Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America

Chapter 4 War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience

Chapter 4 War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience “The character of all these [Iroquois] Nations is warlike and cruel,” wrote Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune in 1657. “The chief virtue of these poor Pagans being cruelty, just as mildness is that of Christians, they teach it to their children from their very cradles, and accustom them to the most atrocious carnage and the most barbarous spectacles.”1 Like most Europeans of his day, Le Jeune ignored his own countrymen’s capacity for bloodlust and attributed the supposedly unique bellicosity of the Iroquois to their irreligion and uncivilized condition. Still, his observations contain a kernel of truth often overlooked by our more sympathetic eyes: in ways quite unfamiliar and largely unfathomable to Euro‑ peans, warfare was vitally important in the cultures of the seventeenth‑​­ century Iroquois and their neighbors. For generations of Euro‑​­ Americans, the signifi‑ cance that Indians attached to warfare seemed to substantiate images of blood‑ thirsty savages who waged war for mere sport. Only in recent decades have ethnohistorians discarded such shibboleths and begun to study Indian wars in the same economic and diplomatic frameworks long used by students of Euro‑ pean conflicts. Almost necessarily, given the weight of past prejudice, their work has stressed similarities between Indian and European warfare.2 Thus neither commonplace stereotypes nor scholarly efforts to combat them have left much room for serious consideration of the possibility that the non‑​­ state societies of aboriginal North America may have waged war for different—​­ but no less ra‑ tional and no more savage—​­ purposes than did the nation‑​­ states of Europe.3 This chapter explores that possibility through an analysis of the changing role of warfare in Iroquois culture during the first century after European contact. The Iroquois Confederacy (composed, from west to east, of the Five Nations of the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks) frequently went 70 Native Power and European Trade to war for reasons rooted as much in internal social demands as in external dis‑ putes with their neighbors. The same observation could be made about count‑ less European states, but the particular internal motives that often propelled the Iroquois and other northeastern Indians to make war have few parallels in Euro‑​­ American experience. In many Indian cultures a pattern known as the “mourning‑​­ war” was one means of restoring lost population, ensuring social continuity, and dealing with death.4 A grasp of the changing role of this pattern in Iroquois culture is essential if the seventeenth‑​­and early eighteenth‑​­ century campaigns of the Five Nations—​­ and a vital aspect of the contact situation—​­ are to be understood. “War is a necessary exercise for the Iroquois,” explained mis‑ sionary and ethnologist Joseph-​­François Lafitau, “for, besides the usual motives which people have in declaring it against troublesome neighbours . . . , it is in‑ dispensable to them also because of one of their fundamental laws of being.”5 * * * Euro‑​­ Americans often noted that martial skills were highly valued in Indian societies and that, for young men, exploits on the warpath were important Northeastern North America, c. 1650. Map by Philip Schwartzberg. 8:12 GMT) War and Culture 71 determinants of personal prestige. This was, some hyperbolized, particularly true of the Iroquois. “It is not for the Sake of Tribute . . . , that they make War,” Cadwallader Colden observed of the Five Nations, “but from the Notions of Glory, which they have ever most strongly imprinted on their Minds.”6 Participation in a war party was a benchmark episode in an Iroquois youth’s development, and later success in battle increased the young man’s stature in his clan and village. His prospects for an advantageous marriage, his chances for recognition as a village leader, and his hopes for eventual selection to a sachemship depended largely—​­ though by no means entirely—​­ on his skill on the warpath, his munificence in giving war feasts, and his ability to attract fol‑ lowers when organizing a raid.7 Missionary‑​­ explorer Louis Hennepin exag‑ gerated when he claimed that “those amongst the Iroquoise who are not given to War, are had in great Contempt, and pass for Lazy and Effeminate People,” but warriors did in fact reap great social rewards.8 The plaudits offered to successful warriors suggest a deep cultural signifi‑ cance; societies usually reward warlike behavior not for its own sake but for the useful functions it performs.9 Among the functions postulated in studies of non‑​­ state warfare is the maintenance of stable population levels. Usually this...