Content area
Full text
The title, The Great Law and the Longhouse, aptly identifies the main ethnological contents of this handsomely presented and minutely detailed and documented ethnohistorical record. Scholars owe an immense debt to William N. Fenton for setting out with chronological clarity a reconstructed continuous stream of Iroquois political tradition in the face of demographic crises, territorial losses, military challenges, and European and American intrusion. Three prophets marked the course of Iroquois cultural history: Sapling, its primitive stage; Daganawidah, the formation of the idealistic and symbolic League of the Longhouse and its political arm, the Confederacy; and Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet, its modern evolution since June 1799 as a spiritual movement and revitalization religion of the Good Message code. Traditional ceremonies and government were rekindled at the Grand River reserve after the War of the American Revolution.
The author begins with a personal career review that illuminates this cumulative product of some sixty years of research and personal contact with scholars and Iroquoian informants. He defines and defends 'upstreaming' methodology as he experienced it, progressing from verified present-day observations to earlier fragmentary accounts by witnesses who understood little of what they recorded. This knowledge enabled him over a long and fruitful investigation to establish the development of the condolence ceremony and the emergence of the League and its fifty titles. The problems posed by the credibility of oral testimony and the possibility of...