Apologies to the Iroquois. With a study of The Mohawks in high steel by Joseph Mitchell

Apologies to the Iroquois is a book about the present situation of the Six Nations Confederacy, who figure in Cooper’s novels and Parkman’s history and are the subject of Lewis H. Morgan’s great pioneer study in anthropology, The League of the Iroquois. The Six Nations - called collectively the Iroquois - are the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Oneidas, and theTuscaroras. More numerous today than when the white man first found them, they live on reservations in New York State and Canada. At the time of the arrival of the whites, these Indians were the most advanced in the East. They had an organized league with a constitution and an empire which eventuaIIy extended as far west as the Mississippi. They had also an elaborate ceremonial life, to which, at the end of the eighteenth century, was added the doctrine of Handsome Lake, their great prophet and, religious reformer. This league and this religion still survive among a people who, strangely enough, now mostly earn their livings as steel and iron workers. The Iroquois have lately, under pressure of various projects which threaten to deprive them of their reservations or otherwise encroach on their traditional rights, been stimulated to something in the nature of an Iroquois nationalist movement. This book presents the findings and adventures of two New Yorker writers, Joseph Mitchell and Edmund Wilson, in exploring the Iroquois world: its politics, its ceremonies, its personalities. BOOK JACKET.