PROBLEMS ARISING FROM THE HISTORIC NORTHEASTERN POSITION OF THE IROQUOIS

By William FentonSmithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,vol. 100. p. 159-251.

As I RECALL, William Fenton's senior thesis in Sociology dealt with the culture of the Iroquois. No doubt this early paper would seem quite juvenile to Fenton now for he has devoted the years since his graduation to a thoroughgoing study of these Indians, first as a graduate student in anthropology at Yale, later as a representative of the U. S. Bureau of Native Education stationed on the Seneca Reservation and now as associate ethnologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution.

The present monograph is one of a series of essays on the historical anthropology of North America, published as a single volume by the Smithsonian Institution and dedicated to its veteran ethnologist, Dr. John R. Swanton. Using data from the early accounts of Cartier, Champlain and the Jesuit Relations as well as from recent anthropological and ethnological studies, Fenton discusses the cultural position and maps the movements and village sites of each of the various Iroquois speaking tribes including not only the classic Five Nations (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas) but also less well known tribes such as the Laurentian Iroquois, Tobacco, Erie, Wenro and others.

As its title indicates the study is designed to raise problems rather than to answer them, but this reviewer suspects that if the answers to many of these questions are ever forthcoming they will result from future studies by Fenton himself.