Haudenosaunee

The Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, are a confederacy of five nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, joined from the early eighteenth century by the Tuscarora, which is why they are also called the Six Nations. They are not a grouping anyone drew from outside. The confederacy is constituted under the Great Law of Peace, brought by the Peacemaker with Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee, which establishes a council of fifty chiefs, allocates the titles among the nations, sets out how a chief is raised up and how he is removed, and describes the whole as a single longhouse extending across the territory with each nation keeping its own fire. Clan mothers hold the right to nominate and to depose.

The date of the founding is disputed, with proposals ranging over several centuries before European contact, and the confederacy's own accounts and the archaeological evidence have not been reconciled. Iroquois, the name in general scholarly use, came into English through French from an Algonquian source and is an exonym. The confederacy's own name is used here, with the familiar one carried as an alias so a reader can find it. The claim sometimes made that the Great Law directly influenced the United States Constitution is argued over: the founders certainly knew of the confederacy and Benjamin Franklin cited it, and how far that amounted to influence rather than acquaintance is a live historical dispute.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Haudenosaunee had lost most of their territory, had been divided by the American Revolution, and were confined to reservations on both sides of a new international border. In 1799 a Seneca named Handsome Lake, Ganiodaiio, fell gravely ill and reported a series of visions in which messengers gave him instructions for his people. What he taught over the following sixteen years became the Gaiwiio, the Good Message, and it addressed alcohol, witchcraft, family obligation and the keeping of the ceremonial calendar, combining older practice with elements that had reached him from Quaker missionaries. It is recited by trained speakers at longhouses on a fixed cycle, and the Longhouse religion built on it is practised today across Haudenosaunee communities, alongside Christianity and alongside those who follow neither. It is one of the clearest cases anywhere of a prophetic movement arising in response to colonial catastrophe and becoming a durable institution rather than a moment.

The atlas notes that its ceremonies belong to the communities that hold them, and describes the movement's history rather than its ritual content. The confederacy also continues to assert its own sovereignty, issuing its own passports and refusing at intervals to be treated as a domestic population of either state its territory now crosses, which is a political position with a religious constitution behind it.