The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy

The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy, William N. Fenton's 1998 study from the University of Oklahoma Press, Civilization of the American Indian Series, is the standard scholarly political history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy from the sixteenth century to the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, by an anthropologist who worked with Six Nations communities for over sixty years. Its strength is that it covers the Grand Council's three bench structure, the doorkeeper and firekeeper offices, and the 1722 admission of the Tuscarora as sixth nation in more depth than any other English language source, from a scholar with six decades of direct community engagement. Its limit is that it is a single author's synthesis of oral and documentary tradition across centuries; a claim about one specific nation's internal variation on a shared practice should be checked against that nation's own account.