The Iroquois Confederacy - America's Earliest Democracy

The Iroquois Confederacy - America's Earliest Democracy Six million people alive today carry bloodlines back to five nations most Americans still cannot name. Those nations knew each other's villages by name because they had burned them. When a man was killed, his family was left holding a debt that only blood could settle, and the mourning carried real authority: a grieving mother or sister could call for a raid, and the warriors went. Raids came at the edges of the day, at planting time, when the men were out in the fields, and what the warriors wanted was people, not ground. A captive faced three futures and the family of the dead chose which one. Some were killed where they were taken, some were marched home, and some were adopted, handed the name of the person whose loss had sent the raid out. That eased one family's grief, which made the raid worth running again, and the village that lost a son knew exactly where to answer. Into that country came Deganawida, carrying a vision of a white pine whose roots ran out in four directions so any nation could follow them, and on the road he met Hiawatha, a Mohawk councilman who lost his daughters and then his standing, and who ate bark and frozen ground on the walk that followed. The plan that met him began with condolence: wipe the tears, clear the ears, clear the throat, because a grieving man makes bad law. Then the tree, needles in bundles of five, weapons buried under the roots, an eagle at the crown watching the horizon. Fifty titles sat beneath it, one of them belonging to the man the tradition calls Tadodaho, and behind every chief stood a clan mother who named him and could take the antlers off his head in front of everyone. Mohawk and Seneca argued first as elder brothers, Oneida and Cayuga went over the whole thing again, Onondaga kept the fire in the middle, and no vote was ever called, because a nation outvoted is a nation with a grievance. The peace never made them gentle. Mohawk held the eastern door on the river, and after the Huron confederacy fell the league went through the Neutrals, the Erie and the Susquehannock, adopting captives into empty seats. The silver chain struck with the Dutch and hammered tighter with the English, the Two Row of a ship and a canoe traveling the same river, and every treaty council opened with the brightening of the chain and the wiping away of tears. At Albany the colonies asked the Six Nations to stand with them. At Lake George a Mohawk sachem named Hendrick Theyanoguin died in his seventies. Four years after Oriskany, Washington sent General John Sullivan up the Susquehanna with 4,000 men who burned around 40 towns. In 1784 a handful of chiefs signed away millions of acres at Fort Stanwix. In 1923 Deskaheh carried the case to Geneva and was turned away, and in 1925 he died in Rochester, still in exile. The Onondaga land claim was filed in 2005, dismissed in 2010, upheld on appeal in 2012, and in 2013 the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The Haudenosaunee were governing by council and consensus centuries before Philadelphia, and the fire beside Onondaga Lake has never been moved.