IROQUOIS (ir'o-kw6 or -kwoi). During the colonial period the Iroquois were, north of Mexico, the native American people of greatest political importance. The name has been adopted for the entire linguistic family of which they were the most conspicuous representatives. The Iroquoian family occupied three territories, a northern, southern, and south-eastern. In the northern area there lived, besides the Iroquois proper, the Conestoga or Susque hanna in Pennsylvania; the Erie and Neutrals south and north of Lake Erie; the Tionontati or Tobacco nation, and the Huron (q.v.) in Ontario; and a series of tribes on the St. Lawrence later merged with '.he Huron. The southern division consisted of the Cherokee (q.v.) ; the of the Tuscarora (q.v.), Nottoway, and Meherrin. These tribes were all semi-sedentary, practised maize agriculture, lived in villages palisaded in time of need, were divided into totemic, matrilineal clans, and manifested tendencies toward the formation of fairly cohesive confederacies, in which blood lineages integrated in clans, clans in tribes, and tribes in leagues. Religion was relatively simple on the ritualistic side, and somewhat interwoven with political ceremonial. War
fare was frequent and ruthless, captives being either tortured, en slaved, or adopted. In all these traits the Iroquoian tribes resem bled the Muskogian (q.v.), and differed somewhat from the Al gonkin (q.v.), who were patrilineal, on the whole less given to farming, less developed in political sense and cohesiveness, and less aggressive in warfare though perhaps equally brave. It is therefore likely that a culture of Algonkin type, probably carried by Algonkin peoples, once prevailed uniformly over north-eastern United States and eastern Canada, and that into this there in truded cultures and peoples of south-eastern origin, first the Mound Builders (q.v.) in the Ohio valley, and later the northern Iroquoians in the region of the lower Great Lakes; the aboriginal Algonkin, however, surviving as a fringe completely surrounding these north Iroquoians. In New York, where archaeological ex ploration has been unusually well co-ordinated, its results con firm this view. The most notable point of difference between the northern Iroquoians and the Cherokee and Muskogi of the south east seems to be the somewhat higher status of woman among the former.