ART on view 72 of equal importance for the survival of society, within which men and women were complementary rather than equal. Many of the items on display here, such as wooden bowls and ladles, baskets, clothing, dolls, gaming equipment, and musical instruments, were or are associated with the material, social, and spiritual aspects of securing their livelihood. Many of these artworks also reveal the changes that have occurred over the course of the centuries. While this introductory ethnographic overview anticipates some of the developments since the time of first European contact, the actual narrative of the exhibition begins with “Longhouse and League.” This tells the story of the origin—probably in the fifteenth century, although some Iroquois voices argue for an earlier date—of the Iroquois League (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy), originally made up of five tribes in central New York (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) that had been engaged in internecine warfare. The League was based upon the “Great Law of Peace” formulated by the culture heroes Deganawida and Hiawatha. The installation also examines the symbols of the League, notably the longhouse, in which the confederated nations are seen as living together as a family, and the Unity, or Hiawatha, belt, named for the innovator of the wampum protocol that governed the political procedures of the league. There is also an explanation for the seemingly paradoxical importance of warfare for a people committed to a constitution designed to provide universal peace by inviting all nations to bury their hatchets and sit together under the Tree of Peace—as long as it was under Iroquois supremacy. To the first European observers, the Iroquois were the epitome of the savage yet successful warrior, and it was only in the twentieth century that the Iroquois provided inspiration to the international peace movement. The fact that the continued popularity of the Mohawk haircut serves as a symbol for nonconformist belligerence is a strange irony. The processes of globalization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created “New Worlds” both for the Iroquois and their colonial neighbors. The Iroquois were irresistibly drawn into the fur trade with the French, Dutch, and English by the attractiveness of the European trade goods, which promised to improve the quality of their lives but at the same time resulted in their dependence upon White traders. The efforts by European missionaries to convert them to Christianity in fulfillment of the Great Commission were only successful when established Iroquois regimes and systems of world explanation were thrown into a crisis, e.g., as a result of FIG. 14 (below): Anna Arndt after Johann Valentin Haidt (1700–1780), Encounter of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf with Iroquois Chiefs. 1742/1899. Oil on canvas. 93.5 x 75.5 cm. Unitätsarchiv, Herrnhut, cat. no. GS 389. FIG. 13: Doll. Mohawk, Kahnawake or Kanehsatake(?), Quebec, Canada. 1827. Cornhusk, cotton, wool, glass beads, buckskin, metal. H: 27 cm. Hopton Hall Derbyshire Collection, courtesy of the Gell Muniment Trustees, loan to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, cat. no. AAA3777 (Rev. John Philip Gell Collection, formerly John Franklin Collection).
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