Haudenosaunee

• 1. Introduction

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  The Haudenosaunee call themselves People of the Longhouse. From east to west, that house held five nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. In about 1722 a sixth joined, the Tuscarora, and the alliance became known as the Six Nations. At its peak around 1700, their power reached from present-day New York State north into Ontario and Quebec, and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains into Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley. For nearly 200 years they were a powerful factor in North American colonial policy. The French knew them as the Iroquois, a name of colonial origin that some scholars consider derogatory. How did former enemies bury their weapons under a Tree of Peace? Why did the women of these nations hold the power to make and unmake chiefs? And what happened when this united polity finally fractured?

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• 2. A Name Argued Over

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  Hodínöhšö:ni:h, meaning those of the extended house, is one of two phonetically similar Seneca words behind the autonym Haudenosaunee. The other, Hodínöhsö:ni:h, means house builders. An older autonym, Ongweh'onweh, means original people. The name Haudenosaunee first appears in English in Lewis Henry Morgan's work in 1851, written as Ho-dé-no-sau-nee.

  The origins of Iroquois are obscure. Its first written appearance, as Irocois, comes in Samuel de Champlain's account of his journey to Tadoussac in 1603. In 1978 Ives Goddard concluded that no such form is attested in any Indian language as a name for any Iroquoian group, and that its origin and meaning are unknown.

  Jesuit missionary Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix offered an early theory in 1744. He argued the word was purely French, built from Hiro or Hero, meaning I have said, and Koué, a cry of either sadness or joy. In 1883 Horatio Hale called that etymology dubious and proposed a Huron source. The French had encountered Algonquian-speaking tribes first, and so would have learned Algonquian names for their Haudenosaunee competitors.

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• 3. The Great Law Of Peace

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  The Great Peacemaker is traditionally held to have founded the confederacy, alongside Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee, the Mother of Nations, whose home acted as a sort of United Nations. They brought the Great Law of Peace to nations that had been fighting, raiding, and feuding with each other. Many archaeologists place the League's formation about 1450, though arguments have been made for a date as early as the solar eclipse of the 31st of August 1142.

  The League is composed of a Grand Council, an assembly of fifty chiefs, each representing a clan of a nation. When Europeans arrived, the Haudenosaunee were based in what is now central and western New York State, including the Finger Lakes region. Each nation kept a distinct language, territory, and function within the League.

  The Tuscarora migrated north from the Carolinas after a bloody conflict with white settlers. Sponsored by the Oneida, they were accepted as the sixth nation in 1722. The shift in name carried into diplomacy: until 1707 treaties were between the Five Nations and England, but after 1722 they were between the Six Nations and Britain.

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• 4. Beaver Wars And Empires

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  Beginning in 1609, the League fought the decades-long Beaver Wars against the French, their Huron allies, and neighboring tribes. Trying to control access to game for the lucrative fur trade, they invaded peoples of the Atlantic coast and the boreal Canadian Shield. Through the century they defeated and assimilated most of the Huron in 1649, the Petun in 1650, the Neutral Nation in 1651, the Erie in 1657, and the Susquehannock in 1680.

  In July 1701 the Haudenosaunee concluded the Nanfan Treaty, deeding conquered land north of the Ohio River to the English. That same year they signed the Great Peace of Montreal with the French. During the French and Indian War they briefly fought on both sides while trying to maintain neutrality, joining the British after the fall of Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac.

  The Dutch had built their wealth on this trade earlier. By the 1640s Dutch traders were exporting thousands of furs a year, most from the Mohawks, who used their monopoly over the Fort Orange market at Albany to set prices. Many of those furs had been stolen from Indigenous rivals around the St. Lawrence and then sold on.

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• 5. When The League Broke

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  During the American Revolution the League divided over how to answer the British Crown's requests for aid. The Oneida and Tuscarora supported the colonists, while the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca sided with the British and Loyalists. At the war's conclusion with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, no provisions were made for the Haudenosaunee.

  The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 forced the cession of much of their historical homeland, followed by the Canandaigua treaty of 1794 that took even more. The British ceded Haudenosaunee territory without consultation, and many had to abandon lands in the Mohawk Valley to relocate north. The Crown offered land in compensation for the five million acres lost in the south, but it was not equivalent.

  The numbers tell the squeeze. In 1784 a total of 6,000 Haudenosaunee faced 240,000 New Yorkers. As one account put it, the Oneidas alone, only 600 strong, owned six million acres. Iroquoia was a land rush waiting to happen, and by the War of 1812 the Haudenosaunee had lost control of considerable territory.

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• 6. Clan Mothers And Power

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  The Clan Mothers appoint leaders, because they have raised children and are therefore held in higher regard. If a leader becomes corrupt or stops listening, those same women have the power to strip him of leadership. The Haudenosaunee have historically followed a matrilineal system: hereditary leadership passes from a mother to her children, who belong to her clan and gain social status through hers.

  Minnie Myrtle observed in 1855 that no Haudenosaunee treaty was binding unless ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the mothers of the nation. Revising Council laws required the consent of two-thirds of the mothers. This double supermajority made the Confederacy a de facto consensus government, with women holding the power to veto treaties or declarations of war.

  The demotion of a chief had a name and a gesture: knocking off the horns. The deer antlers, an emblem of leadership, were removed from his headgear, returning him to private life. Women's councils met separately from the men's, sending runners to deliver their decisions, and a woman could appear before the men's council as an orator. The status of these women later reached the early American feminist movement, visible at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, where Matilda Gage, who wrote extensively about the Haudenosaunee, was a prominent member.

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• 7. Masks, Spirits, And Thanksgiving

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  Orenda was the Iroquoian name for the magical potence found in people and their environment, a spiritual force believed to flow through all things. The Haudenosaunee recognized deities including the Great Spirit, the Thunderer, and the Three Sisters, the spirits of beans, maize, and squash. Creation stories speak of Skywoman, or Aientsik, whose granddaughter bore twins: Tawiskaron, who made vicious animals and river rapids, and Okwiraseh, who created all that is pure and beautiful.

  The False Face Society is the most familiar of the medicine societies. Carved in living trees and then cut free, painted, and decorated, the False Face Masks represent grandfathers of the Haudenosaunee and are meant to frighten illness-causing spirits. There are 12 different types of masks worn by the societies, and those wearing Doctor masks blow hot ashes into the faces of the sick to chase away evil spirits.

  The Seneca chief Handsome Lake, also known as Ganeodiyo, introduced a new religious system in the late 18th century, blending Quaker beliefs with traditional Iroquoian culture. By the 1960s at least half of the Haudenosaunee followed it. The thanksgiving address, recited daily at the start of school days, gives thanks across 17 main sections, from the Earth Mother to Grandmother Moon. Robin Wall Kimmerer included it in her book Braiding Sweetgrass after asking permission from Oren Lyons, a spiritual leader of the Onondaga Nation.

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• 8. Nation Among Nations

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  The Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy declared war on Germany in 1917 during World War I, and again in 1942 during World War II. The seats on that Council are distributed unevenly: 14 to the Onondaga, 10 to the Cayuga, 9 each to the Oneida and Mohawk, 8 to the Seneca, and 6 to the Tuscarora. The Onondaga traditionally serve as the peace keepers, represented on the Hiawatha belt by an Eastern White Pine, the Tree of Peace.

  Wampum carried these agreements in purple and white shell beads on threads of elm bark. The Two Row Wampum, meaning it brightens our minds, was presented to Dutch settlers as a canoe and a sailboat moving side-by-side, neither interfering with the other's course. Tradition holds that Hiawatha invented wampum belts to console chiefs and clan mothers who had lost family to war.

  The Haudenosaunee government has issued passports since 1923, when authorities issued one to Cayuga statesman Deskaheh, Levi General, to travel to the League of Nations. Lacrosse remains the one sport in which they field national teams, and the First Nations Lacrosse Association is recognized by World Lacrosse as a sovereign state. In 2010 the Haudenosaunee Nationals were allowed by the U.S. to travel on their own passports only after the personal intervention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, yet the British government refused to recognize those passports and denied the team entry.

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