Iroquois or Haudenosaunee
Although different roles were traditionally assumed for males and females, they overlapped to a significant degree. The Great Law of Dekanawida gives approximately equal rights to each sex. The chief was always male, but was elected by women.
In the Iroquois culture up until the middle of the 19th century serial monogamy was common among the Iroquoians. Although adultery was frowned upon, divorce and remarriage were not. Due to the Iroquois matrilineal system, children usually stayed with the mother rather than the father, if divorce occurred. Most divorced mothers quickly remarried.
Read more about this topic: Gender Roles In First Nations And Native American Tribes
Famous quotes containing the word iroquois:
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)