Haudenosaunee

At a glance

Who were the Five Nations?

Five nations speaking related Iroquoian languages, living in longhouse villages across what is now central and western New York. The Mohawk (Kanyen'kehà:ka, "people of the flint") held the Mohawk valley, the eastern door of the confederacy. The Oneida lived west of them, south of the Oneida lake. The Onondaga held the country around Onondaga lake, in the centre, where the council fire was kept. The Cayuga lived between the Onondaga and the Seneca, around the Finger Lakes. The Seneca (Onödowá'ga) held the Genesee country to the west — the "keepers of the western door". The Tuscarora, an Iroquoian people driven out of the Carolinas, were admitted as a sixth nation in 1722.

Each nation was a cluster of villages that moved every generation or so as firewood, bark and soil gave out. A village might hold a few longhouses or as many as fifty; a longhouse was built of elm bark over a bent-pole frame, about twenty feet wide and up to two hundred feet long, housing an extended clan family with platforms along both sides and a row of fires down the middle. Villages were often palisaded. The people called themselves Haudenosaunee, "people of the longhouse", and the confederacy's own metaphor was a longhouse with five fires.

Their world was maize, beans and squash — the Three Sisters — grown by women in fields cleared from the forest, supplemented by deer, bear, fish and wild plants. The Iroquoian population of the north-east is not known precisely. A defensible statement is that northern Iroquoia held more than 30,000 people by the sixteenth century; any single figure for the Five Nations before 1600 is an estimate built on village counts and household sizes.

When was the Confederacy founded?

There are five positions, and that is the honest answer. The Haudenosaunee themselves date the Confederacy to time immemorial. The Onondaga Nation's own history says that "over a thousand years ago … democracy was born". That is a statement of identity and continuity, not a computed date, and it should be reported as such.

The academic arguments run from the twelfth century to the seventeenth.

1142. Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields argued in 1997 that a total eclipse darkened Seneca country on 31 August 1142, at the moment the Peacemaker told the doubting Seneca to watch for a sign. Their case combines a Seneca tradition of the "Black Sun", an actuarial argument about how long chiefly titles were held, and an eclipse computation. The actuarial argument has been dismantled by David Henige, who showed that Mann and Fields had excluded pontificates and produced an average papal tenure of 12.1 years against a real figure of 7.3; their confidence interval was an artefact. Their own paper concedes that modern computation makes the 1142 event "partial, albeit nearly total" at Ganondagan. NASA's canon puts the greatest eclipse of 22 August 1142 at 53°N 101°W, in what is now western Canada. So: Mann and Fields argue for a near-total eclipse over Seneca country; it is not a fact that a total eclipse darkened central New York that day.

c. 1450. The date most often printed, and the date drawn on this site's map. It rests on an older eclipse suggestion — Paul Wallace's 1451 candidate — and on Neta Crawford's synthesis of the traditional and scholarly literature. Horatio Hale had suggested "1450 or thereabouts" in 1946. The 1451 eclipse was real but its greatest point lay in the high Arctic; it would have been partial in New York. Surveys of the literature disagree about whether c. 1450 or the mid-sixteenth century is the majority view, which is itself a warning.

1536 or the mid-sixteenth century. Dean Snow's archaeological and eclipse work concluded that "the League of the Iroquois was complete by 1536 at the latest", with 1451 slightly more likely than 1536. William Fenton thought confederation was "going on fairly early in the sixteenth century".

After 1609. William Starna argues that the League's genesis is tied to the arrival of the Dutch and the trade at Fort Nassau, which would make it a response to European commerce rather than a pre-contact achievement. This is a minority position, and it sits awkwardly with the confederacy's own account.

A process, not a moment. Jon Parmenter's model — a Peacemaker active somewhere between 1400 and 1550, and League formation as "a lengthy process that took place over generations" — fits the archaeology best, and it is how the Haudenosaunee themselves describe it: the elders "guess that it took a period of 100 to 120 years to bring the Five Nations together".

The archaeological background supports the long view. Iroquoian villages appear in southern Ontario around AD 500; maize was present in New York centuries before it became a staple; recognizable "Iroquoian" traits were not fully developed until about 1300. After 1250 villages moved regularly, which is why each site records a single generation and why the sequence can be dated so precisely. And the century before 1500 shows exactly the world the Great Law addresses: coalescence, palisades and war. A 2021 study of conflict sites around Onondaga and Seneca country places them in the later 1400s and early 1500s, with defensive posture everywhere by about 1525, and concludes that internal conflict may have preceded confederacy formation. Archaeology can date villages, maize, palisades and burials. It cannot date a constitution.

What did the Great Law set up?

A council of fifty hereditary chiefs — hoyaneh, "caretakers of the peace" — distributed by nation: Mohawk nine, Oneida nine, Onondaga fourteen, Cayuga ten, Seneca eight. The numbers were not proportional and were never meant to be; each title belonged to a specific clan and a specific matrilineal family within it. The Circle Wampum has fifty strands, one for each chief, with a longer strand for the Onondaga.

The council sat in three benches. The Onondaga were the Firekeepers: they hosted the council fire, opened and closed each session, set the agenda and pronounced the final decision. Tadodaho, one of their fourteen chiefs, presided — but, as the earliest English edition of the Great Law puts it, "Adodarhoh, in spite of his high title, was only the moderator of the fire keepers". The Mohawk and Seneca were the Elder Brothers, who debated first; the Oneida and Cayuga were the Younger Brothers, who debated second.

The procedure was a formal relay. The Firekeepers raised the question; the Elder Brothers discussed until they were of One Mind and sent their decision "across the council fire" to the Younger Brothers; the Younger Brothers debated and sent their answer back; the Elder Brothers either agreed and passed it to the Firekeepers, or sent a new proposal back for another round; the Firekeepers confirmed, or sent it back. Unanimity was required. If the two sides agreed and the Firekeepers disliked the result, the Firekeepers still had to confirm it.

The procedural details are what make it real rather than idealised. The council "shall not sit after darkness has set in". No chief could put a question to the whole body while it was debating; he could only speak "in a low tone with the separate body of which he is a member". A speaker for the day was appointed, from the Mohawk, Onondaga or Seneca, and his term was one day. An outsider had "no voice in the Confederate Council except to answer a question put to him". And the law could be amended: a change, once adopted, was "Added to the Rafters". This is a constitution with an amendment clause, not a fossil.

Above the hereditary chiefs sat the possibility of a Pine Tree chief: a man of proven ability raised with a seat and a voice but no title and no vote, whom no one could depose — "no one shall cut him down" — but whose voice everyone was thereafter to ignore. The confederacy's own site says there are none at present.

Who chose the chiefs?

The clan mothers. A chief's title was hereditary — but not through him. It belonged to a matrilineal family within a clan, and the clan mother chose which man of that family would hold it, watching boys as they grew and being ready with a candidate when a chief died. She looked for men "honest, reliable, and clear headed, with knowledge of confederacy laws and values". Installation required more than her choice: the candidate was presented to his nation, then to the brother nation, then to the Grand Council, and raised in a condolence ceremony.

She could also remove him. After warnings, a chief who broke the law was "de-horned" — his antlers, the emblem of office, taken from him — and the title passed to another man of the family. The Great Law sets out a graded procedure: complaint through the war chief, a second warning, a third, then the matter goes to the council of war chiefs, who "shall then divest the erring Lord of his title by order of the women in whom the titleship is vested".

There are forty-nine clan mothers for fifty chiefs, because the Tadodaho title has no clan mother; a new Tadodaho is chosen by the Onondaga chiefs with the clan mothers' advice. The clan mother also named children from the clan's stock of names, approved marriages to prevent marriage within the clan, and supervised ceremonies — "the ceremonies cannot begin without the Clan Mothers present".

It is tempting to call this women's suffrage, and Ely Parker, writing in 1916, did: "Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage, all flourishing in the old America of the Red Man." Quote that, if at all, as Parker's 1916 interpretation. The accurate sentence is: titles were hereditary within particular matrilineal families; the clan mother chose which man of that family should hold the title, and could recall him.

How did it work without a state?

Through kinship, ceremony and shame. Clans were matrilineal and exogamous: a child belonged to the mother's clan, and a Wolf-clan Mohawk and a Wolf-clan Seneca were relatives who owed each other hospitality. That is the practical infrastructure of a confederacy without passports — a traveller sought out his clan and was fed and housed as family. The number of clans varied by nation, from three among the Mohawk to nine among the Oneida; Colden's 1727 simplification that each nation was divided into three "tribes" — Tortoise, Bear and Wolf — is true only of the Mohawk.

The household was matrilocal. Newly married husbands moved into the wife's clan longhouse, which was headed by its clan mother; divorce was easy and the children stayed with the mother. Adoption was a legal institution, with articles of its own: a person, family or foreign nation could be adopted into a clan with a string of shell as pledge, and on confirmation the chiefs announced that the adopted had "ceased forever to bear their birth nation's name and have buried it in the depths of the earth". Adopted nations were admitted only temporarily, had no vote, and could be expelled. Captives were adopted by the same route, and Colden noted that "some of their Captives have afterwards become their greatest Sachems and Captains".

Authority ran on honour rather than force. Cadwallader Colden, writing in 1727, put it better than any modern summary: "They never execute their Resolutions by Force upon any of their People. Honour and Esteem are their principal Rewards; as Shame, and being despised, their Punishments." And on office: "There is not a Man in the Ministry of the Five Nations, who has gain'd his Office, otherwise than by Merit; there is not the least Salary, or any Sort of Profit, annexed to any Office". Chiefs distributed presents rather than accumulating them, and were, Colden said, "generally poorer than the common People". That is a European official's admiration and should be quoted as such — but it is also the best short answer to how this worked without a state.

What did they live on?

The Three Sisters, and the forest. Women planted maize, beans and squash together — beans climbing the corn, squash shading the ground — in fields cleared and worked by hand. The combination is nutritionally serious: one estimate puts the yield of a Three Sisters field at about 12.25 million kilocalories per hectare, with 349 kg of protein, enough to support roughly 13 people per hectare per year. Maize was nixtamalised — soaked and cooked with wood ash or lime — which releases niacin and makes it a viable staple.

The year had a shape. Spring planting and summer tending; the green corn ceremony; autumn harvest and the storage of maize in bark-lined pits; winter hunting, when men left the villages for deer and the community lived on stored food; spring fishing and the gathering of maple sap, berries and nuts. Villages moved every twenty to thirty years as firewood and bark gave out and soil wore down, which also kept the fields productive.

After 1600 the fur trade reorganised this economy. Beaver were trapped out of the homeland within a few decades, and the confederacy's response was territorial expansion to reach new trapping grounds — which is where the seventeenth-century wars come from. Wampum, made from quahog and whelk shell, became both a ceremonial material and a currency in the colonial trade.

What did the wampum mean?

Wampum belts were a legal technology, not decoration. A belt could hold a treaty, a condolence, a name, a history; the patterns of white and purple shell were mnemonic prompts for speakers who had memorised the words. The Hiawatha belt, with its five figures joined, is the emblem of the confederacy itself. The condolence ceremony — the tears wiped away, the ears cleared, the throat cleared, the bloodstain removed, and finally the naming of a successor — is the ritual that made and remade the council, and it is still performed.

Treaty belts carried obligations between nations. The Two Row Wampum, Gaswéñdah, shows two purple rows on a white field: a canoe and a Dutch ship travelling side by side, each steering its own vessel, neither trying to steer the other. It is the founding metaphor of Haudenosaunee–European relations, and the Onondaga Nation still recites it as a covenant.

The historical record is thinner than the metaphor. The written "Tawagonshi document" purporting to record a 1613 treaty is a twentieth-century forgery, exposed by Gehring, Starna and Fenton in 1987. The relationship itself is attested in eighteen recitations between 1656 and 1755, as Jon Parmenter has shown. Whether a specific agreement was made in 1613 is therefore undecidable; that the Two Row was understood as the basis of the relationship is not.

The Covenant Chain, first recorded in 1677, was the later and more institutional English alliance — a chain of silver linking the confederacy to the colonies, polished when it tarnished. It ran through Albany, where the treaty councils were held, and it was renewed in the 1710s and 1720s.

What happened after 1609?

In July 1609 Samuel de Champlain, travelling with a Montagnais–Algonquin–Huron war party, met a Mohawk force on the lake that now bears his name. He describes the encounter himself: he aimed at one of three chiefs, "with the same shot, two fell to the ground; and one of their men was so wounded that he died some time after. I had loaded my musket with four balls." The third man died of his wounds; the popular summary that Champlain "killed three chiefs" is a fair account of the outcome but not of the shot. The battle, probably at the cape at Ticonderoga, ensured Mohawk enmity towards the French and pushed the confederacy towards the Dutch at Fort Orange, built in 1624 on the Hudson where Albany now stands.

The fur trade armed the confederacy and then emptied its country of beaver. From the 1640s the Five Nations fought the Beaver Wars — the Canadian Encyclopedia calls them the Iroquois Wars — to open new trapping grounds. The French armed their Wendat and Algonquian allies in response, but the Jesuits restricted gun sales to Christian converts, whom they judged more reliable. In 1649 more than a thousand Seneca and Mohawk attacked the two main Wendat villages; Huronia was destroyed, its people dispersed, killed or adopted. The Neutral were defeated in 1651, the Erie absorbed in 1657, the Susquehannock by 1675.

The verdict belongs to the Canadian Encyclopedia, and it is the thesis of the whole seventeenth century: "Over the course of five conflicts, the Haudenosaunee succeeded in breaking up every one of the groups that had surrounded the confederacy. However, the victories did not bring them the prosperity they sought."

Did they have an empire?

This is one of the sharpest disputes in early American history, and it has three positions.

The contemporary colonial view — and the confederacy's own diplomatic claim — was that the Six Nations held dominion over dependent nations from the Carolinas to the Mississippi. The park service states the maximal version without hedging. The treaty record shows what they could claim: at Fort Stanwix in 1768 the Six Nations signed "on behalf of the Six Nations, Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo and other dependent tribes", and in 1784 they declared themselves "the only persons adequate to treat of, and conclude a peace" for the Ottawas, Chippewas, Hurons, Potawatomis, Miamis, Delawares, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks.

The revisionist case begins with Francis Jennings's The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984) — the title is the argument. Jennings and later Richter and Merrell held that the "empire" was substantially an English diplomatic fiction that served colonial land claims: Iroquois power was real, but it was not imperial, and the claim flattered both sides. Jon Parmenter reframed the question away from territory altogether: the confederacy's power lay in geographical knowledge, kinship and ceremony, in linking scattered communities into a fluid but interconnected polity, not in governing subject nations.

The honest sentence is that the Six Nations could summon, negotiate for and sometimes coerce dozens of nations — and could not govern them. Everything beyond that is interpretation.

What happened in 1701?

Two treaties, in two empires, in the same season — and they are almost always told as one.

At Montréal in the summer of 1701 the confederacy ratified a peace with the French and their Indigenous allies, agreeing to remain neutral in wars between Britain and France. At Albany on 19 July 1701 the "Nanfan Treaty" or Albany Deed was signed with the English: the Six Nations conveyed an enormous tract — the deed describes a region eight hundred by four hundred miles, reaching to "Quadoge" (Chicago) — while retaining hunting rights. Whether the deed alienated soil or only confirmed a hunting range is the live legal question; the English read it as a cession, and it became the basis of later land claims.

The map's own data tells the story of that year in a single number. The confederacy's drawn area peaks at 563,605 km² in 1683 — roughly eight times its 1450 homeland — and collapses to 75,263 km² in 1702, the year after the Nanfan deed. That is the largest single change in the series, and it matches the documents.

What happened in the Revolution?

First neutrality, then a split. The confederacy tried to stay out; the Grand Council could not hold it together. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca fought for Britain — Joseph Brant's Mohawks most famously — while the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. At Oriskany on 6 August 1777 a British–Haudenosaunee force ambushed an American column relief party; the battle was bloody and indecisive, and it turned the confederacy's internal division into open war.

In 1779 George Washington ordered a campaign of reprisal. His instruction to Major General John Sullivan, dated 31 May, is unambiguous: the object was "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements" and the capture of "as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible", so that the country would not "be merely overrun, but destroyed". Sullivan's army burned forty villages and their stores. The damage was real, but the campaign did not end the war in the north.

The peace did. Neither Britain nor the United States provided for the Six Nations in the Treaty of Paris, and the confederacy had no seat at the table. In 1784 the United States imposed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix on the four nations that had fought for Britain, taking a large cession and — in the park service's words — treating "the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca as defeated enemies which they were not". The resulting reserve became, in the same source's phrase, the first American Indian reservation in the United States. Brant's followers received the Haldimand Grant on the Grand River in Ontario on 25 October 1784.

Why does the map end in 1782?

Because that is the last full year in which the confederacy can be drawn as a territorial power, not because it ceased to exist.

The dataset's area series runs from about 72,000 km² in 1450, through the 1683 peak of about 564,000 km², down to about 15,000 km² in 1781–82. It is the map-maker's judgement, not a historical measurement, but its turning points match the documents: the 1683 peak is the "empire" at its height; the 1702 collapse follows the Nanfan deed; the fall to 43,435 km² after 1763 tracks the Royal Proclamation, and the fall to 15,134 km² after 1768 the Fort Stanwix cession.

Four things happened by 1782. The fighting ended — Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781 and the preliminary articles were signed in November 1782 — and the confederacy was not represented in any of it. The 1784 treaty converted a confederacy into a reservation, holding land by grant rather than territory by right. The confederacy had split and could no longer act as one body; the 1784 treaty was signed by individuals the United States chose and the Six Nations never ratified. And the population had moved: Brant's people to the Grand River, the Seneca and Cayuga to Buffalo Creek, the Oneida and Tuscarora inside New York.

The Grand Council still meets at Onondaga. The Six Nations of the Grand River is one of Canada's largest reserves. The confederacy did not end in 1782; the map does.

Was the US Constitution influenced by it?

This is a genuinely contested question, and it is usually argued badly in both directions.

The case for influence is associated with Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen. Their evidence is real: Benjamin Franklin printed the proceedings of treaty councils between 1736 and 1762, attended a condolence ceremony at Carlisle in 1754, and months later proposed the Albany Plan, whose single house of 48 seats is close to the confederacy's 50 chiefs. Canassatego advised the colonies to unite in 1744, breaking one arrow and then a bundle. Julian Boyd concluded in 1942 that Franklin "found his materials in the great confederacy of the Iroquois". The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own site makes the case while conceding that "many debate the validity of the claim"; one of its three parallels — that Elder and Younger Brothers resemble a two-house Congress — does not hold, since those benches deliberated in sequence rather than holding separate powers.

The case against is associated with Elisabeth Tooker, whose 1988 study concluded that "a review of the evidence in the historical and ethnographic documents offers virtually no support for this contention". She traced the modern claim not to the founders but to the ethnologist J. N. B. Hewitt, and noted that the League required unanimity and gave each sachem a veto — a structure with no resemblance to the Constitution's majoritarianism. Grinde and Johansen themselves concede that "the founders did not copy the Iroquois, any more than they copied the Greeks, the Romans, the Magna Charta".

The political fact is that in 1988, in the United States, Congress passed H.Con.Res. 331 by four hundred and eight votes to eight, acknowledging the confederacy's contribution to the development of the United States Constitution. The scholarly fact is that the strong "model" claim is not supported. The defensible position is that the confederacy was part of the intellectual climate in which American federal ideas were formed, that Franklin knew it well, and that no clause of the Constitution can be traced to it.

Common myths about the Haudenosaunee

Timeline of the Haudenosaunee

What the map shows next

At 1001 on the map none of this exists yet: the Chaco regional system is at its height in the Southwest, and the Norse Greenland colony has just been founded.

At 1228 on the map the Aztec regional system holds the Totah, Norse Greenland is in decline, and the Five Nations are forming in the north-east.

At 1782 on the map the confederacy is at the end of its territorial phase, and the United States is about to begin.