Iroquois Confederacy

A league of five nations with a written constitution centuries before European settlement, and one of the few indigenous North American polities that operated as a state in the way Europeans recognised. The Haudenosaunee - Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, joined by the Tuscarora in 1722 - were bound by the Great Law of Peace, recorded on wampum belts and transmitted orally, which established a grand council at Onondaga, unanimity in decision-making, and a procedure for adding new members. Clan mothers selected and could depose the fifty sachems, giving women a formal constitutional role unknown in Europe at the time. The confederacy sat between New France and the English colonies and made that position pay for a century and a half, controlling the fur trade routes and playing the two empires against each other with considerable skill. Its Beaver Wars in the seventeenth century dispersed the Huron, Erie and Neutral nations entirely. Neutrality broke in the American Revolution: most nations sided with Britain, the Oneida and Tuscarora with the colonists, and Sullivan's expedition of 1779 burned forty towns and the winter's food. The Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794 is still cited by both parties. Whether the constitution influenced the American founders is argued about, and Congress acknowledged a debt in 1988. The grand council still meets. Their homeland ran across what is now upstate New York. Longhouses gave the confederacy its own name for itself, people of the longhouse. Six nations still hold territory in New York, Ontario and Quebec. Lacrosse descends from their ball game, and Haudenosaunee teams compete internationally. Wampum belts remain the record of their agreements.

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