Iroquois

71:1.3The north­ern tribes of the Amer­i­can red men never at­tained real state­hood. They never pro­gressed be­yond a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of tribes, a very prim­i­tive form of state. Their near­est ap­proach was the Iro­quois fed­er­a­tion, but this group of six na­tions never quite func­tioned as a state and failed to sur­vive be­cause of the ab­sence of cer­tain es­sen­tials to mod­ern na­tional life, such as:

71:1.41. Ac­quire­ment and in­her­i­tance of pri­vate prop­erty.

71:1.52. Cities plus agri­cul­ture and in­dus­try.

71:1.63. Help­ful do­mes­tic an­i­mals.

71:1.74. Prac­ti­cal fam­ily or­ga­ni­za­tion. These red men clung to the mother-fam­ily and nephew in­her­i­tance.

71:1.85. Def­i­nite ter­ri­tory.

71:1.96. A strong ex­ec­u­tive head.

71:1.107. En­slave­ment of cap­tives—they ei­ther adopted or mas­sa­cred them.

71:1.118. De­ci­sive con­quests.

71:1.12The red men were too demo­cratic; they had a good gov­ern­ment, but it failed. Even­tu­ally they would have evolved a state had they not pre­ma­turely en­coun­tered the more ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion of the white man, who was pur­su­ing the gov­ern­men­tal meth­ods of the Greeks and the Ro­mans.

84:2.2The prim­i­tive fam­ily, grow­ing out of the in­stinc­tive bi­o­logic blood bond of mother and child, was in­evitably a mother-fam­ily; and many tribes long held to this ar­range­ment. The mother-fam­ily was the only pos­si­ble tran­si­tion from the stage of group mar­riage in the horde to the later and im­proved home life of the polyg­a­mous and monog­a­mous fa­ther-fam­i­lies. The mother-fam­ily was nat­u­ral and bi­o­logic; the fa­ther-fam­ily is so­cial, eco­nomic, and po­lit­i­cal. The per­sis­tence of the mother-fam­ily among the North Amer­i­can red men is one of the chief rea­sons why the oth­er­wise pro­gres­sive Iro­quois never be­came a real state.

87:2.10The dead were sup­posed to use the ghosts of the tools and weapons that were theirs in life. To break an ar­ti­cle was to “kill it,” thus re­leas­ing its ghost to pass on for ser­vice in ghost­land. Prop­erty sac­ri­fices were also made by burn­ing or bury­ing. An­cient fu­neral wastes were enor­mous. Later races made pa­per mod­els and sub­sti­tuted draw­ings for real ob­jects and per­sons in these death sac­ri­fices. It was a great ad­vance in civ­i­liza­tion when the in­her­i­tance of kin re­placed the burn­ing and bury­ing of prop­erty. The Iro­quois In­di­ans made many re­forms in fu­neral waste. And this con­ser­va­tion of prop­erty en­abled them to be­come the most pow­er­ful of the north­ern red men. Mod­ern man is not sup­posed to fear ghosts, but cus­tom is strong, and much ter­res­trial wealth is still con­sumed on fu­neral rit­u­als and death cer­e­monies.