The Requickening Address of the 

 League of the Iroquois 



By J. N. B. Hewitt 



HE League or Confederation of the Iroquois, at the time 

 of its establishment, about 1570, was constituted of five 

 linguistically cognate tribes which occupied, when first 



^^iy§M^i known, chiefly the central and the eastern parts of the 

 fefefe^j present State of New York. 





The tribes so leagued in an organic unity were the Mohawk, the 

 Onondaga, the Seneca, the Oneida, and the Cayuga. And at that 

 time these peoples were united (a fact hitherto unknown) in a more 

 or less close alliance with the famous Neutral Nation of the Iroquoian 

 linguistic stock, which, through the noted chieftainess Djigonsasen 

 (the Wildcat) took an active part in the conferences and deliberations 

 preliminary to the formation of the League and of this alliance. This 

 alliance, however, was not wrought into permanent organic form, and 

 so, in the extant structure of the League, there appears no evidence 

 of this important alliance, not even nominal recognition of the Neutral 

 Nation; but there are, however, some essential features of the struc- 

 ture of the League which tradition ascribes to the work of this broad- 

 minded chieftainess of the Neutral Nation. 



Iroquoian civil and religious polity is based on a fundamental 

 dualism, which consists in the symbolic representation of the male 

 and the female sexes in the organic structure of the civil and the 

 religious public institutions. This formal recognition of the activities 

 of the sexes was first wrought into the structure of the tribe, and then, 

 later, into that of the League or Confederation. This obtrusive sym- 

 bolization of the two sexes in the tribal and the federal institutional 

 organizations is designed to secure and to promote the procreative 

 fertility of the community, and it appears to be the product of naive 

 unquestioning trust in the efficacy of symbols, which is so common to 

 undeveloped mentation. 



An Iroquoian tribe is composed of clans; the League or Confedera- 

 tion of the Iroquois is in like manner composed of tribes. The clans 

 of a tribe are organized into two basic organic units — two sisterhoods 

 of clans — each of which is composed of one or more clans which are 

 correlated one with another as sisters, this being the descriptive term 



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