The Great Law and the Longhouse : a political history of the Iroquois Confederacy
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Great Law and the Longhouse : a political history of the Iroquois Confederacy
(The civilization of the American Indian series, v. 223)
University of Oklahoma Press, c1998
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [743]-764) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This masterful summary represents a major synthesis of the history and culture of the Six Nations from the mid-sixteenth century to the Canandaigua treaty of 1794. William N. Fenton, the dean of Iroquoian studies, has used primary sources extensively, in both French and English, to create a very readable narrative and an invaluable reference for all future scholars of Iroquois polity.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.
Fenton's style of writing combines Iroquois and American English in a way that no one else has been able to do. His analysis and comparison of multiple versions of the same myth is a valuable contribution in itself, while his distillation of previous cultural and historical studies will be of special interest to historians of anthropology as well as those concerned with the American Indian.
by "Nielsen BookData"