The Rollcall Of The Iroquois Chiefs

Annemarie Anrod Shimony's classic work clearly shows the contemporary cultural and religious crises that face the Longhouse Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario. Shimony presents a lucid and eloquent account of the survival of the Native American tradition, which is struggling to maintain political and cultural autonomy in an ever-changing modern world. Based on original field work dating from 1953 to 1961, and supplemented by new material describing changes during the last thirty years, Shimony's work is once again the most comprehensive ethnography of the largest extant traditional Iroquoian community. Some of the material discussed includes the social organization, the system of hereditary chiefs, the beliefs and practices of the Longhouse religion, the events of the Iroquoian life cycle, and the extensive medicinal and witchcraft aspects of the culture. Additional areas of focus include the rituals of the agricultural calendar and Iroquois conceptions of death and burial rituals. As Elizabeth Tooker wrote in Indians of the Northeast, Shimony's monograph is, "next to Morgan's League, the most important general description of the Iroquois." With its new material added, Conservatism among the Iroquois is once again required reading for anyone interested in Native American culture.

The Great Law, a living tradition among the conservative Iroquois, is sustained by celebrating the condolence ceremony when they mourn a dead chief and install his successor for life on good behavior. This ritual act, reaching back to the dawn of history, maintains the League of the Iroquois, the legendary form of government that gave way over time to the Iroquois Confederacy. Fenton verifies historical accounts from his own long experience of Iroquois society, so that his political ethnography extends into the twentieth century as he considers in detail the relationship between customs and events. His main argument is the remarkable continuity of Iroquois political tradition in the face of military defeat, depopulation, territorial loss, and acculturation to European technology.