As for the Haudenosaunee after the arrival of Europeans, much is known from both historical writings and archaeological studies. The Haudenosaunee were organized into the Iroquois League, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. At first, in about 1570, the Haudenosaunee formed the League of Five Nations— that is, Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca.
Two men brought the five tribes together to found the League: Deganawida, the Peacemaker, a Huron prophet from the north, who had had a vision of the tribes united under the sheltering branches of a Tree of Great Peace; and Hiawatha, a Mohawk medicine man, who paddled through Haudenosaunee country preaching the message of unity and carrying a wampum belt that symbolized the Great Law of Peace. Over a century later, in the early
Detail of Haudenosaunee wampum belt
1700s, when the Tuscarora migrated to New York from North Carolina, the alliance became the League of Six Nations.
The founding fathers of the United States who shaped the new democratic government after the American Revolution—people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—are thought to have used the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the new democracy. The various states were like the different tribes; the senators and congressmen, like the 50 sachems, or chiefs, chosen as representatives or spokesmen; the president and his cabinet, like the honorary Pine Tree Sachems; and Washington, D. C., like Onondaga, the main village of the Onondaga tribe, where the Grand Council Fire burned continually and the Grand Council was held every year.
World History
