If You Lived with the Iroquois

Detailed, color paintings and question-and-answer text bring to life traditional ways, customs and everyday world of the Iroquois--one of the most powerful and influential nations of Native American.

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This story is a great way to teach students about a Native American culture. The book gives a history and a map of their settlement. The book also discusses many topics that children would want to know when studying a new culture. The book addresses food, entertainment, and how the tribe members interact with one another.

The colorful images in the story are appropriate. Many earth tones are used to represent the Native Americans. However, when things are supposed to be colorful they are.

After reading the book children can discuss other Native American tribes and share if they are a member of one. ( )

After a brief introduction to introduce the Iroquois and a map to show the land they occupied the rest of the book follows a question and answer format. The book is very thorough and every possible topic that would interest a child is presented: food, clothing, family relations, lodgings, games, sports, what boys and men did opposed to what girls and women did and many more topics. The text is written to the reader in the second person speaking to "you" directly as if you had asked the question yourself. The book is profusely illustrated with each page being completely coloured itself, no white pages to be found here. We read a previous book in this series earlier this year on the Hopi Indians and my son enjoyed this one much more. I'm not sure whether it was because of the the writing itself or because these Indians are from where we live that he had more interest.

I only have a couple of minor problems with the book. One is the few pages that discuss the Iroquois creation story. It is compared to the Biblical creation story and then to many other religious creation stories and it is noted how similar they all are. The tone is that all religious stories are just that, stories. I found that disrespectful, and, personally, I saw very little similarities between the Iroquois and Biblical views of creation. The other was that when discussing the area, the words America or the United States were often used when it is obviously clear from the map that the area inhabited by the Iroquois is equally in modern day Canada and the US. I always used the word North America and sometimes even used just the word Canada. If they can just use United States, I can just use Canada! But otherwise everything else was unbiased. The book only pertains to pre-white man times which enables it to keep to a very evenhanded presentation. ( )