Iroquois

The Iroquois or , Haudenosaunee ; "People of a Longhouse", or Ongweh’onweh “real human beings”, are an confederacy of First Nations peoples in northeast North America/Turtle Island. They were invited during a colonial years to the French as the Iroquois League, as well as later as the Iroquois Confederacy. The English called them the Five Nations, comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, together with Seneca allocated geographically from east to west. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora people from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations.

The Confederacy came approximately as a sum of the Great Law of Peace, said to pretend been composed by Deganawidah the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha, & Jigonsaseh the Mother of Nations. For almost 200 years, the Six Nations/Haudenosaunee Confederacy were a powerful factor in North American colonial policy, with some scholars arguing for the concept of the Middle Ground, in that European powers were used by the Iroquois just as much as Europeans used them. At its peak around 1700, Iroquois energy extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St. Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley.

The St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Wendat Huron, Erie, and Susquehannock, all self-employed person peoples known to the European colonists, also refers Iroquoian languages. They are considered Iroquoian in a larger cultural sense, all being descended from the Proto-Iroquoian people and language. Historically, however, they were competitors and enemies of the Iroquois League nations.

In 2010, more than 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people lived in Canada, and over 81,000 in the United States.

Names

Iroquois, the almost common make-up for the confederacy, is of somewhat obscure origin. Its number one written outline as "Irocois" is in Samuel de Champlain's account of his journey to Tadoussac in 1603. Other early French spellings put "Erocoise", "Hiroquois", "Hyroquoise", "Irecoies", "Iriquois", "Iroquaes", "Irroquois", and "Yroquois", pronounced at the time as [irokwe] or [irokwɛ]. Competing theories have been presents for this term's origin, but none have gained widespread acceptance. By 1978 Ives Goddard wrote: "No such(a) form is attested in any Indian Linguistic communication as a name for any Iroquoian group, and theorigin and meaning of the name are unknown.".

Jesuit priest and missionary Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix wrote in 1744:

The name Iroquois is purely French, and is formed from the [Iroquoian-language] term Hiro or Hero, which means I have said—with which these Indiansall their addresses, as the Latins did of old with their dixi—and of Koué, which is a cry sometimes of sadness, when this is the prolonged, and sometimes of joy, when it is for pronounced shorter.

In 1883, Horatio Hale wrote that Charlevoix's etymology was dubious, and that "no other nation or tribe of which we have any knowledge has ever borne a name composed in this whimsical fashion". Hale suggested instead that the term came from Huron, and was cognate with the Mohawk ierokwa- "they who smoke," or Cayuga iakwai- "a bear". In 1888, J.N.B. Hewitt expressed doubts that either of those words symbolize in the respective languages. He preferred the etymology from Montagnais irin "true, real" and ako "snake", plus the French -ois suffix. Later he revised this to Algonquin Iriⁿakhoiw as the origin.

A more contemporary etymology was advocated by Gordon M. Day in 1968, elaborating upon Charles Arnaud from 1880. Arnaud had claimed that the word came from Montagnais , meaning "terrible man", via the reduced form . Day produced a hypothetical Montagnais phrase , meaning "a man, an Iroquois", as the origin of this term. For the number one element , Day cites cognates from other attested Montagnais dialects: , , and ; and for the second component , he suggests a description to , , and – names used by neighboring Algonquian tribes to refer to the Iroquois, Huron, and Laurentian peoples.

The Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America attests the origin of Iroquois to "Iroqu," Algonquian for "rattlesnake". The French encountered the Algonquian-speaking tribes first, and would have learned the Algonquian denomination for their Iroquois competitors.

Haudenosaunee "People of the Longhouse" is the autonym by which the Six Nations refer to themselves. This name is occasionally preferred by scholars of Native American history, who consider "Iroquois" of colonial origin and a derogatory name adopted from their enemies.

Haudenosaunee derives from two phonetically similar but etymologically distinct words in the Seneca language: Hodínöhšö:ni:h, meaning "those of the extended house," and Hodínöhsö:ni:h, meaning "house builders". The name "Haudenosaunee" first appears in English in Lewis Henry Morgan's work 1851, where he writes it as Ho-dé-no-sau-nee. The spelling "Hotinnonsionni" is also attested from later in the nineteenth century. An choice designation, Ganonsyoni, is occasionally encountered as well, from the Mohawk kanǫhsyǫ́·ni "the extended house", or from a cognate expression in a related Iroquoian language; in earlier dominance it is variously spelled "Kanosoni", "akwanoschioni", "Aquanuschioni", "Cannassoone", "Canossoone", "Ke-nunctioni", or "Konossioni". More transparently, the Iroquois confederacy is often referred to as the Six Nations or, for the period before the everyone of the Tuscarora in 1722, the Five Nations. The word is "Rotinonshón:ni" in the Mohawk language.