The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization

by Daniel K. Richter

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

Genres: History, Native American History, Nonfiction, Native Americans, Native American, American History, Indigenous

454 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 1992

Reviews

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Daniel Richter, wrote this book, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization, as a chronological history of the Five Iroquois Nations from their creation story through to a new “continent dominated by Euro-Americans.” The author’s purpose is to exhibit “European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the frontier.” The author wanted to show how the Iroquois were a “people that found themselves caught up by economic, political and demographic forces over which they had little control.”
Richter wrote this book utilizing a chronological timeline through eleven chapters starting with Native American Cosmogonic myths and beliefs followed by Iroquois beginnings and their Great League of Peace and Power. Once the reader hits Chapter 3, they can already begin to see the Iroquois cannot maintained peace and war with their neighbors is the inevitable outcome for the Five Nations. Along the St. Lawrence waterway, “the Algonquins, Montagnais, and Huron…were at war with at least some of the Five Nations by the first decade of the seventeenth century.” Between developing warfare and technology, boosting economic beaver fur trade, and epidemics of disease; this all influenced more Iroquois raids on neighboring Native Americans. Richter then shows how the Dutch, English and French influenced the Iroquois nation through trade, religion, wampum, and ultimately more war and destruction. It is not until the 1700s where the Iroquois start finding peace with the French and the Five Nations begin to realize the importance of a “diplomatic and political balance” between the English, French and colonizers. The Iroquois restored and regrouped during this relative peace. Towards the end of Richter’s book, he shows how after the 1720s, the “Europeans rather than native Americans, now substantially controlled the destinies of all the peoples of northeastern North America.” By the 1730s, the Iroquois longhouses dispersed into smaller villages and alcohol abuse ran rampant through the communities. Ultimately, the now Six Nations did survive through all the challenges and their core values remained intact. Their community drastically changed but the history is still very much alive.
The author uses a vast number of sources for this material from written primary sources to translations of oral histories. Richter’s verbose notes helps guide other students through the relevant primary sources and he even categorized his bibliography by specific categories and climatic year (1760). The sources include many written works from the 1980s but also a plethora of council minutes and quotations from the 1600-1700s.
A strength in Richter’s work would include the ease in which he tells the story to his reader. He does not try to overcomplicate the information and make it written for a master scholar. Throughout the work, the perspective stays in the eyes of the Native Americans as first proposed by the author. This is challenging to do as there are no primary sources in hard copy written by Native Americans on this topic of history.
The reader noticed a weakness in slightly jumping back in years in a few of the chapters where it could confuse a reader without a fluent background on this topic of history. For the most part, the information flowed chronologically, but there were times where dates jumped around the timeline.
Overall, Richter’s work on a unique Iroquois perspective during the European colonization of American offered great insight on a topic broadly written in a contrasting view. He offered many valuable primary and secondary resources for the future student and kept his promise on the Iroquois perspective through the economic, political and demographic challenges from pre-European colonization to 1750s.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

makes a helpful intervention in attempting to center the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century in the NY/Ontario regions around the Iroquois rather than the French or the English. It doesn't really do that, fully. It still reads like a military history where every turn in the plot and in Richter's historical narration involves diplomatic or military interaction with European colonizers. So we don't learn quite as much about the longhouse and Iroquoian culture as the title might suggest, but it was still very informative as to why/how their diplomatic and political relations with each other, other Native American groups, and the Dutch, British, and French took the forms that they did. One of Richter's clearest moves is to recast the image of the needlessly violent Iroquois (say, via Mohawks) as deeply in mourning. He also thoroughly demonstrates that there was a lot to mourn about.

Helpful, but a bit dry, not as informative about Iroquois culture and religion as I'd hoped, and a tad long.

[Robert Jeens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterful book by a serious historian, richly documented, and rigorously analyzed. Richter takes us on a journey into the heart of Iroquoia, looking at how the peoples of the Iroquois League adapted to European colonization from the beginning to the 1730s. Taking the viewpoint of the Iroquois, the book goes into some detail about the debates at various councils and between factions in different villages and the League as a whole. As an outsider hundreds of years later, reasoning from incomplete evidence recorded by other outsiders, the author admits that he doesn’t have all the answers, but this is a book of sanity before everything was swallowed by identity politics. Richter tries to tell you the viewpoint of the Iroquois, but he doesn’t say you have to believe it. Here is the evidence, here are the limitations of the evidence. If you want to dispute it, where is your evidence? The basic argument of the book is that, by the 1730s, the Iroquois had successfully adjusted their policies to preserve their cultural autonomy in an age of European colonization.
There were Five and then Six Nations of the Iroquois League, which became the Iroquois Confederacy, located in upstate New York, south of Lake Ontario. From east to west, they were the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Senecas, and the Tuscaroras joined from the south in the early 18th Century. They were agriculturalists who lived in heavily fortified villages of about 2,000 people, and at the time of contact, there were probably about 20,000 people in the Iroquois League. In the villages, people lived in longhouses, up to 150 feet long and about 15 feet wide, in which a grandmother would predominate, sharing the house with her daughters, and their husbands and children. Women were in charge of things in the village, including farming (and the food supplies), cooking, raising the children, and making clothes. Men were in charge of warfare, hunting, diplomacy and building the villages and clearing the fields.
The Great Iroquois League of Peace and Power was formed probably in the late 15th Century. The creation myth is included in the book. The primary function of the League was to keep peace and spiritual unity among the diverse peoples of Iroquoia. There were very important spiritual rituals to keep this peace within the League, and because the Grand Council’s main purpose was only the preservation of peace, the Iroquois did not have a centralized decision making process. There was no coercive state. The Council operated through consensus, and so minority opinions could not be suppressed. Villages could speak for themselves, as could factions within them. The Grand Council could and did engage in diplomatic negotiations, but that was not its primary purpose. Nobody spoke for everybody. Factionalism was normal. Sometimes this was unhelpful, as factions who wanted war could just attack their enemies although most wanted peace. Sometimes this was helpful, as factions who wanted peace could send representatives to their enemies, engage in negotiations, and build consensus in the League over time.
The peace brought about by the League was basically a state of mind - good thoughts - and that was extremely important in a noncoercive society where people could not be forced to be peaceful. Similarly, making peace with their neighbors was another state of mind brought about through the use of wampum belts. Wampum belts were granted to chiefs by their clans or villages as proof that the chief was not just an individual, but was speaking for others. These belts were then offered with every statement the chief made, to dry your tears, to open your ears, etc. until the enemy’s reason was restored and discussion could begin. But again, because of the factional, noncoercive nature of Iroquois society, the chiefs could not force young men from going to war, and so the state of mind was fundamental to its preservation.
Which meant that war was “a fundamental way of being” for the Iroquois. Although the fur trade introduced by the Europeans intensified warfare, there is plenty of evidence that war was endemic between the Iroquois and their neighbors before that. Of particular importance was the “mourning war.” The mourning war is one of many examples of both the political power of women in Iroquois society, and the fact that, if women are in charge, the world is not necessarily more peaceful. When someone died, they needed to be replaced, both their place in society and their name. When this was a leader, that person (who would be a man) was replaced by another man in the female line, chosen by the women. That person was also given the original person’s name, a process known as a “requickening”. For others, however, the women would pronounce a mourning war, and call on the men in their lineage to go to war to bring back captives to replace the dead. When the captives were brought back, the women were the ones who decided to adopt them or kill them.
The actual narrative of the book is largely a military and economic history, I think mostly that is because that is what was important to the Europeans who recorded what was going on with the Iroquois at the time. The Iroquois began to get European goods by the middle of the 16th Century, probably through middlemen who brought them from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Coast. This brought about a flowering of their indigenous art and implements, as they could use superior materials to make them. The Dutch arrived at Albany on the Hudson River in the early 17th Century and began to trade with the Mahican people who lived there until the Mohawks cleared out the Mahicans and began to trade directly with the Dutch. This made the Mohawks more powerful than other Iroquois nations, but they worked it out through the mechanisms of the League. At the same time, to the north, the Iroquois’ indigenous enemies began trading with the French on the St. Lawrence. Thus began the “Beaver Wars” for the control of the fur trade. At the same time, all the indigenous peoples of the northeast began suffering from massive depopulations as a result of the introduction of European diseases, which intensified the need for mourning wars. Because the Dutch traded guns to the Iroquois and the French traded very many fewer to their allies, by the 1650s, the Iroquois were victorious, having smashed the Hurons, Eries, Petuns and Neutral peoples who lived in what is now Southern Ontario. They incorporated large numbers of them into the League or forced the others to move west.
From the 1650s to 1700, the Iroquois entered a new era. The French-allied indigenous peoples of the north became better armed and pushed back. As well, the French sent military expeditions into Iroquoia itself, burning villages and food supplies. There were periods of peace and war. At the same time, the Iroquois fought to the south and west for better effect. Meanwhile, the English replaced the Dutch in New York. The League split as Iroquois who had been Christianized by French Jesuits moved to reserves on the St Lawrence, and they fought against each other in the 1690s. The Iroquois League became the Iroquois Confederacy, as previously, village chiefs had spoken only for their own peoples but League Councils made up of war chiefs began discussing diplomacy for the entire Iroquois people in the late 1680s. The Confederacy was split between Anglophile, Francophile and neutralist factions. The end results of these developments was that the Iroquois made a grand peace with the French and their allied nations in 1701, a peace which held despite various provocations, until the end of the period of this book.
By 1700, Richter contends that the Iroquois were economically dependent upon European trade goods and could not afford a war with any of the European powers on their borders. They entered into a “Covenant Chain” agreement with New York, which the British interpreted to mean that they were sovereign over the Iroquois and the Iroquois were sovereign over other indigenous peoples to their south and west. This was used in a series of land transfers in which the Iroquois surrendered the lands of those peoples to the British. The Iroquois were still fighting other indigenous peoples to their south and thus entered into relations with Pennsylvania and other southern colonies. The British built forts on Lake Ontario and the French at Niagara and Detroit. These had the effect of cutting the Iroquois off from the western fur trade.
By the 1730s, there was widespread dislocation. Some Mohawk lands had been lost, and many Iroquois had moved from Iroquoia proper and gone north, south and west, joining other peoples or becoming new peoples. None of the big village castles existed any more, and nobody lived in longhouses. Alcoholism was widespread and the Iroquois were completely dependent upon European goods. They had been economically and politically colonized. Still, they existed as a people with social and cultural autonomy. The Iroquois Great League of Peace continued to function, with its associated rituals and condolences. The Iroquois creations myth continued to be told. The sex-based division of labor continued to function, people spoke their own languages, and they continued to see themselves as Iroquois.
So, “first came massive depopulation from imported diseases; next, a slide into economic dependence on trade with Europeans; then ensnarement in the imperial struggles of powerful French and English colonial neighbors; finally, direct incursions on Iroquois territory and sovereignty.” But the Iroquois held out for a long time. How did they do it? First, they had a good geographical location, where they were able to take advantage of trade routes to Europeans while being inland enough to be a little hard to get to to conquer directly. Also, the Iroquois could maneuver between the French and the Dutch and then English. Finally, they had a strong culture and political institutions. They were agriculturalists whose economy continued to function despite the upheavals, they adopted war captives to make up for losses due to epidemics and war and they had the Great League of Peace and Power itself, which was flexible enough to accommodate diverse peoples and strong enough to continue enduring rituals.
The Iroquois were living in a colonized world but were still intact, with the rituals of the League still functioning. They had spiritual and cultural but not political or economic independence. Richter has here a detailed, rich history. Because of the nature of that history, many of the details will probably never be known. He is a worthy chronicler. If you think he is wrong, what is your evidence?

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

While its narrative begins to drag in the final chapters, this book is otherwise a pathbreaking, stunningly intelligent, and deeply researched study of the most powerful Indian federation in colonial North America. It explains with clarity and insight the role that disease, commercial dependency, mass adoption of captives, religious conversion, and imperial rivalry played in the Five Nations' devastating military campaigns of the seventeenth century (and how those wars and the stresses that caused them nearly ripped the Iroquois apart).

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 8, with its internecine account of Anglo-Franco-Iroquois treaty negotiations, is hard to follow, but the rest of the book is stellar. Richter amasses a wealth of archaeological, anthropological, and historical information to tell the story of the Iroquois (properly, Haudenosaunee) people from their ancestors in the Ice Age to the Six Nations forced onto reservations in the early 1800s. This book is basically a modern retelling of Lewis Henry Morgan's "League of the Iroquois." Morgan did not question racist and ethnocentric assumptions the way Richter does. Richter strives to re-envision North American history from a Native American perspective, and while I'm not sure if he changes the U.S. history narrative entirely, he deepens Americans' understanding of Haudenosaunee history, showing that the Haudenosaunee were brilliant political actors, cunning soldiers, and bearers of rich culture. Of course, these claims won't surprise Haudenosaunee readers. They know the power of their civilization; it's the white men who haven't been listening or paying attention.

[Robert Airhart II · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Inspiring Story of Resistance

The author provides a comprehensible story of the Iroquois people from the earliest incursions of Europeans through the early 19th century. He traces the efforts and adaptations they made over several centuries to maintain their independence, culture, and their position among Native American/First Nations Peoples in the eastern part of the North American continent. No understanding of Colonial history is accurate without the comprehensive review of the evidence, both written and archeological, of the Iroquoian experience, of the Iroquoian point of view the author has compiled in this book.

This book is one off as handful of “must read” books for understanding the scope of the theft of land and genocide that is one of the two violent criminal foundational building blocks of present day America.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ordeal of the Longhouse is an excellent start to gaining an understanding of how the Iroquois were affected by the onset of Europeans in their territory. This book does an excellent job of looking at Iroquoian culture and how it developed both before and after Europeans arrived. Europeans changed the cultures of all groups that they interacted with as each took on some of the characteristics of the other and the Iroquois were not exception. Richter takes great detail to play out the various council negotiations and treaty discussions that led to the formation of the five nations council in the view of the Europeans and how this affected diplomacy in the new world. The British, Dutch and French all were forced to deal with the five nations and having a book that so expertly captures their negotiations is wonderful. This is an essential study for anyone who wishes to understand colonial history. While newer books have been coming out on the subject this still remains the gold standard and one of the excellent studies on the Iroquois. A great addition to any colonial or native American historians library.

[Abe]

Richter specifically focuses on the Iroquois and how the Five Nations used European rivalries for their own interests. A good monograph that provides agency to the Iroquois but unfortunately can at times read like a military history.

[Brad Hayes · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a student, I found this book imposing. Twenty years later, I realize that Richter's writing style leaves a lot to be desired, but the content is pretty good for a political survey of Iroquoia in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nuanced, well-documented, sensitive study. A corrective to the stereotype of the all-powerful, warlike Iroquois. By the late 1600's, they were caught in a vise between the English and the French.