Hiawatha

Chief

• Born: c. 1525
• Birthplace: Mohawk River valley, New York
• Died: c. 1575
• Place of death: Mohawk River valley, New York

Mohawk chief

Hiawatha was instrumental in founding and organizing the Iroquois Confederacy with the prophetic peacemaker Deganawida. Through his skills of oratory and diplomacy, he helped establish peace among the Iroquois in precolonial North America.

Area of Achievement Government and politics, law

Early Life

Not much is known about the life of Hiawatha (hi-eh-WAW-theh) before he became a chief. Some oral histories relate that he had another name before meeting the visionary Deganawida, and that it was the visionary who named him Hiawatha.

There are no written references to Hiawatha before the seventeenth century, and the first complete story of his life was written from oral tradition by the Mohawk chief and statesman Joseph Brant (1742-1807) shortly before his death. A more complete version by Seth Newhouse (1842-1921) in 1885 became the “official” version of the Iroquois Nations when the council of chiefs redacted it in 1900 and again in 1912. The story itself, however, suggests great antiquity. The exact date, or even century, of the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy might never be known, though recent archaeological evidence suggests a union of the five nations much earlier than the early sixteenth century date that has become standard.

Before his meeting with Deganawida, Hiawatha was a prosperous chief with seven beautiful daughters (in some versions of the story, three). An enemy of Hiawatha, Atotarho, whom some narratives describe as a wizard and a cannibal, killed the daughters, one at a time, when they would not marry him. Inconsolable with grief for his daughters, Hiawatha exiled himself in the woods. It was there that the meeting with Deganawida would change his life and make Hiawatha the first royaneh (chief) to accept the visionary’s message of peace and consolation.

Life’s Work

While recent historians and ethnographers have rightly emphasized the greater role of Deganawida in bringing peace to the five nations of the Iroquois (Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Onandaga, and Seneca) and uniting them in a confederacy (to which the Tuscaroras were added in 1712 after their defeat by English colonial forces), one cannot overstate Hiawatha’s role as the first tribal leader to embrace and have validated, because of his influence, Deganawida’s vision of peace. Deganawida had been exiled from his own nation, the Huron, for his pacifist tendencies, and though he was presented in the narrative and religious tradition as divinely appointed, he met nothing but rebuffs until he met Hiawatha in the forest. The meeting of Deganawida and Hiawatha was mutually beneficial.

Deganawida had a message of peace to deliver to the warring tribes of Iroquoia (the geological term for central and western New York State), yet he was afflicted, some say, with a stutter or similar speech impediment. Hiawatha was gifted in eloquence, yet his debilitating grief isolated him from the people whom he should have served as hereditary leader. Deganawida healed Hiawatha by teaching him a series of rituals that remain part of the ceremonial life of the six nations: the sequential use of wampum, the condolence ceremony, and the requickening ceremony.

The use of wampum (Algonquian wampumpeag, white shell beads) represents a genuine collaboration between Hiawatha and Deganawida. The wampum were used for ceremonies, to record a treaty or other agreement, as tribute, and as gifts for exchange. The wampum in the case of Hiawatha came to represent his grief and reconciliation as he wandered through the forest. One story is as follows. On the third day of his exile (or perhaps the third leg of the journey), Hiawatha reached a deserted village on the Susquehanna River. He traced the river to its source and found a pond or lake filled with ducks. The ducks were startled by him, and then flew away, taking the water of the pond with them. Hiawatha then collected white and purple shells from the exposed dry bed of the pond and strung them on threads made from hemp to serve as reminders of the coming together of the Iroquois nations. Given the sacredness of the wampum to the Iroquois, and given that the wampum, by definition, is used to mark significant events, Hiawatha’s collecting these sacred objects became legend.

On meeting Hiawatha on his journey to spread the gospel of peace, Deganawida used Hiawatha’s strings of shells as a mnemonic (memory) device to guide his oration in a prototype of what would become the condolence ceremony. The concept of “condolence” is vital to the Iroquois concept of “peace.” The warring nations, which had been familiar with an intricate system of retaliation and revenge that characterized their cultures at war, needed an alternate system of compensation to replace it. Hiawatha learned that by ritually mourning the deaths of his daughters, instead of seeking consolation through retaliation alone, he could return to the concerns of the living; he soon became an advocate of Deganawida’s message of peace by mourning his daughters through a ritual of condolence.

The requickening ceremony takes the compensatory nature of condolence one step further by ritually adopting a member of another tribe as a re-embodiment of a slain member of one’s own tribe. That these surrogates were often seized in raids on the tribe responsible for the death of a loved one (usually a chief or sachem) indicates that the Iroquois definition of “peace” is not necessarily the cessation of all violence. It is, instead, a spiritual balance.

Hiawatha’s total absorption of Deganawida’s doctrine of peace is suggested by his reconciliation even with the evil Atotarho. The Onandaga shaman is depicted as having a crooked back and having snakes in his hair. In many cultures, including Iroquoian, straightness is an emblem of righteousness. Hiawatha straightened Atotarho’s body and combed the snakes out of his hair. (Combs made of antlers are common archaeological finds at Iroquois sites, and a possible etymology of the word hiawatha is “he who combs.”) The combing and straightening represented the re-formation of an evil wizard who would, as a now-righteous advocate of peace, become the first titular head of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The formation of the Iroquois Confederacy is the last great event of Hiawatha’s life. Under his leadership, and that of the re-formed Atotarho, the five great nations from east to west Seneca, Cayuga, Onandaga, Oneida, and Mohawk became a loose confederacy with the central nation, the Onondagas, having the final voice. The Onondaga’s leadership was more spiritual than political, and all five (later six) nations still functioned independently.

The original wampum record of the confederacy with four squares, two on either side of a central pine tree (which on the reverse appears as a heart), representing the union of five nations can be seen in New York’s state museum.

Significance

As the primary carrier of Deganawida’s message of peace, Hiawatha deserves a place not only in the history of the Iroquois but also in the history of world peace. As a Mohawk chief, he has come to stand for what was thought to be an unfamiliar (or unlikely) tolerance for peace, for like many Native American tribal names, the word “Mohawk” is derived from the slur of a neighboring tribe. In this case, “Mohawk” means “those who eat human flesh.”

Some versions of the Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederacy stories make Hiawatha a cannibal in a grieving phase compounding his divorce from society and other versions make Atotarho the cannibal. In either case, Hiawatha is the agent of reform, either himself repenting, or reforming another of cannibalism. For a great chief like Hiawatha to subordinate himself to a former enemy is the epitome of the humility that is necessary for peace to flourish.

The survival of Hiawatha’s name and legend (though with a great deal of inevitable variation) across nearly half a millennium is itself indicative of his historical significance. As one of the facilitators of the Great Peace and Power and Law that helped inspire the founders of American federalism, Hiawatha’s historical importance goes beyond just Seneca or Native American history; he deserves to be an icon of democratic principles.

Further Reading

Fenton, William N. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. An exhaustive sourcebook on the Iroquois Confederacy from its inception to 1794. Chapters 2 through 6 deal with Hiawatha.

Hale, Horatio. The Iroquois Book of Rites. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1963. This reprint of Hale’s 1883 classic preserves some of the earliest versions of the Hiawatha legend.

Parker, Arthur C. Parker on the Iroquois. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968. A reprint of three of an Iroquois ethnologist’s early twentieth century monographs that includes the Newhouse text of the Hiawatha story.

Richter, Daniel K. Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. A thorough history of the Iroquois people and their confederacy before and after the arrival of the Europeans.

Related article in Great Events from History: The Renaissance & Early Modern Era

16th century: Iroquois Confederacy Is Established.