Iroquois Kinship Iroquois horticultural kinship

The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee are a matrilineal horticultural society based on longhouse clans where the women traditionally farm, own the output of their labor, and have decision power in a decentralized, consensus-based and Association of clans called the Iroquois League. What has often been called the Iroquois Confederation in the past but has always been and is currently called the League is a balanced-reciprocity group of 50 male chiefs who are selected, monitored, overseen and if necessary demoted by the Clan Mothers. Local decision making takes place in small clan groups based around the longhouse, by male and female councils who then agree on policy but which the women ultimately arbitrate (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). The Clan Mothers also have religious authority and redistribute private property upon a member's death (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). This entails institutions of private property, which women acquire through grain surplus, with which they traditionally underwrote the men's trading and hunting activities. Clan structure was (is, in existing traditional Clans) communal, with longhouse privileges and farm tenure assigned by the Clan Mother to the various matrifocal nuclear family groups. These groups share (d) parenting status where the biological parents' same-sex sibling has parental authority over the biological parent's child, but the birth parent's opposite-sex sibling provides the kindred relationship designating preferred marriage relation if age- and gender-appropriate such cousins are available. The optimal result is that a female marries one of her father's sister's sons, and a male marries...

This helps ensure marriage across rather than within clans, but keeps inheritable property and use rights within the group. While some authors describe this primary role for women as a thing of the past, evidence suggests the traditional culture survives to this day (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011a). The problem now seems to be recognition by other authorities (Iroquois Indian Museum 2011b).
The matrilineal descent institution affects Iroquois lifeways by dictating that males join their wives' longhouses, leaves the institution of marriage largely fluid since children remain in the mother's clan, so males and females can dissolve marriage easily even where children are present. This matriarchal descent structure plays out in governance where the Clan Mothers allocate property and use rights, designate and send male chiefs to inter-clan institutions, and amass wealth independent of male property rights. The matriarchal lineage institution also provides for surrogate parents in same-sex siblings as the birth parent, which likely helps to support a less-binding primary marriage agreement if other adults from the previous generation are responsible for and authorized to replace the birth parent if the marriage becomes dissolved.

These match and differ from U.S. culture in varying ways. While inheritance and legal dominion has traditionally been patriarchal in this society, we see matriarchal tendencies emerging from within over the last century or so with the weakening of the nuclear family. As more and more families divorce, the result is seems in my experience at least increasing assignment of custody and primary residence for…