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Book Review
Canada and the United States
William N. Fenton. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. (The Civilization of the American Indian Series, number 223.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1998. Pp. xxii, 786. $70.00.
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Sixty-five years after first going to Iroquoia to study Seneca ethnobotany, social organization, and ceremonialism, anthropologist William N. Fenton has finally completed his magnum opus. Fenton, the dean of Iroquois scholarship, has produced a work that should be on the reference shelf of any serious student of the Iroquois. His book is voluminous, containing over seven hundred pages of text, three separate appendixes on the Iroquois Condolence Council, and an extensive bibliography. Forty-six figures and eight tables also make the book impressive. Besides beautiful illustrations, the figures include a floor plan for a condolence rite (1945); a model for the kinship relations between a chief and his subjects; summary of statuses, roles, and events in the Condolence Council (1945); and relationships and groupings of Iroquois chiefs into moieties of tribal phratries, as on the condolence cane and seating arrangements of the council of life chiefs of the Six Nations. Included in the tables are proposed dates of the founding of the Iroquois League, which Fenton now estimates as the early years of the sixteenth century, the emergence of League titles (16471803), and Timothy Pickering's estimates of tribal populations and treaty attendance at Canandaigua (1794). |
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