America's First Matriarchy: The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Nation) Part I.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the matriarchy of antiquity and how to prove its existence, or rather, assemble the proof in a fresh form, that I forget to talk about other matriarchies. For those of you who have trouble picturing a matriarchal culture, it's important for you to know that one existed in America for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois Conferderation, was -- and in some places still is -- a matriarchal system. I'm going to write a series of posts based on book Sisters In Spirit, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner that will look at the structure and function of a working matriarchal system.

Let’s start by defining our terms. There are many ways to describe this type of society. It can be called matrilineal, meaning that inheritance pass from mother to child. It It can be matrifocal, with an emphasis on motherhood and mother-kinship. It can be ordered around the mother’s family, especially her sisters, where spouses are brought in from other clans, and that can be called matrilocal. I use the term matriarchy to describe a form of government where women are the center of culture. It doesn’t mean that women dominate men, or rule over them. That’s the stuff of men’s nightmares and science fiction. It is sometimes also referred to as gynarchy, but my preferred form is the former option. In the case of the Haudenosaunee, the culture was a matrifocal, matrilocal, matrilineal, matriarchy. There was no rape; no domestic violence; women chose the chiefs, worked together on agriculture, and were equal in every way to the men in their tribes. I’ll get into that later.

First we have to establish that if you are not Native American and don’t live on or near a reservation, most of what you know about the First Nations people is wrong. We all grew up watching westerns where Natives were either “noble savages” or just plain savages. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy lived in peace and made decisions by consensus. They were not conquered through the supremacy of the white man. They were conquered through genocide, disease, and the entitlement Europeans felt to enslave, exploit, murder and steal to enrich themselves, their churches and their monarchs. To understand the culture, you’re going to have to overcome any of the white supremacist attitude that may have worked its way into your conscious and/or subconscious mind. Please don’t overreact to that assertion. We live in a culture that defines “normalcy” as being white, male, of European origin and wealthy. Anything else is “other” - female, brown, red, yellow, black, poor, uneducated, savage, inferior, coarse, common but not “normal”. Even the most enlightened among us will usually have aspects of this attitude deeply ingrained in our thinking, as we’ll see in the author’s case in Part II. For now, open your mind to new information, your ears to hear my words rather than your own assumptions, and your eyes to a picture that hasn’t been shown in the movies.

End of Part I