deerfield. They caught the sleeping town unawares one February dawn and burned most of it to the ground. More than 100 Deerfield residents became captives, including the town's minister, the Reverend John Williams. Hurrying up the frozen Connecticut River to escape pursuing militia, the raiders tomahawked anyone unable to keep up-including Williams' wife-though they treated the children far more leniently. The captors carried Williams' seven-year-old daughter, Eunice, on their shoulders and looked after her with what even her father later described as "a great deal of tenderness." When the prisoners reached destination after 25 cold, arduous days, Eunice was adopted by a Caughnawaga family.
  
  Life in the motherly embrace of a native village was in some ways much more pleasant than a typical upbringing in Puritan Massachusetts. She would be taught by example rather than punishment-by love, not the birch rod. So when Eunice's father, who had been ransomed, tried toget her back, she said no. Eunice converted to Catholicism; at age 16 she married a Caughnawaga man; and except for a few brief visits to New England, she spent the rest of her 80 years as a tribal woman.
  
• Proclaiming their neutrality, the Iroqouis in 1701 made peace. Iroquois chiefs convened at Onondaga to try to halt the downward spiral. Recasting the league's earlier policy, they made peace with their Indian enemies. They then traveled to Albany and Montreal, entering into additional peace treaties with the English and French. Henceforth, the Iroquois would remain neutral in the wars of their European neighbors.  It was a wise decision.  Using their strategic location to play the colonial rivals against each other, the People of the Longhouse once again held the balance of power in the Northeast.
  
  Despite the Iroquois revival, generations of armed confict had a devastating impact on the Indian way of life. Young men left their families and villages to serve as scouts and forest soldiers for European armies; Indian raiding parties ranged far and wide; colonial armies tramped into Indian country to burn towns and crops. Wars disupted normal cycles of hunting, gathering, planting, and harvesting. Rituals and ceremonies that ensured the health of the community, the success of the hunt, the fertilityof the crops, and even the protection of warriors-all suffered neglect and disruption. As men fell in battle, populations plummeted;birth rates dropped, and famine stalked in the ashes of burning food supplies. Diseases returned, finding easy targets in hungry children.
  
  One way for a tribe to rebuild its population was to take large numbers of captives and adopt them. This was an accepted, time-honored practice: By the late 1600's some Iroquois towns contained as many adoptees as native-born inhabitants. Nor was it uncommon for some of the new faces to be white.
  
• A candidate for sainthood, Kateri Tekakwitha was a Mohawk woman who in 1677 became the first Indian nun. So great was her piety, it is said, that when she died a miracle occurred: smallpox scars that had disfigured her face since childhood abruptly disappeared.
  
• With their thirst for European goods and liquor, many Northeastern natives fell deep into debt. Searching for ways to pay their creditors, they turned to the one asset they held in seemingly endless supply: land. The dense woodlands that blanketed the region were sparsely populated and appeared extensive enough to contain everyone. No deeds of ownership marked the boundaries of tribal territories, which had been established over centuries by custom and usage: Here the Narragansett dug for clams; here the Cayuga farmed and foraged. And so if the newcomers wanted to bargain for the use of a tribe's ancestral hunting grounds, there seemed to be no harm in letting them do so.
  
  The settlers had different ideas, of course. Once they took possession, they set about transforming the land to match their vision of civilized life: a world of farms, fields and fences, roads and bridges, prosperous mills and bustling towns. Confronted with the newcomers' bewildering land hunger, Indian leaders tried to strike the best deals they could. They attempted to master the complexities of colonial deeds and to slow down the rate at which their homelands were being overrun. But the process was unstoppable. Land speculators, in the business of acquiring woodland property for future development, made offers to individual villages and families that seemed too tempting to refuse. Sometimes, because of shady dealing and the clever phrasing of property deeds-what the Onondaga leader Canasatego scornfully called "pen and ink work"-the land slipped from the Indians without their full consent or even their knowledge. So by fair means and foul, the tribal territories were steadily whittled away. "Our hearts grieve us when we consider what small parcel of lands is remaining to us," Mohawk headmen complained to Albany in 1730.
  
• In the mid-1700's, the colonial administrators tried to bring the tide of settlement under control, and some succeeded better than others. One of the most able-and controversial- was Sir William Johnson, England's superintendent of Indian affairs in the northeast. Johnson had moved into Iroquois country and made a fortune in land development and fur trading while at the same time earning the lifelong trust of the Iroquois nations. During the recent wars, he had led a combined force of Mohawks and colonists into battle against the French.  His Mohawk wife, Mary Brant, gave him eight mixed-blooed children. the Mohawk people, in turn, took Johnson into the tribe under the name Brother Warraghiyagey (He who Does Much Business) and moved their council fire to the grounds of his estate.
  
  Resolving to settle once and for all the boundary between white settlement and Indian hunting grounds, he called a summit council of tribal and colonial delegates. Some 3,000 Indians showed up in 1768 to attend the meeting at Fort Stanwix on the upper Mohawk River. The outcome was a cash payment to the Iroquois and the promise of a perpetual homeland north of the Mohawk River, in return for which they gave up large stretches of territory to the south and west. But much of this region was also claimed by the Shawnee, Cherokee, and others-whose expressions of outrage and open contempt brought Iroquois prestige to its lowest ebb in many years. (The only real victor was Johnson himself, who lived up to his tribal name by coming away with 100,000 acres of Mohawk Valley land.)
  
  The close ties between the Iroquois and Johnson would have further consequences during the next great conflict, the War for Independence. As a British official, Johnson used every opportunity to enlist the goodwill of the Six Nations on behalf of their "Father, the Great King." When the aging Johnson died shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, the Iroquois Confederacy found itself near stage center in the drama of the American Revolution.
  
• The Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 sent British and American agents hurrying into Indian country to recruit warriors for their respectives sides...The Iroquois also attempted to remain on the sidelines-at first. Slowly, however, the Iroquois were pulled into the conflict, and the resulting split in loyalty crippled the league as an effective force. The Oneida and Tuscarora generally supported the Americans; the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca sided with England. The man most responsible for the latter was Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief better known by his English name-Joseph Brant.
  
  The late William Johnson's brother-in-law, Brant had fought under Johnson against the French as a teenager and later served as Johson's interpreter. Along the way he picked up a first-rate mission-school education, became close with his Johnson in-laws, and translated the Christian Gospels into Mohawk. He also became an eloquent speaker at Mohawk councils. Not surprisingly, when the British started courting the Iroquois, they turned to Brant.
  
  Invited to visit London in early 1776, Brant was feted and lionized.  King George III granted him an audience, and the Prince of Wales took him out for a night on the town. So great was Brant's celebrity that London street gangs began shaving their hair into spiky Mohawk topknots. But before he agreed to anything, Brant wanted concessions in exchange.

"The Mohawks have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King; yet they have been very badly treated by his people.  Indeed it is very hard, when we have let the king's subjects have so much of our lands for so little value. We are tired out in making complaints and getting no redress."-Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), Mohawk, 1776


Apparently the royal reply satisfied him, for on returning to Iroquois country, Brant began raising troops to fight the Americans. Amassing a force of Mohawk and other Iroquois warriors, he joined the British in an assault through western New York in the summer of 1777. The combined force of Redcoats and Indians struck Fort Stanwix, was turned back, then moved on to intercept a relief force of Patriot militiamen at the Battle of Oriskany.


• A contingent of Senecas also fought for the British at Oriskany; ranged against them on the American side were companies of Oneida and Tuscarora warriors. Earlier that year, in the wake of a smallpox epidemic that killed three Onondaga chiefs, the council fire of the Iroquois League had been ritually extinguished. Now, in the smoke of battle, the great Longhouse Confederacy was truly ended. Brother fought against brother in bitter hand-to-hand conflict, leaving the ground heaped with bodies and tinting the streams red with blood, in an engagment long remembered with horror by those who survivied it.
  
  Brant remained in the field, leading his Mohawks in raids on frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania, sometimes with British troops or with colonial militiamen who had remained loyal to the Crown. Reports of atrocities began to circulate. A combined force of Iroquois and Tory militia struck the prosperous farmlands of northeastern Pennsylvania, burning houses, driving off livestock, and killing 227 armed defenders, along with many women and children.
  
  After one attack on an American fort in 1777, Brant found that a child had been carried away by some of his men. The child was returned unharmed to the commandant the next morning, along with a note that made pointed reference to white militiamen sometimes allied with Brant's Mohawk warriors:
  

"Sir: I send you by one of our runners the child which we will deliver, that you may know what ever others do, I do not make war on women and children. I am sorry to say that I have those engaged with me in the service who are more savage than the savages themselves."-Joseph Brant, Mohawk.

The Americans struck back with avenging fury, invading Iroquois towns in the Susquehanna Valley in 1778 and again the following spring. "They put to death all the women and children," lamented an Onondaga chief, "excepting some of the young women, whom they carried away for the use of their soldiers and were afterwards put to death in a more shameful manner." (Nowhere was there a starker contrast in the conduct of whites and natives. "Bad as these savages are," wrote Gen James Clinton, no friend of the Iroquois, "they never violate the chastity of any woman.")


• George Washington, determined to extinguish the Indian threat for once and for all, then ordered a massive sweep of Iroquois country, specifying that it should "not merely be overrun, but destroyed." In August 1779, Gen John Sullivan marched north from Pennsylvania with 2,500 men. Many later described the richness of the land, with its neat frame houses and broad, verdant cornfields. But their mission was to scorch the earth, and that they did-burning towns, pillaging longhouses, uprooting crops, chopping down orchards, slaughtering cattle, and destroying grain supplies. Some units stopped to plunder graves for burial goods; others skinned the bodies of dead Iroquois to make leggings.

"There was nothing but bare soil and timber, not a mouthful of any kind of sustenance, not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing form hunger."-Seneca surivor of Sullivan's campaign

Most residents, forewarned by lookouts, fled into the woods and so sustained few casualties. But their homeland lay devastated. Many fled to the British fort at Niagara, where they huddled in squalid refugee camps through one the coldest winters on record. Some starved; some froze to death. Ever after, the Iroquois remembered George Washington as Caunotaucarius-Town Destroyer.

In 1783, Great Britain and the United States signed a peace accord in Paris. Along with independence, the new nation won title to all territory south of Canada that had been claimed by the British. To the mind of the vicotrs, this included lands rightfully belonging to the Indians. And so for the region's original inhabitants, the Treaty of Paris was an act of terrible betrayal. Virtually all prior government agreements were rendered void. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, already broken a hundred times over by land-hungry frontier farmers, became so much scrap paper. With the departure of the British, Indian warriors who had supported them were left stranded. Even those allied with the Patriots, who had fought and bled in the cause of liberty, received little thanks.


• When delegates of the newly independent American Colonies met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a Constitution, they took inspiration from many sources: the ancient Greek democracies, British parliamentary tradition, the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau-and the practical example of the Iroquois league.
  
  "We are a powerful confederacy," the Onondaga leader Canasatego had advised colonials officials back in 1744, "and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power." The words prompted a bright young journalist name Benjamin Franklin to make a study of the Iroquois system. Franklin discovered a fine working example of representative democracy, with an unwritten constitution that spelled out checks and balances, rules of procedure, limits of power, and a stress on individual liberty. Deeply impressed, Franklin drew up a scheme, called the Albany Plan, for joining the Thirteen Colonies into a similar confederation.
  
  Franklin's proposal languished for several decades. Then, at Philadelphia, the delegates turned to its provisions; much of the final Constitution thus came to reflect Iroquois ideals. So, too, did an important piece of national symbolism: the American eagle.  Like the majestic bird that guards the Iroquois Tree of Peace, the American eagle stands for unity and power. There is one further echo. The Iroquois eagle holds six arrows, one for each of the Six Nations; the United States eagle grasps 13 arrows, a reminder of its 13 original member states.
  
• In New England unpaid Revolutionary War soldiers were given Indian lands instead of currency. Two tribes, the Penobscot and Passamquoddy, appealed to the new US Congress, demanding the freedom and justice "which we have been fighting for as other Americans." Eventually Congress passed the Indian Trade and Non-Intercourse Act, declaring illegal any sales of Indian land that Congress itself had not specifically approved, but the measure had little effect....The Revolution left the Iroquois Confederacy in ruins. An embittered Joseph Brant, preferring to live in exile rather than remain at home among the Americans, led his Mohawks and some other Iroquois allies to the Grand River in Ontario. On a small stretch of land set aside for them by the British government-and where their descendants still inhabit the Six Nations Reserve-they built new homes and churches and rekindled their sadly diminished coucil fire.

"Every man of us thought that, by fighting for the king, we should ensure for ourselves and children a good inheritance."-Joseph Brant, Mohawk


The government of the Iroquois was now permanently divided between Brant's followers in Canada and groups remaining in New York. To mark the split, tribal leaders physically cut the great founding wampum belt of the confederacy into two separate parts.


• For generations, Mohawk ironworkers from eastern Canada and New York State have pieced together the struts and girders of today's suspension bridges and high-rise cityscapes. Their first job, in 1850, put a bridge across the St Lawrence River at Montreal. Says Tom Diabo, whose grandfather worked on it: "You know how Mohawks love to build things. So when the men from town were watching the bridge being built, some of the younger guys just climbed right up to take a closer look. The Frenchmen were so scared they had to hold on to everything they could so they wouldn't fall off. But the guys from town just walked along the supports looking the job over, checking out how it was done. That is how we got into the construction trade."
  
  Walking the high steel of Sault Ste Marie Bridge in Michigan in 1888, the tribe's first casualty, Joe Diabo, plunged to his death. But the Mohawks went on, putting up the Empire State Building and thousands of other structures.