Seneca Erotic

The Seneca call themselves Onöndowa'ga:', the People of the Great Hill, and they are the westernmost of the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy outsiders named the Iroquois. The Haudenosaunee picture their union as one longhouse laid across upstate New York, and the Seneca keep its western door: the nation that met whoever came in from the Ohio country and the Great Lakes, and the one that fought them first. Their old towns sat around the Finger Lakes and down the Genesee valley. Today the two main Seneca governments sit at the western end of the state, on the Allegany, Cattaraugus and Oil Spring territories of the Seneca Nation of Indians and on the Tonawanda reservation of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, while the Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma descends from Haudenosaunee people removed from Ohio in the 1830s.

The Seneca language is Northern Iroquoian, close to Cayuga and Onondaga. It is critically endangered, with very few first-language speakers left and an immersion program working to raise new ones. Society is matrilineal and organized by eight clans: Turtle, Bear, Wolf, Beaver, Deer, Heron, Hawk and Snipe. A child belongs to the mother's clan, fields and longhouses belonged to women, and clan mothers still name and can remove the chiefs at Tonawanda, which never adopted the elected government the Seneca Nation wrote for itself in 1848. Religion divides along a similar line. Many Seneca are Christian, but the Longhouse religion, Gaihwi:io, is a Seneca creation: the prophet Handsome Lake, Cornplanter's half-brother, received his visions in 1799 in a community wrecked by land loss and alcohol, and his code still sets the ceremonial year of Midwinter, Strawberry and Green Corn.

The last two and a half centuries have been one long argument with New York State and Washington over land. The Sullivan expedition burned the Seneca towns and orchards in 1779. The Treaty of Canandaigua guaranteed what remained in 1794, and a run of later deals, some plainly fraudulent, stripped most of it away. In the 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers built the Kinzua Dam and drowned a third of the Allegany territory, including the Cornplanter grant, over the nation's objections and the treaty itself. The Seneca have also produced people the wider country knows: the orator Red Jacket, and Ely S. Parker, who wrote out the surrender terms at Appomattox as Grant's military secretary and became the first Native Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Less known is the Seneca hand in Haudenosaunee raised beadwork, the padded, sculptural style sold to Niagara Falls tourists for a century, and the single upright eagle feather on the Seneca gustoweh, the cap that tells other Haudenosaunee which door you keep.