SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONBureau of American EthnologyBulletin 149
Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois CultureNo. 1. Introduction: The Concept of Locality and theProgram of Iroquois ResearchBy WILLIAM N. FENTON

INTRODUCTIONTHE CONCEPT OF LOCALITY AND THE PROGRAM OFIROQUOIS RESEARCH
By William N. Fenton
The modern state, at all its levels, from the nation down to thecommunity, is organized on the principle of where one lives, and neigh-bors seldom are related. At earlier times and in nonliterate societiesneighbors are likely to be a group of kinsmen. If the modern stateseizes the principle of coresidence, or local contiguity, and thus makesall its political and legal arrangements on a local or territorial basis,preliterate societies project the kinship units, which absorb local po-litical and legal functions, to the level of the tribe and state. Maine(1883, p. 124 ff.) discovered the two principles of kinship and ter-ritorial organization of politics, but overstated the case for an evo-lutionary sequence from the former to the latter. In earlier societies,he wrote, man fights for his kin, not his neighbors, but he neglected tostate that they were often identical. According to Lowie (1948, pp.10-11), Maine was wholly right in distinguishing the two principlesof solidarity—kinship and coresidence—and he was also correct instressing the predominance of kinship in simpler cultures, but he over-emphasized the point. In predominately kinship states like the Iro-quois, the local tie operated equally with kinship, and Iroquois societyshows that a kinship group is fundamentally also a local group, andthat both factors have been operative in the creation of a confederacy.Morgan himself was aware of the localized character of much ofIroquois culture, and his description of the operation of the Leagueindicated how certain matters were left to local autonomy. His mate-rials were derived mainly from the Tonawanda Band of Seneca,whom he befriended in their efforts to recover a reservation sold fromunder their feet by the Seneca council at Buffalo Creek, and his knowl-edge of the Seneca Nation, by that time resident at Cattaraugus andAllegany, derived from conversations with Nicholson Parker, theUnited States interpreter, and from correspondence with Rev. AsherWright. So far as I know, Morgan never visited Allegany. TheOnondaga at Syracuse were better known to him, and he went to
4 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Bull. 149Grand River collecting for the New York State Cabinet of Antiqui-ties (Fenton, 1941). Perhaps, without his intention, his writings be-came generalized for all the Iroquois.Morgan's intense interest and prodigious contribution to the studyof kinship systems have all but obscured his own affirmation ofMaine. The relation of kin to locality was sharply focused in Mor-gan's thinking : that clans arise from clans by a process of local seg-mentation, that clans were formerly associated with villages, and thatclans lived together and tended to segregate their dead in burialgrounds. Such were the questions which he addressed to Rev. AsherWright and to which partial answers may be found in Morgan's writ-ings (Stern, 1933; Morgan, 1878, 1881).With a few notable exceptions, succeeding generations of anthropol-ogists carried on studies of kinship and left community studies to thesociologists (Murdock, 1949, p. 79) . My own interest in the organiza-tion of social groups on a local basis stems from several sources : fromSapir's sending me as a student to see Speck before going to the field,from a 2-year residence at Tonawanda while community worker for theUnited States Indian Service; from reading and teaching Linton'swork (1936) ; from conversations with Steward (after joining the"Bureau") while writing for the Swanton volume (Fenton, 1940).Finally, the stimulus to attempt integration of the disciplines workingon various aspects of the Iroquois problem came from a war-time ex-perience of surveying foreign area-study programs in the universities(Fenton, 1947). There resulted four conferences on Iroquois Re-search,^ held annually 1945-48 at Red House, N. Y., and by extensionthe present symposium, to which the annual meetings of the AmericanAnthropological Association devoted an afternoon session. New YorkCity, November 17, 1949.The Iroquois afford an opportunity to test the validity of the area-study approach to a culture which has local, tribal, and national levels.
* The Proceedings of the Conference on Iroquois Research have been prepared byparticipants and edited by me for publication in mimeograph and distributed to mem-bers of the Conference. Proceedings of the First Conference (11 pp.) were issued at theAdministration Building, Allegany State Park, Red House, N. Y., and are now out ofprint. Proceedings of the Second Conference (6 pp.) were issued by Smithsonian Insti-tution, and notes appeared in the American Anthropologist (vol. 49, 1947, pp. 166-167)and in American Antiquity (vol. 12, 1947, p. 207). Proceedings of the Third Conferencereached abundant proportions (24 pp.) and were issued for the Conference by the Pea-body Museum, Salem, Mass., following on Science (December 5, 1947, pp. 539-540) andthe above professional journals. By 1948 the group had shifted fromi informal discussionto presentation of research papers and formal reports of field and museum investigations
;
again Science (November 26, 1948, vol. 108, p. 611) carried a notice, and the Proceedings ofthe Fourth Conference, issued March 15, 1949, by the Smithsonian Institution, totaled27 pages. (A limited number of copies of Proceedings 3-4 are available.) The meetingshad reached such proportions and the topics so crowded the agenda of the Fourth Con-ference that it seemed advisable in 1949 to meet with all the anthropologists in NewYork and devote a full 2-hour seminar in Ethnology to formal papers written aroundthe theme of local diversity.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 5Moreover, the long tradition of research in the Iroquoian field gives itrich materials for testing cultural historical depth. No ethnographicprovince in the Americas, indeed—if not the world—has a richer lodeof published ethnological and historical literature than the Northeast,and the manuscript collections of historical materials bearing on theIroquois alone in a number of libraries are rivaled only by the Hewittpapers in the Bureau of American Ethnology archives. These ma-terials present no challenge to the timid nor is the Iroquois problem arestricted area of inquiry. He who essays the Iroquoian problemtackles the history of northeastern North America from discovery tothe present, for the Six Nations crop up near the center of every na-tional crisis down to 1840. Since 185^1, when Morgan'^ Leagueappeared, they have become a classic people to ethnology.The study of the local basis of Iroquois culture and the local organ-ization of Iroquois society has particular significance because theLeague is a kinship state. As opposed to a tradition of conquest statesin Asia and Africa, in America north of the Rio Grande confederaciesof related village bands prevailed. Quite the most famous of these,and justly so, was the democratic League of the Five Iroquois Nations,the so-called United Nations of the Iroquois. Its political history, inpreparation (Fenton, 1949 b) , shows how it grew out of what Franklincalled a "League of ragged villagers." Founded as a confederationof then village chiefs, its symbolisms were projected from a basic joint-household type of kinship structure to the Longhouse that was theLeague. Yet the Longhouse as a symbol for the state exhibited andtolerated a certain amount of local diversity at each of its five fires.Tribal languages have survived for study ; tribal councils had locallydifferent methods of counseling and sent different-sized delegations toconfederate councils ; and ceremonialism was a local concern. As maybe expected, local folkways prevailed within the general framework ofpan-Iroquois culture.As if to augment local diversity, during the seventeenth centurythe Longhouse incorporated Iroquoian-speaking Erie, Neutral, Huron,and Conestoga captives—the Seneca alone gaining two whole villagesin their role as Keepers of the Western Door ; and a century later camethe Tuscarora as the Sixth Nation, Siouan-speaking Catawba captives,the entire Tutelo and Saponi Tribes, and parts of the Algonquian-speaking Delaware and Nanticoke. All these tribal cultures foundshelter within the Longhouse, a home in Iroquoia, and were graduallyassimilated.But Iroquois culture is not entirely a thing of the past. Much ofit survives for study. Just how vigorous is the present-day culturemay be judged from the symposium papers. They are based on
6 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Bull. 14!)functional field work in the present communities, a viewpoint that weowe to the late Professor Speck, who first suggested it.As early as 1933 Speck observed to me that each of the Rio GrandePueblos has a distinctive local culture and that anthropology hadprogressed in the Southwest only after prolonged concentration byethnologists working separately in each community. Speck's ownwide field experience, ranging from Labrador to the Southeast, whichhe brought over via Delaware to the study of Cayuga ceremonies atSour Springs on Grand River (Speck, 1949), argued for communitystudies by ethnologists working independently on local Iroquois socialorganization and ceremonial life at each of the focal longhouse centers.While Speck continued at Sour Springs, I commenced among theSeneca, first at Allegany (Fenton, 1936), then at Tonawanda (1941).A wider range of field work became possible after coming to the Bureauin 1939.Work with Hewitt's materials on the League of the Iroquois tookme to Grand River, where for a number of seasons down to 1945,only partly interrupted by the war, I pursued such topics as ethno-botany, the ceremonial cycle at Onondaga Longhouse, music, andsocial and political organization, which entailed translating theDeganawidah epic of the founding of the League (Fenton, 1944), ob-serving and describing its major institution, the Condolence Council(1946) , and analyzing various mnemonic systems (Fenton and Hewitt,1945, and Fenton, 1950).Speck was responsible for directing a number of students to workin the area. John A. Noon spent the summer of 1941 on Six NationsReserve exploring the law and government of the Grand River Iro-quois (Noon, 1949). Noon selected law and politics to exemplify theprocess of cultural change, showing how the institutions of the Con-federacy were adapted to the needs of local government in Canada.Another doctoral dissertation in the Iroquoian field at Pennsylvaniawas that of George S. Snyderman whose analysis of Iroquois warfare(1948) goes far beyond Hunt (1940) in supplementing economic de-terminism with an ethnohistorical perspective derived from fieldwork among the Seneca.^ Both E. S. Dodge, now director of thePeabody Museum at Salem, and John Witthoft, State anthropologistof Pennsylvania, were guided in their first Iroquoian field work byProfessor Speck. Although Dodge is associated with northeasternAlgonquian and Witthoft has worked most intensively on Cherokee,both have made important contributions, often in collaboration withSpeck, to the ethnobiology of the eastern woodlands.
» A third doctoral dissertation thesis on the Warfare of the Iroquois and their northernneighbors by Raymond Scheele was submitted at Columbia in 1949.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 7Two additional community studies may be directly ascribed to theinfluence on Speck of the Conferences on Iroquois Kesearch. Outof the first two meetings came definite recommendations as to futureneeds. One was for a study of the Tuscarora problem ; another wasfor a community study of the Onondaga at Nedrow, N. Y. Asidefrom their implications for archeology, the Tuscarora, who weredriven out of the Southeast in the first quarter of the eighteenthcentury and migrated north to join the League as the SixthNation, left a rich historical literature; they speak a divergentIroquoian tongue, their society and politics resemble other Iroquois,and as second-class citizens of the League they present interestingproblems of personality orientation. This problem Speck dumpedin the lap of Anthony F. C. Wallace, son of a distinguished historicalbiographer, student of both Speck and Hallowell, and himself ahistorical biographer in his own right (Wallace, 1949). The Onon-daga problem fell to Augustus F. Brown. Pennsylvania parties havespent two seasons now at Tuscarora, N. Y., and Onondaga.Work among the Oneida of Wisconsin was begun under the aegisof the University of Wisconsin during WPA, in acculturation byHarry W. Basehart, and in linguistics by Lounsbury. Since the warLounsbury has extended the analysis of Oneida to a study of com-parative Iroquoian, conducting field work in 1948 at Onondaga,Tuscarora, and at Six Nations Reserve on Cayuga, adding anotherYale Ph. D. to the roster of Iroquoianists.Apropos of linguistics, the Conference stimulated the work of theVoegelins and W. D. Preston on Seneca language (Preston andVoegelin, 1949). At the Summer Linguistics Institute, Universityof Michigan, 1947, Seneca was the piece de resistance, and the studentsof Prof. Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania are at workon Onondaga and Cherokee in particular.While Speck had students to direct into the Iroquoian field, theUniversity of Pennsylvania shared the program with other univer-sities, and many of the projects funneled through the Bureau ofAmerican Ethnology. Yale, Columbia, Indiana, and Toronto Uni-versities have a stake in Iroquois studies.Support has come from many sources—from participating insti-tutions, but principally from the American Council of LearnedSocieties, The Viking Fund, Inc., and the American PhilosophicalSociety. The latter two, by grants to me, have contributed heavilyto the Iroquois Research Fund at the Smithsonian Institution.No over-all grants have been requested to finance a total program.Rather, the Iroquois Conference has avoided formal organization,taking the line that research foundations follow the policy of making
8 SYMPOSIUM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Biill. 149grants to individual working scholars, and the Conference has in-formally agreed to mutually endorse the applications of its partici-pants. Each scholar is responsible to his own institution, to thesource of his research grants, and to himself to guarantee productiveresults. In this connection, members of the Conference have workedclosely with the Committee on American Indian Linguistics, Eth-nology, and Archaeology of the American Philosophical Society.While grants to predoctoral or postdoctoral fellows in universitieshave predominated, support has been managed for the nonprofessionalscholar without institutional connection. Examples are the study ofmusic, the dance, and ethnohistory. In 1936, while resident com-munity worker for the Indian Service at Tonawanda, I enlisted thecooperation of Martha Champian Huot,-'' then a graduate student atColumbia, to record Iroquois music. I rounded up the singers andtook the texts ; Mrs. Huot made the records. The Columbia collectionof Iroquois records went to Indiana University with Prof. GeorgeHerzog and still awaits study. Mrs. Huot, however, in 1947 receiveda Viking grant and renewed an interest in Iroquois culture throughintensive field work on acculturation in the Mohawk language (Huot,1948) and personality development in children at Six Nations Re-serve. She has meanwhile made an analysis of Iroquois folklore,using the Waugh collection. The problem of Iroquois music has car-ried over to studies of the dance, to which it belongs by association.It is fortunate, indeed, that Iroquois studies can claim two trainedstudents of the dance. During the war Philippa Pollenz made a fieldstudy of Seneca dances, working almost exclusively with Cattaraugusinformants. Her report, submitted first as an essay for the degree ofmaster of arts in anthropology at Columbia University, is now await-ing publication as a monograph of the American Ethnological Society.Ethnologists are quite ill-equipped ordinarily to describe dances aspart of ceremonialism. The need for an adequate choreographic tech-nique is quite as apparent as the need for musical annotation. Ger-trude Prokosch Kurath brings to the work an expert knowledge ofmusic and the dance, and her symposium paper combines the techniquesand methods of both fields of study. Her field study and analysis ofthe Fenton records in the Library of Congress collections were sup-ported by Viking grants and represent pioneering on new ground.She has worked intensively with Seneca at Allegany, thus comple-menting Pollenz' work at Cattaraugus, and at Six Nations Reservewith Onondaga and Cayuga informants.Topical studies are somewhat the antithesis of community studies,but need not be. Neither the dance, music, nor personality study hasas yet brought forth an over-all picture of the Cattaraugus Seneca,but ethnohistory has done better by the Allegany and Cornplanter
2« Now Mrs. E. V. Randle.
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 9Seneca. Etlinohistory is, in last analysis, a kind of ethnography plusdocumentary research. History, moreover, has a tradition of gloriousamateurism. It is natural, I suppose, that the local scholar, whofirst comes to notice as a correspondent of the Bureau of AmericanEthnology, as a critical reader of Smithsonian publications, may beinduced to take up ethnology seriously. He has usually been attractedby his reading to cultivate Indian neighbors who are living descend-ants of deceased heroes of history. It is a natural transition fromthe border warfare of the Pennsylvania frontier and from such heroesas Cornplanter and Blacksnake to collecting Seneca folklore and cul-tivating such characters as the late Windsor Pierce and ChaunceyJohnny John. The banker or lawyer in the small city near an Indianreservation has unusual opportunities for following ethnology as ahobby and combining with reading and writing systematic interviewsof Indians who call on him daily. Such has been the growth of inter-est in the case of Merle H. Deardorff, who contributes the paper onthe historical beginnings of the Handsome Lake Religion at Corn-planter, which is situated close to Warren, Pa., where Mr. DeardorflPhas been sometime superintendent of schools and banker for manyyears.Ethnological studies at Allegany have received further stimulusfrom Hon. Charles E. Congdon of Salamanca who, like L. H, Morganof Rochester, came out of the law. For many years Indians havebeen among his clients ; they are daily callers at his law offices ; and,as part of the local scene, they fall within a range of interests whichembraces the history, fauna, and flora of southwestern New York.It is to Mr. Congdon, chairman of the Allegany State Park Commis-sion, that the Iroquois Conference owes its place of meeting annuallyat the Administration Building on Red House Lake. Every scholarwho has worked at Allegany owes the Congdon family a debt of hos-pitality.Viewed topically, the present symposium covers the land, language,society, personality, religion, and music. Every contribution startsfrom field work in a certain community; from there it moves out tocomparative treatment of data from a second and third community;thence to generalized observations. We have avoided the temptationof overgeneralizing on single instances and insufficient data. To theextent that acute observations of local patterns of behavior may beobserved to hold for several communities they may be consideredpan-Iroquois culture norms. Thus the observation of Lawson for theeighteenth-century and Wallace for mid-twentieth-century Tuscarorathat they evidently have no fear of high places is supported by thepredilection of the Mohawk for work in "high steel," and structuralsteel working is virtually an Iroquois national monopoly. Yet the
10 SYMPOSroM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. E. Bull. 149method of science requires that until parallel studies are made ofother Iroquois communities the study of personality in the Tus-carora community be not generalized for all the Iroquois. To the ex-tent that this study is sound, of which it gives every evidence, Wallacecan generalize from later field work and the results of parallel studiesby Doris West at Cattaraugus, A. F. Brown at Onondaga, and M. C.Randle at Six Nations.Similarly, Kurath's dance materials present every indication of be-ing generalized behavior. In the case of songs and dances which arewidely diffused and participated in by several Iroquois communities,the general culture patterns stand out in sharp relief while local dif-ferences are niceties of which the Iroquois are acutely aware and theobserver comes only gradually to distinguish.Concepts of land ownership seem to be widely diffused among theIroquois and their neighbors. One is struck by an over-all familiar-ity with a common philosophy toward the land by all Eastern In-dians, and the historical sources often fail to yield local distinctionsno longer obtainable through field work. The changes in this phi-losophy owing to White contact have peculiar timeliness just now forassessing claims arising out of treaties. In fact, ethnohistory hasalready joined hands with the law and become a branch of appliedanthropology, claiming the research time of several anthropologists.Historical sources frequently deal with the Indians of a particularplace at a given point of time. The village with its chief and councilof old men is a recurring theme in Iroquois political mythology;and the chiefs of particular places who were the leaders of local vil-lage bands appear as signers of treaties. By constantly keeping local-ity in perspective and being on the alert for cultural differences thatarise locally we can assess the documents and understand what hap-pened in history. We shall see that people who lived together in acertain place, and were thereby related according to structural princi-ples outlined below, retained an overriding sense of loyalty not sharedfor kinsmen who had moved away. And those who had left the long-house fireside to dwell outside its walls soon became kindred aliens.The time perspective for cultural history moves from the ethnologicalpresent to the historic past. Spatially, the method proceeds from thelocal community to tribe, nation, and confederacy. Recognizing thatfeuds and factions develop locally and are the frequent cause of bandfission today, the same process can be seen at work in history to pro-duce splinter movements and the dismemberment of kinship states.Focal factors, on the other hand, are language, village agriculture,the mutual-aid work party, the projection of kinship patterns of soli-darity to persons in other towns, tribes, and nations, implemented per-haps by ceremonial friendships, lacrosse leagues, intertribal politicaland religious councils, and the Condolence Council by which the
No. 1] CONCEPT OF LOCALITY—FENTON 11
chiefs of one set of towns installed candidates in another set of towns,and the current exchange of Handsome Lake preachers.We have included in this symposium two other papers : a joint ac-count of the Feast of the Dead among two Grand River groups byMrs. Kurath and myself, because it illustrates what kind of datathe ethnologist can still collect among the Iroquois, and the paperillustrates a combination of ethnological reporting supplemented bytranscription and analysis of recorded music and choreography ; anda discussion of the status of Iroquois women in the past and presentby Martha Champion Randle.There's life in the Longhouse yet.BIBLIOGRAPHYFenton, William N.1936. An outline of Seneca ceremonies at Coldspring Longhouse. Yale Univ.Publ. Anthrop. No. 9. New Haven.1940. Problems arising from the historic northeastern position of the Iro-quois. Smithsonian Misc. Coll. vol. 100, pp. 159-251.1941. Tonawanda Longhouse ceremonies: Ninety years after Lewis HenryMorgan. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 128, Anthrop. Pap. No. 15, pp.139-165.1944. Simeon Gibson: Iroquois informant, 1889-1943. Amer. Anthrop., vol.46, pp. 231-234.1946. An Iroquois Condolence Council for installing Cayuga chiefs in 1945.Journ. Wash. Acad. Sci., vol. 36, pp. 110-127.1947. Area studies in American universities. Amer. Council on Education.1949 a. Seth Newhouse's traditional history and constitution of the IroquoisConfederacy. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc, vol. 93, pp. 141-158.1949 b. Collecting materials for a political history of the Six Nations. Proc.Amer. Phil. Soc, vol. 93, pp. 233-238.1950. The roll call of the Iroquois chiefs : A study of a mnemonic cane fromthe Six Nations Reserve. Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. Ill, No. 15.Fenton, William N., and Hewitt, J. N. B.1945. Some mnemonic pictographs relating to the Iroquois CondolenceCouncil. Journ. Wash. Acad. Sci., vol. 35, pp. 301-315.Hunt, George T.1940. The wars of the Iroquois. Madison, Wis.HuoT, Mabtha Champion. (See also Randle, this vol.)1948. Some Mohawk words of acculturation. Int. Journ. Amer. Ling., vol.14, No. 3, pp. 150-154.Linton, Ralph.1936. The study of Man. New York.LowEE, Robert H.1948. Social organization. New York.Maine, H. S.1883. Ancient law. New York.Morgan, L. H.1878. Ancient society. New York.1881. Houses and house-life of the American aborigines. Contr. N. Amer.Ethnol., vol. 4.905645—51 2
12 SYMPOSroM ON IROQUOIS CULTURE [B. A. B. Bull. 149MuEDOcK, George Peteb.1949. Social sturucture. New York.Noon, John A.1949. Law and government of the Grand River Iroquois. Viking Fund Publ.in Anthrop., No. 12. New York,Peeston, W. D., and Voegelin, C. F.1949. Seneca I. Int. Journ. Amer. Ling., vol. 15, pp. 23-44.Snydeeman, George S.1948. Behind the tree of peace : A sociological analysis of Iroquois warfare.Bull. Soc. Pa. Archaeol., vol. 18, Nos. 3-4. Philadelphia.Speck, F, G.1949. Midwinter rites of the Cayuga Long House, Univ. Pa. Press. Phila-delphia.Stern, B. J., Editoe.1933. The letters of Asher Wright to Lewis Henry Morgan. Amer. Anthrop.,vol. 35, pp. 138-145.Wallace, Anthony F. C.1949. King of the Delawares : Teedyuscung, 1700-1763. Univ. Pa. Press.Philadelphia.