lasted understanding religious convincing history destruction

BEFORE COLUMBUS
29
legal device. And child welfare legislation, prominent in the Iroquois scheme
of things, had to wait for a century or more before the white men were ready
to adopt it. 33
To limit a description of female power among the Iroquois to the
achievement of "woman suffrage," however, is to not even begin to convey
the reality of women's role in Iroquois society. As the Constitution of
the Five Nations firmly declared: "The lineal descent of the people of the
Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the
progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and
women shall follow the status of the mother." 34 In her survey and analysis
of the origins of sexual inequality among the major cultures of the world,
this is how anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday describes the exception of
the Iroquois:
In the symbolic, economic, and familial spheres the Iroquois were matriarchal,
that is, female dominated. Iroquoian women headed the family longhouse,
and much of the economic and ceremonial life centered on the agricultural
activities of women. Men were responsible for hunting, war, and
intertribal affairs. Although women appointed men to League positions and
could veto their decisions, men dominated League deliberations. This tension
between male and female spheres, in which females dominated village life
and left intertribal life to men, suggests that the sexes were separate but
equal, at least during the confederacy. Before the confederacy, when the individual
nations stood alone and consisted of a set of loosely organized villages
subsisting on the horticultural produce of women, females may have
overshadowed the importance of males. 35
Perhaps this is why, as Sanday later remarks: "Archaeological excavations
of pre-Iroquoian village sites show that they were unfortified, suggesting
that if there was an emphasis on warfare, it lacked major economic motivation,
and conquest was an unknown objective." 36 And perhaps this also
helps account for the unusually strong egalitarianism even among later
Iroquois people--as among other native peoples of the northeast-{)n which
early European visitors invariably remarked. The Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix,
for instance, traveled throughout what today is New York, Michigan,
and eastern Canada and marveled at the early age at which Indian
children were encouraged, with success, in seemingly contradictory directions-toward
both prideful independence and cooperative, communal socialization.
Moreover, he noted, the parents accomplished this goal by using
the gentlest and subtlest of techniques. While "fathers and mothers
neglect nothing, in order to inspire their children with certain principles of
honour which they preserve their whole lives," he wrote, "they take care
always to communicate their instructions on this head, in an indirect manner."
An emphasis on pride and honor-and thus on the avoidance of
shame-was the primary means of adult guidance. For example, notes