The Iroquois Confederacy

The Iroquois Confederacy. . , The Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois League, was created around 1450, mainly to reduce warfare by binding five Iroquoian nations into one group. The five nations of the confederacy were originally: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. These nations were bound by clans and “the Great Law,” the oral guidelines of the Confederacy. In 1722, the Tuscarora joined the confederacy and it became the Six Nations, the most powerful and long lasting Native political organization in the new world., Tradition traces the beginnings of the confederacy to Deakanawidah, who is said to have befriended Hiawatha, an Onondaga, and convinced him to embrace peace and “the Great Law” as the foundation of the confederacy. A common council of clan and village chiefs united the individual nations in the confederacy. Each nation had one vote, and the major decisions affecting all were decided by consensus., [Captions:] , A group of Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca Chiefs display their wampum belts to ethnologist Horatio Hale in Brantford, Canada, 1871. The agreement among the six nations to form an alliance and follow the Great Law established the Iroquois Confederacy and is symbolized in wampum. (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution), The borders of the five, and later six, nations were fluid and changing. The shaded regions on the map above represent the territories, circa 1720., The Iroquois Confederacy was created with the adoption of the Gayanashagowa (or “Great Law of Peace”). This wampum belt is a symbolic representation of the Great Law of Peace. Wampum is the individual beads. They are used to make a wampum belt., The Iroquois Tree of Peace by Oren Lyons, Onondaga. The Tree of Peace is a powerful symbol of the Great Law. According to tradition, the weapons of the Iroquois were buried under this tree.