The history of the Haudenosaunee, or history of the Iroquois, goes back to the formation of the league around 1450. Since then the Haudenosaunee and their history have played an important role in the histories of the United States and Canada.
Historiography Knowledge of Haudenosaunee history stems from Haudenosaunee oral tradition, archaeological evidence, accounts from Jesuit missionaries, and subsequent European historians. Historian Scott Stevens credits the early modern European value of written sources over oral tradition as contributing to a racialized, prejudiced perspective about the Haudenosaunee through the 19th century. The historiography of the Haudenosaunee peoples is a topic of much debate, especially regarding the American colonial period.
French Jesuit accounts of the Haudenosaunee portrayed them as savages lacking government, law, letters, and religion. But the Jesuits made considerable effort to study their languages and cultures, and some came to respect them. A source of confusion for European sources, coming from a patriarchal society, was the matrilineal kinship system of Haudenosaunee society and the related power of women. The Canadian historian D. Peter MacLeod wrote about the Canadian Haudenosaunee and the French in the time of the Seven Years' War: Most critically, the importance of clan mothers, who possessed considerable economic and political power within Canadian Iroquois communities, was blithely overlooked by patriarchal European scribes. Those references that do exist, show clan mothers meeting in council with their male counterparts to take decisions regarding war and peace and joining in delegations to confront the Onontio [the Haudenosaunee term for the French governor-general] and the French leadership in Montreal, but only hint at the real influence wielded by these women.
Jesuit missionaries wrote historical accounts of their experiences, even if they did not fully understand what they were seeing.Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed. "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 60". Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Company, Imperial Press, 1900, Preface. One Jesuit account in 1641 reported on how a Neutral Nations war party of about 2,000 warriors attacked an enemy village (of Mascouten) in southern Michigan, taking 170 women and children captive.Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed. "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, vol. 21". Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Company, Imperial Press, 1898, pgs. 193-195. Historians interpret such attacks to have been part of a "Mourning War", a type of warfare among the Haudenosaunee and other nations where small raiding parties would attack enemy villages and bring back people they captured, in order to cope with a sudden grief or loss within their own group, which would lead to a ceremony to replace their lost loved ones, called the "requickening".Hoxie, Frederick E. (ed.). "The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History". Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press, 2016, Ch. 10., pgs. 49, 199–216. Archaeological evidence suggests conflict between the Mascoutens and Neutrals existed for two centuries prior to the mid-1600s.
Eighteenth-century English historiography focuses on the diplomatic relations with the Haudenosaunee, supplemented by such images as John Verelst's Four Mohawk Kings, and publications such as the Anglo-Iroquoian treaty proceedings printed by Benjamin Franklin. A persistent 19th and 20th century narrative casts the Haudenosaunee as "an expansive military and political power ... [who] subjugated their enemies by violent force and for almost two centuries acted as the fulcrum in the balance of power in colonial North America".
Historian Scott Stevens noted that the Haudenosaunee themselves began to influence the writing of their history in the 19th century, including Joseph Brant (Mohawk), and David Cusick (Tuscarora, 1780–1840). John Arthur Gibson (Seneca, 1850–1912) was an important figure of his generation in recounting versions of Haudenosaunee history in epics on the Peacemaker. Notable women historians among the Haudenosaunee emerged in the following decades, including Laura "Minnie" Kellogg (Oneida, 1880–1949) and Alice Lee Jemison (Seneca, 1901–1964).
Formation of the League
The Haudenosaunee League was established prior to European contact, with the banding together of five of the many Iroquoian peoples who had emerged south of the Great Lakes. Many archaeologists and anthropologists believe that the League was formed about 1450, though arguments have been made for an earlier date.. "It was a confederation based on kinship—a symbolic household. They called their confederation Ganonsyoni, which means "The Lodge Extended Lengthwise", that is, a lodge that is "spread out far". All individuals and all the tribes of the Confederacy were considered as one family living together in one lodge. The Mohawks, dwelling furthest east, were Keepers of the Western Door. The Onondagas, situated in the center, were the Fire Keepers as well as the Wampum Keepers. Onondaga was therefore, the capital, where the Grand Council was held and wampum records were kept. The local clan chiefs of each tribe meeting together as a unit were the federal chiefs of the League. The Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas were the Elder Brothers; The Oneidas and Cayugas, the Younger Brothers. The younger and elder brethren sat on opposite sides of the lodge and counseled across the fire with each other. The Onondagas sat in the middle and kept the balance between the two sides." One theory argues that the League formed shortly after a solar eclipse on August 31, 1142, an event thought to be expressed in oral tradition about the League's origins. Some sources link an early origin of the Haudenosaunee confederacy to the adoption of corn as a staple crop.
Archaeologist Dean Snow argues that the archaeological evidence does not support a date earlier than 1450. He has said that recent claims for a much earlier date "may be for contemporary political purposes". Other scholars note that anthropological researchers consulted only male informants, thus losing the half of the historical story told in the distinct oral traditions of women. For this reason, origin tales tend to emphasize the two men Deganawidah and Hiawatha, while the woman Jigonsaseh, who plays a prominent role in the female tradition, remains largely unknown.
The founders of League are traditionally held to be Dekanawida the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Jigonhsasee the Mother of Nations, whose home acted as a sort of United Nations. They brought the Peacemaker's Great Law of Peace to the squabbling Iroquoian nations who were fighting, raiding, and feuding with each other and with other tribes, both Algonkian and Iroquoian. Five nations originally joined in the League, giving rise to the many historic references to "Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee". With the addition of the southern Tuscarora in the 18th century, these original five tribes still compose the Haudenosaunee in the early 21st century: the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca.
According to legend, an evil Onondaga chieftain named Tadodaho was the last converted to the ways of peace by The Great Peacemaker and Hiawatha. He was offered the position as the titular chair of the League's Council, representing the unity of all nations of the League. This is said to have occurred at Onondaga Lake near present-day Syracuse, New York. The title Tadodaho is still used for the League's chair, the fiftieth chief who sits with the Onondaga in council.
The Haudenosaunee subsequently created a highly egalitarian society. One British colonial administrator declared in 1749 that the Haudenosaunee had "such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories". As raids between the member tribes ended and they directed warfare against competitors, the Haudenosaunee increased in numbers while their rivals declined. The political cohesion of the Haudenosaunee rapidly became one of the strongest forces in 17th- and 18th-century northeastern North America.
The League's Council of Fifty ruled on disputes and sought consensus. However, the confederacy did not speak for all five tribes, which continued to act independently and form their own war bands. Around 1678, the council began to exert more power in negotiations with the colonial governments of Pennsylvania and New York, and the Haudenosaunee became very adroit at diplomacy, playing off the French against the British as individual tribes had earlier played the Swedes, Dutch, and English.
Iroquoian-language peoples were involved in warfare and trading with nearby members of the Haudenosaunee League. The explorer Robert La Salle in the 17th century identified the Mosopelea as among the Ohio Valley peoples defeated by the Haudenosaunee in the early 1670s. The Erie and peoples of the upper Allegheny valley declined earlier during the Beaver Wars. By 1676 the power of the Susquehannock was broken from the effects of three years of epidemic disease, war with the Haudenosaunee, and frontier battles, as settlers took advantage of the weakened tribe.
According to one theory of early Haudenosaunee history, after becoming united in the League, the Haudenosaunee invaded the Ohio River Valley in the territories that would become the eastern Ohio Country down as far as present-day Kentucky to seek additional hunting grounds. They displaced about 1,200 Native Americans of the Ohio River valley, such as the Quapaw, Mosopelea, and Tutelo and other closely related tribes out of the region. These tribes migrated to regions around the Mississippi River and the Piedmont regions of the east coast.
Other Iroquoian-language peoples,See history of Erie people, Susquehannock, Tuscarora people and the Wyandot (Huron) peoples. including the populous Wyandot (Huron), with related social organization and cultures, became extinct as tribes as a result of disease and war. They did not join the League when invited, and were subsequently greatly reduced due to the Beaver Wars and high mortality from Eurasian infectious diseases. While the indigenous nations sometimes tried to remain neutral in the various colonial frontier wars, some also allied with Europeans, as in the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years' War. The Six Nations were split in their alliances between the French and British in that war.
Expansion In Reflections in Bullough's Pond, historian Diana Muir argues that the pre-contact Haudenosaunee were an imperialist, expansionist culture whose cultivation of the corn/beans/squash agricultural complex enabled them to support a large population. They made war primarily against neighboring Algonquian peoples. Muir uses archaeological data to argue that the Haudenosaunee expansion onto Algonquian lands was checked by the Algonquian adoption of agriculture. This enabled them to support their own populations large enough to resist Haudenosaunee conquest. The People of the Confederacy dispute this historical interpretation, regarding the League of the Great Peace as the foundation of their heritage.
The Haudenosaunee may be the Kwedech described in the oral legends of the Mi'kmaq nation of Eastern Canada. These legends relate that the Mi'kmaq in the late pre-contact period had gradually driven their enemies – the Kwedech – westward across New Brunswick, and finally out of the Lower St. Lawrence River region. The Mi'kmaq named the last-conquered land Gespedeg or "last land", from which the French derived Gaspé. The "Kwedech" are generally considered to have been Haudenosaunee, specifically the Mohawk; their expulsion from Gaspé by the Mi'kmaq has been estimated as occurring c. 1535–1600.