Iroquois Confederacy

Tribes affected: Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Tuscarora

Culture area: Northeast

Language group: Iroquoian

Primary location: From the Ottawa River, Canada, south to Cumberland, Tennessee; from Maine west to Lake Michigan

Population size:28,202 in United States (2021 American Community Survey); estimated 55,200 in Canada (2021 Statistics Canada)

The word “Iroquois” refers to all the tribes that speak dialects of the Iroquoian language group, including the Saint Lawrence, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Tuscarora, Huron, Erie, Honniasont, and Susquehannock groups. Cherokee is also part of the Iroquoian language family, but it is as different from the northern dialects of Iroquoian as German is from English. The Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse), consisted of the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca peoples, plus the Tuscaroras after 1722. These groups practiced extensive horticulture, centered on corn, beans, and squash, as well as fishing and hunting. They lived in fortified villages. They were little affected by European contact until after 1760, when the fall of New France in the French and Indian War opened the floodgates to English and American settlers, upon which encroachment on Iroquois land began in earnest.

Three basic understandings were central to Iroquois life. First, all actions of individuals were based on personal decisions, and group action required consensus. Second, everybody shared; generosity and charity were paramount. Third, no one was separate from the web of life. Humankind was not outside nature, and the earth and the woodlands could be neither owned nor exploited.

The Founding of the Confederacy

These central precepts were incorporated into the famous League of the Iroquois, or Iroquois Confederacy. Modern members of the original five tribes of the confederacy, to which was added the Tuscarora tribe in 1722, still celebrate in ritual and ceremony the founding of the league.

A Huron prophet named Deganawida is said to have had a vision of a white pine which reached through the sky to communicate with the Master of Life. An eagle perched atop the white pine was present to keep the peace and watch for intruders. This icon is now at the center of understanding of the Iroquois Confederacy, just as the tree of life is at the center of their cosmology. The tree’s roots were the original Five Nations—the Senecas (the Great Hill People), the Cayugas (People at the Mucky Land), the Onondagas (People on the Hills), the Oneidas (People of the Standing Stone), and the Kanienkehakas (People of the Flint). (“Mohawk,” as the Kanienkehakas are also known, is an Algonquian term meaning “cannibal.”) The soil around the tree was three principles: skenno, health of body and sanity of mind and peace between individuals and groups; gaiiwiyo, righteousness in conduct, thought, and deed and equity in human rights; and gashedenza, faith and knowledge that spiritual power (orenda) is connected to governing and the maintenance of self-defense.

The league was probably founded between 1400 and 1600 in response to constant warfare among the tribes in the Northeast. Its purpose was to unify and pacify the infighting Iroquois and to gain strength in numbers in order to resist the implacable opposition of both the Iroquois-speaking Huron confederacy and the Algonquian-speaking people of the area.

The Haudenosaunee created a carefully constructed constitution, the Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace, that was transmitted from generation to generation orally from variously colored symbolic cues or mnemonics woven into belts of shells called wampum. That “wampum” came to be translated as “money,” or as something valuable in commodity exchanges, is an example of the different mindsets of Europeans and American Indians; originally, wampum belts passed on ritual, ceremonial, and mythological knowledge as well as political and social instructions.

Iroquois are known as great orators. Oral communication of the symbols on the wampum belts allowed speakers to become definers. The Great Law of Peace, with its social requirements and legal relationships, can take many hours, even days, to communicate.

At the onset the Onondagas were given the responsibility of keeping the central fire and sacred wampum belts. The Faithkeeper (central religious leader), always an Onondaga, calls a yearly council for the purposes of rehearing the constitution and laws and resolving differences. The council retains tribal relationships. Clan-system relationships from ancient times define roles within the council. The traditional clan system was matrilineal; the oldest sensible woman of each clan of each tribe was designated in council with other tribal clan women to select a proportion of the fifty chiefs who made up the council. Chiefs served for life, but the clan mothers could remove chiefs from office for immoral or unethical behavior. Since clan mothers usually selected chiefs from their own lineage, each member of the council was answerable to the women of his maternal family. The power wielded by women had its roots in the early subsistence patterns of the five tribes, since they were dependent on agriculture.

The Confederacy in the Seventeenth Century

The Great Peace was spread by warfare. Warfare was visited on any tribe who did not accept the wampum belts of peace. In one week in March 1649, as attested by French Jesuit priests, the Five Nations essentially wiped out the Hurons. Nine months later, the Petun people of western Michigan suffered the same fate. The Eries, who outnumbered the Iroquois in population, were the next to fall. Those who were not killed were adopted, and the Erie tribe ceased to exist. By 1700, the Five Nations, numbering fewer than thirty thousand people, were the political masters of an area from the Ottawa River in Canada to the Cumberland in Tennessee and from Maine to Lake Michigan. This hegemony remained in force for another 150 years.

The Five Nations of the Iroquois wrote a crucial chapter in American history. In the year 1609, Samuel de Champlain, a French fur trader and explorer, accompanied a war party of Hurons and Algonquins on an expedition to the lake that now bears his name. Met by a war party of Mohawks who had never before encountered a musket, Champlain single-handedly killed three Mohawks with his firearms, scaring the others away in bewilderment and fear. This humiliation made the Mohawk doggedly hate the French from that time on. Within a few years, Five Nation Iroquois were purchasing guns from Dutch and English traders. The Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys were opened to the English; the French were locked out. The subsequent British dominance in the New World was made easier by the political and military power of the Iroquois Confederacy and their hatred of the French. The opening of the frontier moved with the Iroquois and their conquering ways, not with the English or French. The Iroquois stood at a pivotal point and controlled the keys to the interior of the continent.

After 1690, the Iroquois Confederacy developed a level of unity and cooperation that allowed them to capitalize on their pivotal position. They learned to play the various European traders one against the other in ways most beneficial to the Iroquois, and they followed a policy of independent neutrality with diplomatic artistry.

Colonial delegates from the Americas traveled to Albany to learn from the Iroquois. The longhouse sachems urged the colonists to form assemblies and meet to discuss common interests. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin asked, if Iroquois "savages" could govern themselves with such skill, how much better could the "civilized" English colonists do? In 1754, the first great intercolonial conference was held at Albany, and Iroquois delegates were in attendance.

Iroquois power in the eighteenth century reached the highest point of any Indian nation in North America. Yet the great orator chiefs who held the respect of all who negotiated with them had no personal wealth to display in the manner of the Europeans. “The chiefs are generally the poorest among them,” wrote a Dutch pastor in Albany in 1640, “for instead of their receiving from the common people, they are obliged to give.”

Origins, Warfare, and Religious Life

The Iroquois are a prime example of a group whose culture has a well-established pedigree. Archaeological evidence suggests a long period of occupancy in New York State in a cultural continuum of between one thousand and fifteen hundred years. A subsistence model culture called Owasco preceded the Iroquois, and its influences are reflected in Iroquois legends and in the design of Iroquois personal clay pipes. The Iroquois carried the highly distinctive Owasco clay-pipe designs to another step with more skillful carving and more elaboration in bowl shape. Owasco was preceded by the mound-building Hopewell cultures (Hopewell burial attitudes were reflected in later Huron attitudes toward the dead). By 1400 CE, proto-Iroquois villages existed, and by 1600, the culture was distinctive to the level that the people referred to themselves as Haudenosaunee.

The Iroquoian speakers of the Eastern Woodlands seemed always to be in a state of war. Before the establishment of the League of Five Nations, war was a ritual, a means of advancing individual or group prestige. Wars were fought primarily for revenge, and such warfare had degenerated into unavoidable ongoing feuds by the time of the emergence of the principles of Deganawida, perhaps around 1570. After the establishment of the confederacy, which ended intertribal blood feuds and instead established a spiritual reason for warrior societies, wars became conquests to expand hunting grounds and dominate neighbors—to “make women of them” if they did not accept participation in the confederacy.

The foundation of the Iroquois confederacy was the fireplace, composed of a mother and her children. Each hearth was a part of a larger owachira, a related or extended family traced through the mother. Two or more owachiras made a clan, and eight clans made a tribe.

Religious life was highly organized and included a priesthood of three men and three women who supervised the keeping of the faith. Even though the Iroquois are most noted for their strongly defined and impressive governing organization in which politics dovetailed with complex matrilineal associations, the Five Nations are also well known for their elaborate religious practices. Their cosmology was well defined, and their mythology was more detailed than the origin stories in the Bible. Anthropomorphic deities, complex ceremonies, and a highly developed theology of impersonal spiritual power have not, even to this day, entirely disappeared. As with all the religious practices indigenous to North America, curing was a central part of the religious life day to day. The Iroquois also had a profound sense of the psychology of the soul and used dreams to communicate with the spirits. The mythological base of the league organization and curing societies formed a stable and traditional charter that has resulted in continuity among the Iroquois to this day, despite the overwhelming influx of the Europeans.

The American Revolution to the Present

Iroquois power and strength as a confederacy grew until the American Revolutionary War, when the tribes were divided in their allegiances to the British and the Americans. The westernmost tribes of the league were assaulted, burned out, and chased into Canada by General John Sullivan’s campaign of 1777. George Washington ordered the invasion and seizure of Iroquois land in order to use it to pay both his troops and the Dutch bankers who were financing the revolution at the time. The effects of the American Revolution ended the military power of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Iroquois, despite conflict and contact with European influences from the earliest times, have retained their social being and many of their cultural practices, including kinship and ceremonial ties. Midwinter ceremonies are still practiced, along with green corn and harvest thanksgiving ceremonies. Condolence songs are still sung when the maple sap flows. The firm base of the People of the Longhouse persists to this day and is still a viable model for the future.

Bibliography

Fenton, William N. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. U of Oklahoma P, 1998.

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Johansen, Bruce Elliott, and Barbara Alice Mann, eds. Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Greenwood, 2000.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., ed. The American Heritage Book of Indians. Simon, 1961.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Indian Heritage of America. Rev. ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Kanentiio, Doug George. "Doug George-Kanentiio: A 2015 Update on the Iroquois Population." Indianz.6 Jan. 2015, www.indianz.com/News/2015/01/06/doug-georgekanentiio-a-2015-up.asp. Accessed 28 Mar. 2023.

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"2010 Census CPH-T-6. American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes in the United States and Puerto Rico: 2010." US Census Bureau, 21 Oct. 2021 www.census.gov/history/pdf/c2010br-10.pdf. Accessed 28 Mar. 2023