Religion

Like other aboriginal peoples in Canada, Iroquoians traditionally did not have a “religion” in the western sense but practised a type of animism or shamanism that did not clearly distinguish between natural and supernatural worlds. This belief system was of great antiquity and probably accompanied the first humans who migrated from Asia to North America. Although shamanism is most frequently associated with hunting and gathering societies, the adoption of horticulture did not completely alter the Iroquoian world view and many of the original features survived into the historic period.

According to this tradition, animals, plants, and even some inanimate objects had souls and spirit beings inhabited every region of the cosmos. To propitiate these spirits, offerings of tobacco and other gifts were left at various locations, such as awe-inspiring cliffs and waterfalls. Speeches were accompanied by tobacco invocations during which the powdered leaf was sprinkled on fires, so that the words could “ride” the smoke to the upper world. The Huron believed that every human possessed as many as five “souls,” each with a different name, different functions, and different destinies in the afterlife. Some souls could be reincarnated, others lingered about the villages as ghosts, while others were sent off to the Land of the Souls after an elaborate ceremony.

Among all Iroquoian peoples, contact with normally invisible spirit beings was achieved by entering trance states through ritual fasting, monotonous singing, vigorous dancing, smoking, and the ingestion of a variety of psychoactive substances. Although there were shamans who specialized in these activities, by the time of European contact a democratized shamanism offered all members of the community the power to have revelations, which provided important spiritual guidelines for individual and collective action. For the Huron, virtually every important decision was influenced by a dream or vision. The Iroquois had a calendric cycle of planting and harvest ceremonies as well as the great midwinter festival held to reveal and fulfil dream obligations. There were also occasions for curative and prophylactic rituals performed by various medicine societies, including one whose participants wore wooden masks commonly known as False Faces.

The Jesuit missionaries have long been accorded a heroic place in Canadian history, although this image has recently been replaced with the view that they did as much harm as good. From an Iroquoian perspective, the most serious consequence of the Jesuit presence was the emergence of internal factionalism between Christian converts and traditionalists. This factionalism seriously weakened the Huron confederacy in the 1640s and made it more vulnerable to Iroquois attacks; after 1667 it also had a negative effect on the Iroquois and especially the Mohawk nation. In denominational terms, since communities such as Lorette, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, and Akwesasne were established as French missions, Catholicism has dominated much of their history. Tyendinaga and the Six Nations territory, with their links to the British, were always predominantly Anglican. By the late nineteenth century, the Anglicans were joined by Baptists, Methodists, Brethren, Mormons, and the Salvation Army. Modern visitors to the Six Nations territory are struck by the plethora of churches representing various denominations.

Unlike world religions such as Christianity, aboriginal belief systems were not dogmatically bound by sacred texts and oral traditions were marked by a constant injection of new revelations based on dreams and visions. In 1799 Handsome Lake, a Seneca prophet living at the Allegany reservation in New York State, had the first of a series of visions in which he was instructed on his people’s religious obligations. These included the outlawing of drunkenness, witchcraft, sexual promiscuity, and gambling, the reviving of traditional calendric ceremonies, and the sanctioning of the Protestant ideal of the nuclear family farm. The Handsome Lake religion (or Longhouse religion as it is also known), was an indigenous revitalization movement that endorsed some accommodation with non-aboriginal society. As such, it spread rapidly in the Six Nations territory in Canada, but it was not introduced to Kahnawake until the 1920s and to Akwesasne until the 1930s. Though Handsome Lake adherents outnumbered Christians in the early nineteenth century, their numbers have since declined. Nevertheless, the Longhouse continues as an alternative to the Christian churches. Elders such as Cayuga hereditary chief Jacob Thomas and other ritualists have managed to keep the Gaiwí:yo (the Good Message, or Code of Handsome Lake) alive at the Six Nations territory, where over 1,000 adherents, with remarkable persistence, are continuing the celebration of traditional ceremonies. Long regarded as “pagans” even by Christian Iroquois, they are now more often esteemed as “genuine Indians.”