Iroquois Confederacy - Name

Name

The Iroquois call themselves the Haudenosaunee, which means "People of the Longhouse," or more accurately, "They Are Building a Long House." According to their tradition, The Great Peacemaker introduced the name at the time of the formation of the League. It implies that the nations of the League should live together as families in the same longhouse.

Symbolically, the Mohawk were the guardians of the eastern door, as they were located in the east closest to the Hudson, and the Seneca were the guardians of the western door of the "tribal longhouse", the territory they controlled in New York. The Onondaga, whose homeland was in the center of Haudenosaunee territory, were keepers of the League's (both literal and figurative) central flame. The French colonists called the Haudenosaunee by the name of Iroquois. The name had various possible origins both learned by the French from tribes who were enemies of the Haudenosaunee:

• French transliteration of irinakhoiw, a Huron (Wyandot) name for the Haudenosaunee. As the Hurons were traditional enemies, they used a derogatory term, meaning "black snakes" or "real adders". The Haudenosaunee and Huron were traditional enemies, as the Huron were allied with the French and tried to protect their access to fur traders.
• French linguists, such as Henriette Walter, and anthropologists, such as Dean Snow, support the following explanation. Prior to French colonization, Basque fishermen traded with the Algonquins, who were enemies of the Haudenosaunee. The above scholars think "Iroquois" was derived from a Basque expression, hilokoa, meaning the "killer people". Because there is no "L" sound in the Algonquian languages of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence region, the Algonquian tribes used the name Hirokoa for the Haudenosaunee. They applied this to the pidgin language they used with the Basque. The French transliterated the word according to their own phonetic rules and arrived at "Iroquois".