Kinship systems and social support in foraging and horticultural societies

Iroquois Kinship

Iroquois horticultural kinship

The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee are a matrilineal horticultural society based on longhouse clans where the women traditionally farm, own the output of their labor, and have decision power in a decentralized, consensus-based and Association of clans called the Iroquois League. What has often been called the Iroquois Confederation in the past but has always been and is currently called the League is a balanced-reciprocity group of 50 male chiefs who are selected, monitored, overseen and if necessary demoted by the Clan Mothers. Local decision making takes place in small clan groups based around the longhouse, by male and female councils who then agree on policy but which the women ultimately arbitrate (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). The Clan Mothers also have religious authority and redistribute private property upon a member's death (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). This entails institutions of private property, which women acquire through grain surplus, with which they traditionally underwrote the men's trading and hunting activities. Clan structure was (is, in existing traditional Clans) communal, with longhouse privileges and farm tenure assigned by the Clan Mother to the various matrifocal nuclear family groups. These groups share (d) parenting status where the biological parents' same-sex sibling has parental authority over the biological parent's child, but the birth parent's opposite-sex sibling provides the kindred relationship designating preferred marriage relation if age- and gender-appropriate such cousins are available. The optimal result is that a female marries one of her father's sister's sons, and a male marries one of his mother's brother's daughters. This helps ensure marriage across rather than within clans, but keeps inheritable property and use rights within the group. While some authors describe this primary role for women as a thing of the past, evidence suggests the traditional culture survives to this day (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). The problem now seems to be recognition by other authorities (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011b).

The matrilineal descent institution affects Iroquois lifeways by dictating that males join their wives' longhouses, leaves the institution of marriage largely fluid since children remain in the mother's clan, so males and females can dissolve marriage easily even where children are present. This matriarchal descent structure plays out in governance where the Clan Mothers allocate property and use rights, designate and send male chiefs to inter-clan institutions, and amass wealth independent of male property rights. The matriarchal lineage institution also provides for surrogate parents in same-sex siblings as the birth parent, which likely helps to support a less-binding primary marriage agreement if other adults from the previous generation are responsible for and authorized to replace the birth parent if the marriage becomes dissolved.

These match and differ from U.S. culture in varying ways. While inheritance and legal dominion has traditionally been patriarchal in this society, we see matriarchal tendencies emerging from within over the last century or so with the weakening of the nuclear family. As more and more families divorce, the result is seems in my experience at least increasing assignment of custody and primary residence for children, with the mother, where the male contributes material support and occasional parenting duties but is largely free to pursue hunting, trading and competitive activities different in specific content, but similar in structure to traditional Iroquois horticultural folkways. Perhaps the patriarchal nuclear family was a European Christian overlay that is weakening with the decline of religious authority in the U.S. This does not necessarily hold in inheritance yet although the western European tradition of primogeniture is also devolving to a more egalitarian distribution in my personal anecdotal experience although this is not scientific or universal in any sense. The institution of leaving property to whom we choose through legal wills and estate creates the opportunity for more egalitarian wealth distribution which I see in practice more often at least than the eldest son inheriting patrimony with nothing left for the horizontal siblings. In this sense U.S. culture grows to resemble Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) matriarchy by the weakening of its opposite. Marriage practices in my culture are likewise more independent and less structured, where individuals are encouraged to marry outside any parental kinship whatsoever, with formal structure generally only affecting marriage where the kinship is considered too close. This is a negative prohibition where the Iroquois actually have a positive institution designated a preferred partner based on kinship, and was not the case until relatively recently. The Iroquois system would leave no guidance were no appropriate cross-cousins available for marriage, which is my personal situation, and even if I did have an age and sex appropriate cross-cousin, the institution would feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable compared to what I am used to. Nor do new male husbands typically go live in their bride's homes, although the Euro-American tradition of the father allocating savings for his daughter's dowry does parallel this matrifocal Iroquois tradition if this is the 'nest egg' that results in or allows a down payment on a home, for example. The only salient difference between moving into the wife's house and buying a house with the bride's dowry largely reduces to the mode of transmission, the result of choice of communal vs. individual nuclear family living institutions. The Iroquois wife inherits the right to the family place in the social longhouse, but if that right is transferred through dowry, the result is similar until we overlay the western institution where the husband then has rights to dispose of the wife's property after marriage, which differentiates the modern Euro-American marriage institution from traditional Iroquois matriarchy. To the degree we see couples having kids without marrying or even committing to a partnership beyond the biological relationship inherent in the child, this is more of an assimilation toward the indigenous tradition by the dominant colonial institution after several centuries of cultural imperialism.