22 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



and speedy means were taken thereafter to burn them down. In the 

 Seneca invocations to the Creator at the midwinter thanksgiving is 

 a prayer that the dead branches may not fall upon the children in 

 the fields. 



In time the trees were burned or rotted away to leave cleared 

 patches. The Iroquois men^ did very little in the way of field work 

 but it is said that they sometimes helped clear the land but never 

 allowed any one to see them. Some of the old Indians whom the 

 writer interviewed told laughable stories of grim old " warriors " who 

 had been caught with a hoe and how they excused themselves. 



One early writer even goes so far as to say that if a man loved 

 his wife devotedly he often helped her with the field work. As a 

 rule, however, among the Iroquois the men disdained the work which 

 they deemed peculiarly that of women. 



One writer remarks that the Iroquois were too busy with their 

 conquests to engage in field work and this is largely true. In the 

 age of barbarism the condition of society is one of constant emer- 

 gency. Invasion and the destruction of property is momentarily 

 expected. The Iroquois by dividing the labors necessary to sustain 

 life in the manner in which they did contributed much to the strength 

 of their nation and its arms. The function of the men was to 

 hunt, to bring in the game and stand ever ready to defend their 

 people and their property and to engage in war expeditions. An 

 Iroquois man must be ever generous and give to every one who 

 asked for his arms or his meat. If he brought his bear to the vil- 

 lage it became public property, to the material injury of himself and 

 family. He therefore left his game hidden in the outskirts of his 

 town and sent his wife^ to bring it in.^ She was not bound to 

 give of her husband's boimty and could properly refuse the appeals 



1 La Potherie in his Historic de I'Amerique, volume III, page i8 et seq. 

 says that the men cleared the ground and assisted in braiding the harvested 

 ears. Cf. Lawson. Carolina. 



2 The writer in mentioning Indian females never uses the term squaw. 

 As a name in colonial days it may have been proper but it is no longer good 

 form and its use is frowned upon by the Iroquois women of this State and 

 Canada. It has come with them to mean a degraded female character. 

 The Superintendent of the Six Nations of Canada was severely rebuked 

 several years ago by an old Mohawk woman who resented the term as ap- 

 plied to the women of her nation. The term is of course of Algonquin 

 origin. An Allegany Seneca once explained to me that this word was no 

 longer good language, just as Shakspere's word wench is no longer good 

 English as applied to a housewife, or villian as applied to a farmer. 



^ Cf. Carr. Food of Certain American Indians, p. 167; Tanner. Narra- 

 tive, p. 362; Cadillac in Margry 68, Charlevoix, v. 171. 



