II.

Customs

The Iroquois traditionally had an agricultural economy, based mainly on corn, with supplementary crops of squash, beans, and tobacco, and later of orchard fruits such as apples and peaches. They crafted fine pottery, ash-splint baskets, and mats of cornhusks and used wampum as a medium of exchange. The symbolic designs woven into the large wampum belts served as public records.

Each Iroquois town contained several long, bark-covered communal longhouses. Along the structures’ inner sides the families of a clan lived in semiprivate compartments; the central areas were used as social and political meeting places.

The Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy met in a longhouse in Onondaga, the centrally located main village of the Onondaga people, where a council fire was kept burning continually. The councils were fairly democratic in composition; delegates were elected by members of various lineages, and each delegate represented both a tribe and one of the matrilineal clans within a tribe. The office of delegate was restricted to chiefs, and every delegate had to meet the approval of both tribal and league councils. If the conduct of any delegate was perceived as improper, or if he lost the people’s confidence, the women of his clan expelled him and chose another delegate to serve in his place. The league as a whole had no single head, and deliberative decisions were typically made by a unanimous vote of the league council.

Central to Iroquois religious beliefs was Orenda, the Great Spirit and the Creator, from whom all other spirits were derived. In healing ceremonies, Iroquois shamans wore wooden masks, or False Faces, that were carved from a living tree. The masks represented the spirits of the forest and were believed to frighten away evil spirits that caused illness.