Seneca Indian Tribe

The Seneca Indian tribe was a group of indigenous North Americans who lived in the area that is now known as New York prior to the American Revolution. This area is between the Genesee River and Canandaigua Lake. The Seneca maintained permanent settlements and raised crops such as

The Seneca are the largest tribe in the Six Nations also known as the Iroquois League or Iroquois Confederacy. The other tribes within the Six Nations were the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, with the Tuscarora eventually joining to make the sixth nation.

The Seneca Indian Tribe lived in longhouses, which were made of elm logs and bark. The elm trees were cut down with stone axes and the bark was dried and used as shingles. Families would share the longhouses which were built near each other to form a village. As many as twenty different families would live in one longhouse, with as many as one hundred longhouses making up the village.

The diet of the Seneca included deer, turkey, beaver, duck, and fish. While the men were hunting for meat, the women were doing the farming. The Seneca had permanent farms on which they grew many varieties of corn, beans, and squash, known as the "three sisters". The Seneca also ate wild strawberries, wild greens, herbs, and maple sugar.

Currently, the exact number of Seneca tribe members is unknown, but there are between 15,000 and 25,000 living near Brantford, Ontario, Canada and approximately 30,000 in the U.S., living on and off reservations in New York and Oklahoma. The Seneca now run casinos in Niagara Falls, Buffalo Creek, and Allegany.