The Iroquois Confederacy is a political union of North American Indian nations who acted (and act) in war and peace, in trade alliances and treaties of goodwill, as a single nation. The term Iroquois was derived from the Algonquian word Irinakhoiw, which the French spelled with the suffix -ois. The word, which translates as "real adders," illustrates a common phenomenon in which a derisive term used by a native group's enemy becomes the accepted designation of the group in the European languages. The English knew them as the Five Indian Nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. In 1722, when the Tuscaroras joined their league, the confederacy became known as the Six Indian Nations or Six Nations Confederacy. The people of the Six Nations designate themselves Haudenosaunee, which translates loosely as "people of the longhouse."
The confederacy was long in existence when Europeans arrived and became conscious of it in the early seventeenth century. No one knows the exact date of its founding, but a conservative estimate finds it in existence late in the fifteenth century. Some Iroquois oral tradition projects the founding date at several centuries earlier.
The oral tradition recounting the founding of the league is called the Gayaneshakgowa, or Great Law of Peace. This tradition identifies a Huron individual, Deganawida (known in Iroquois tradition as the Peacemaker), as a prophet who was inspired with a plan to end human beings' abuses of other human beings. This mission began at a time of great confusion and blood feuding, when assassinations and murder were common and when war parties were often dispatched to distant lands to avenge an act of violence, which then escalated into warfare between clans, villages, and whole nations.
The Peacemaker enlisted the assistance of a former Onondaga chief, Hiawatha, to carry his message to the nations. The message they brought was complex, and the tradition that relates it requires over a week in the telling. The Peacemaker proposed that the leaders of the communities organize for the purpose of creating a forum at which "thinking will replace violence." This assembly of leaders became the Grand Council, and eventually there were fifty sachems, or chiefs, from the various nations: nine Mohawks, nine Oneidas, fourteen Onondagas, ten Cayugas, and eight Senecas. They would assemble at Onondaga, at the geographical center of the country of the Five Nations, and would gather under what the Peacemaker called the Great Tree of Peace. There, reason would prevail.
The Haudenosaunee took their identity from their custom of building permanent towns and, within the towns, longhouses that served as communal dwellings and ceremonial buildings. The largest of these were about sixty feet wide by over a hundred yards long. The Peacemaker compared the Great League to a long-house with the sky as its roof, the earth as its floor, and the fires of the nations burning within. The various nations had been organized into clans, and the Peacemaker adapted this tradition to the new political order, facilitating the renaming of the clans. There would be nine clans in all, but different nations would have different configurations. The clans are Turtle, Bear, Wolf, Heron, Hawk, Snipe, Beaver, Deer, and Eel. The women of the clans would meet under the leadership of a clan mother and select the men who would assemble as chiefs in the Grand Council. The Peacemaker proposed that the People of the Longhouse would be united in a brotherhood so strong that the people of the Turtle clan of the Senecas would view the people of the Turtle clan of the Mohawks as their own blood kin, and as such it would be unlawful for a person of one of these nations to marry a person of the other who was of the same clan, just as it would be wrong for a person to marry a sibling.
There was initial opposition to the plan of unity from a powerful Onondaga war chief whose name was Tadodaho. He was said to be the embodiment of evil, an individual who had woven snakes into his hair to intimidate all in his presence, and he had no interest in supporting a league dedicated to peace. The Peacemaker and Hayanwatah despaired of ever converting him until they voiced their concerns to Jikohnsaseh, a woman chief of the Cat (or Neutral) Nation. She suggested that he could be won over by being offered the chairmanship of the Great League. When the nations assembled to make their offer, Tadodaho accepted. Jikohnsaseh, who came to be described as the Mother of Nations or the Peace Queen, seized the horns of authority and placed them on Tadodaho's head in a gesture symbolic of the power of women in Iroquois polity.
The Grand Council was empowered to treat with foreign nations and peoples and to settle disputes among the Five Nations. The Iroquois Confederacy is divided into houses or, in their own parlance, "brotherhoods." The elder brothers are the Mohawks and Senecas. The younger brothers are the Oneidas, Cayugas, and, since 1722, the Tuscaroras. The Onondagas are known as the "Firekeepers." The Senecas and Mohawks confer as a "house," and the Cayugas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras confer in a separate caucus, in a structure similar to that found in upper and lower houses in some parliamentary systems. Issues that arise before the council are considered first by the Mohawk and Seneca "side," then by the Cayugas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras in council. If these two "sides" are unable to reach agreement, the matter is sent to the Onondagas, who then cast the deciding vote. If the two "sides" reach agreement, the Onondagas have no veto power and must confirm the decision. In each of their deliberations there is an effort to reach unanimity, but when unanimity is impossible to achieve a vote is taken to determine the sense of the assembly. If the measure is favored by a significant majority, a second vote is taken at which those who dissented are expected to express solidarity with the others.
Continuous contact with a European nation commenced in 1609 when Samuel de Champlain led a French force against a Mohawk military expedition in the Champlain Valley. This led to intermittent warfare between France and her Indian allies on one side and the Haudenosaunee on the other. This warfare was interrupted in 1624 with a peace arrangement that may be described as the first treaty between the Haudenosaunee and a European nation. The peace was short-lived, and intermittent hostilities continued. France had developed extensive alliances with Indian nations north of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, and the European introduction of the fur trade greatly enhanced competition among various Indian nations.
France and the Haudenosaunee concluded a treaty of peace in 1653, but war resumed in 1658, marking the beginning of a century during which the Haudenosaunee balanced their own interests in the context of the rivalry between England and France. The war was costly to New France, however, and in 1665 a military buildup in New France brought the two sides to negotiations and another treaty. Within months of the treaty France launched an invasion into Mohawk territory. One of the results of this exchange was that a Mohawk village was coerced into accepting French Jesuit missionaries. This village would eventually move under French protection to the St. Lawrence Valley, where its people would become known as the "French" or Caugnawaga Iroquois. They would eventually find their home in the oldest and largest Indian town established by Europeans—Kahnawake, Quebec—but they would be estranged from the confederacy from that time.
One of the first actions of the English after expelling the Dutch from the colony of New York was the establishment of formal relations with the Haudenosaunee in the form of a treaty with the Mohawks and Senecas in 1664. There were treaties of peace between the Haudenosaunee and other colonies during this period: with Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1677, with Maryland and Virginia in 1677, and another with Virginia in 1679.
Although they were arguably outnumbered and potentially surrounded by powerful enemies, the Haudenosaunee managed to sustain a measure of political and commercial hegemony among their Indian neighbors through the skillful and energetic use of diplomacy. Through a complex web of agreements and alliances they played a principal role in control of trade routes and in access to large but sparsely populated hunting territories shared by a number of Indian nations. Their strategic location—they were adjacent to both the French and English colonies—was a major factor that enabled them to exercise influence over international affairs far in excess of that afforded by either their numbers or their military prowess.
France continued to view the Haudenosaunee as a threat to their ambitions for economic hegemony over the Indian nations and lands around the Great Lakes and into the Ohio Valley. French efforts to establish economic and military alliances with the Illinois Nation led to tensions between France and the Haudenosaunee after the latter attacked the Illinois in 1680. In early 1684 Seneca warriors seized a French arms shipment and also attacked a French outpost on the Illinois River. New France's Governor La Barre sought and received permission to go to war. In July he set off with an army that was soon devastated by sickness, and he was forced to abandon plans for attack. The next year France sent the Marquis de Denonville to accomplish the task of forcing the Haudenosaunee into submission. He launched an attack in the summer of 1687 during which French armies and their Indian allies invaded the Seneca country while most of the able-bodied Seneca men were pursuing military action against Indians in the Mississippi watershed. All the Seneca towns were burned, but the French were forced to withdraw and there was no decisive battle. Two years later Haudenosaunee forces attacked the French at Lachine on the St. Lawrence River and laid siege to nearby Montreal. Hostilities between the Haudenosaunee and France were to continue independent of France's struggle with England during the War of the League of Augsburg (which ended in 1697) until a peace treaty ending the war was signed in 1701.
From that time until France was expelled from North America in 1763, the Haudenosaunee maintained a position of neutrality in the wars between France and England, although they maintained closer cultural and economic relations with England. Following the Seven Years' War some Senecas joined Pontiac's campaign to drive English settlers out of the Ohio region, but Sir William Johnson was successful in keeping the Seneca Nation as a whole and the rest of the Haudenosaunee from joining Pontiac's forces.
During the American Revolution the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee met and formally declared neutrality in the war between Britain and the American colonists. However, religious loyalties had invaded the Haudenosaunee communities and continued to work to their disadvantage. In 1776 many of the Mohawks in the Mohawk Valley were members of the Church of England, while a number of Oneida warriors were converts to the Bostonian puritanism of the Reverend Samuel Kirkland. Loyalties divided communities and families along these lines. At the same time, disaster struck Onondaga in 1777 in the form of a plague that rendered the Onondagas unable to host confederacy meetings at a critical moment in the war. In the absence of confederacy advice, significant numbers of Iroquois warriors joined the war effort in support of Britain. In retaliation, American forces invaded confederacy lands in 1779, burning crops and villages and scattering the population.
All in all, the American Revolution was a disaster for the Haudenosaunee. Following the war, treaties were signed that transferred ever larger areas of Haudenosaunee territory into the hands of New York State and a series of land speculators. Not even the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, who had supported the American revolutionaries, were spared. They lost most of their land in what are generally regarded as coercive or fraudulent treaties. Joseph Brant, the Mohawk war chief most responsible for persuading the warriors to support the British, negotiated lands in Canada, most notably a territory along the Grand River, in reparation for those lost in New York. In 1784, following the treaty that ended the war, many of the Haudenosaunee migrated there.
In the nineteenth century the Iroquois Confederacy continued as both a political alliance and a cultural entity. In 1799 the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake began his mission to restore the traditional practices of the Haudenosaunee and to lay the foundation of the modern Iroquois traditional religion. He also restored the Confederacy Council Fire to Onondaga in central New York State. Shortly thereafter the nations on the Grand River, unable to travel the great distance to Onondaga to conduct their governance, kindled a confederacy fire at their home in Canada. Since that time the confederacy has conducted Grand Councils in both longhouses. Although the two councils unite and act as one whenever business must be conducted that affects them both, the Grand River Council is the primary political organization in negotiations with Canada and its political subdivisions, while the Grand Council at Onondaga is the primary negotiator with the United States and its subdivisions.
Although there have been some changes, the chiefs of the confederacy continue to meet in council and to host gatherings at which the Great Law is recited, both at Grand River and at Onondaga. The political culture of the Haudenosaunee, now some five or more centuries old, continues to function to this day with a resilience that has enabled their continued existence as a distinct people.
See also
Cayuga;
Mohawk;
Oneida;
Onondaga;
Seneca;
Tuscarora;
Howard Berman, Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution "Perspectives on American Indian Sovereignty and International Law, 1600 to 1776," (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1992); Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester, N.Y.: Sage & Brother, 1851); Paul A.W. Wallace, White Roots of Peace: The Iroquois Book of Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946).
John C. Mohawk
Seneca
State University of New York at Buffalo
