Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Great Peacemaker, Dekanawida, Hiawatha, and Jigonsaseh founded the Iroquois Confederacy to unite five warring nations under a single symbolic household. The confederacy was established at Onondaga Lake to end centuries of bloodshed among the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.
The Great Law of Peace created a Grand Council of fifty chiefs who sat in a longhouse where the Onondaga kept the fire and the Mohawk guarded the western door. This system maintained an egalitarian society that banned servitude and allowed women to hold significant political power through the clan mother system.
The Iroquois began the Beaver Wars in 1609 when Samuel de Champlain assisted his allies in defeating a Mohawk war party by the shores of what is now Lake Champlain. By 1649, Iroquois war parties had destroyed the Huron Confederacy, and by 1654, they had eliminated the Erie tribe.
The Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant fought for the British Crown while the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the American colonists under the pressure of Reverend Samuel Kirkland. In 1779, George Washington ordered the Sullivan Campaign to destroy the British-Indian alliance, resulting in the burning of many Iroquois villages and the displacement of refugees to Canada.
Iroquois men from Kahnawake became skilled steelwork erectors and built many bridges and skyscrapers in Canada and the United States, including the St. Lawrence bridge in 1886. This tradition began when Iroquois men were hired to help in the construction of the bridge and their expertise allowed them to build structures that defined the skylines of major cities.
In 1990, a long-running dispute over ownership of land at Oka, Quebec, caused a violent stand-off that ended with a melee between soldiers and warriors, leaving a policeman dead. As of 2010, there were over 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people living in Canada and over 81,000 in the United States.