The Kinship System of the Iroquois

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The Kinship System of the Iroquois

The kinship system of the Iroquois, regardless of the Matriarchal or Patriarchal period of its existence, is and has been a culture of responsibility and respect, where each person is expected to do their part for the good of the group. The Iroquois kinship system was/is an adaptive construct that assisted them in surviving even when pressured by external forces outside their control. The typical kinship group's organization is stratified not by who is the best or greatest, but simply by the amount of work you can do. Additionally, in this system it can be aligned to the Matriarchal, where the women are predominant, or to the Patriarchal, where the males are predominant, the Iroquois are one of the few groups in recent history that have successfully transitioned from a Matriarchal to a Patriarchal society.

The lives of those in the Iroquois culture were set up to ensure the continuation of the lineage via marriage (and divorce) to ensure that work was done according to ability. The Iroquois system of marriage was based on matrilineage i.e., the mother's lineage. Marrying parallel cousins was forbidden; however, the marriage between cross cousins was highly encouraged in order to keep wealth with the family (Laird and Nowak, 2010). When an Iroquois male married, he would move to the Long House of his wife's people as part of the matriarchal basis of their society. Divorce in their society was also simple, if a female Iroquois wished to divorce her husband she packed his belongings and left them on the steps of the Long House. The children if any would stay with the mother as part of the matrilineage and the husband would return to his tribe (Laird and Nowak, 2010).

The basic structure of the Iroquois system lays out the responsibilities of all members regardless of age or sex. In Iroquois society, the males were responsible for hunting and clearing the land. However, integral to this system, is the idea that the younger adult members of the

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tribe are expected to do a greater share of the work due to their youth, strength, and stamina (Laird and Nowak, 2010). This does not mean that the children or the elderly members are free to sit around and watch the others work; they are required to do a share of the work as well, even if it is as little as the children helping with harvest or the elderly watching the children while the others work. In this system each person is contributing to the success of the whole, and no one person is allowed to sit back and profit from the others work without contributing.

As discussed earlier, the Iroquois culture established the men as the warriors, hunters, and land-clearing element of the culture, but the women were responsible for the raising and harvesting of their crops, which gave the women, power under their system. By controlling food distribution they could enforce their opinions on a variety of subjects, such as when