Admin Table of Contents
How did the Iroquois live together?
Each Iroquois person was born into a clan and remained in that clan for life. Being related, people within a clan could not intermarry; one had to marry someone in a different clan. When a young woman married, her husband came to live in her longhouse, where they would make their new home.
How were the Iroquois organized?
The social structure of the Iroquois is tied to their family structure. Iroquois society is matrilineal, which means that the family line is traced down from the female line. Within each tribe, there are moieties, or parts of a group that divide them socially and ritually. Each moiety is made up of two or three clans.
How were Iroquois villages set up?
Four hundred years ago, an Iroquois longhouse village was typically surrounded by a palisade or “stockade.” The palisade was built of tall, upright posts set into the ground, with saplings, and sometimes, sheets of bark, interwoven between them. From the inside and outside, the palisade wall resembled a wicker basket.
What was the family structure of the Iroquois?
The longhouse family was the basic unit of traditional Iroquois society, which used a nested form of social organization: households (each representing a lineage) were divisions of clans, several clans constituted each moiety, and the two moieties combined to create a tribe.
Is the Iroquois tribe communal or hierarchical?
The Iroquois had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals. The Huron had “as much land as they need[ed].” As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally.
What were Iroquois villages like?
A village was home to hundreds of people, sometimes as many as a thousand people. They lived in large structures called longhouses, which were owned by the women living in them. A longhouse was about 20 feet wide and 50 to 150 feet long. That’s half the length of a football field.
What did the Iroquois village look like?
Iroquois villages were often stockaded and located in easily defensible high places near water. The stockade was made from logs and was often 15 to 20 feet in height. Often the stockades were made in double, triple, and even quadruple lines which were interlaced and reinforced with heavy bark.
What kind of houses did the Iroquois live in?
An Iroquois longhouse Longhouses are exactly that: long houses that have a long, narrow, rectangular shape. They have been built by many different cultures around the world. Long ago, Vikings lived in longhouses; today, some rice-farming people in Borneo live in them.
How did the Europeans change the Iroquois longhouse?
Descriptions made by these explorers and missionaries record early changes to longhouse and longhouse village architecture introduced by the use of European metal tools, particularly, trade axes, and by Europeans themselves who at times remodeled longhouses for their own and special uses.
Who are the members of the Iroquois tribe?
Iroquois Longhouse The Iroquois longhouse were built to house 20 or more families. The Iroquois Indian tribe was actually a confederacy of six Native American nations. It consisted of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.
How did the Iroquois tribe preserve their heritage?
In Iroquois clans this person was a woman. All the people in the clan traced their heritage back to her through their female ancestors. Each Iroquois person was born into a clan and remained in that clan for life. Being related, people within a clan could not intermarry; one had to marry someone in a different clan.