Iroquois Confederacy

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, known in English as the Iroquois, unites the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of northeast North America: originally the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca from east to west, joined after 1722 by the Tuscarora as the Six Nations. Oral history credits the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee with its founding under the Great Law of Peace, dated anywhere between 1142 and 1660. Their country, Iroquoia, covered upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania and southeastern Ontario, organised in matrilineal longhouse clans under fifty sachems. Dutch and then English alliance, sealed in the Two Row Wampum, brought muskets that fuelled the Beaver Wars, in which the Confederacy dispersed or adopted most neighbours and peaked as the dominant power between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. French observers called it the Iroquois League. Weakened by the American Revolution, the Confederacy lost most of its land but endures: the Six Nations of the Grand River, US reservations and a living longhouse political tradition continue the oldest participatory confederacy in North America.