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The Iroquois Nation was the most powerful Indian military alliance in the Eastern part of North America and probably the most successful alliance of any kind between so many important tribes. The idea for the alliance was prompted by the bloodshed suffered by the five tribes in frequent warfare. Eventually the tribes formed a league governed by a Great Council, in which the Mohawk and Seneca formed the Upper House and the Oneida and Cayuga the Lower House. The Onondaga provided the presiding officer and intervened when there was a tie vote. Each tribe was viewed as a nation and, as such, individual nations could, and frequently did, make war as separate powers. In 1710, the Tuscaroras were admitted as a sixth nation without voting rights in the Great Council.
This paper will attempt to describe the history of the Iroquois Confederacy and its impact on our founding fathers, our constitution and our early history. It will attempt to answer the question how five tribes who frequently fought against each other became a powerful confederacy which evolved into a sophisticated democracy whose notions of equality and liberty extended to women as well as men.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE EUROPEANS AND THE IROQUOIS INDIANS
The people whom the first European explorers encountered were not an original type who had migrated from Asia, but an amalgamation of many types, carrying in their veins blended blood, a mixture derived from successive waves of Asiatic migrants, and from the shifting of peoples who themselves had dwelt from Paleolithic times in southern, northern, and western regions of America.
The incomparable political organization for which the Iroquois were famed did not exist in 1534 when Jacques Cartier opened the Gaspe Basin to European exploitation. Tribes of the Iroquoian linguistic stock then were politically independent, were almost constantly at war with each other and were spread over an enormous area, extending from the St. Lawrence Valley and Lakes Ontario and Erie to the deep south and on the East to North Carolina and Virginia.
It was largely the work of two men, Dekanawida, who according to legend was a Huron refugee and a powerful Mohawk medicine man, Hiawatha, who preached that political and military unity would not only bring an...