Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) include the Mohawk (Kanienʼkehá꞉ka), Oneida (Onyota’a:ka), Onondaga (Onöñda’gaga’), Cayuga (Guyohkohnyoh), Seneca (Onödowáʼga), and since 1722, Tuscarora (Skaruhreh). The Haudenosaunee are sometimes referred to as the Five Nations or Six Nations in both the scholarly literature and archival sources. Iroquois is an exonym commonly used in older scholarship, while the endonym Haudenosaunee is becoming more common in recent scholarship. Each nation of the Haudenosaunee speaks a distinct Iroquoian language and at time of contact with Europeans in the 16th century the Five Nations occupied parts of what is now New York and at various times occupied part of Pennsylvania, Ontario, and Quebec. Archaeological evidence suggests that many defining features of Haudenosaunee culture including maize-bean-squash agriculture, matrilocality and matrilineality, and longhouse architecture coalesced circa 1000–1300 ce. The social and political structure of the Five Nations underwent many historical changes, most notably the creation of the Gayanesshagowa or Great Law of Peace, in which the Peacemaker brought together the Five Nations of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca in the Confederacy. The full history of the Great Law and the founding of the Confederacy is sometimes known as the Deganawidah Epic or Founding Epic, and a full oral rendition takes several days to tell. The Confederacy created by the Great Law still brings together chiefs from all six nations to form a decentralized, consensus-based government. After contact with Europeans, the Haudenosaunee were among the most powerful military and diplomatic powers in eastern North America. Haudenosaunee diplomats were major players in many of the major events of the 17th and 18th centuries including the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, and Haudenosaunee traders were influential and active in trade connecting them to the broader Atlantic world. In the wake of the American Revolution, both British-allied and American-allied Haudenosaunee communities faced precipitous land loss to American colonialism and punitive land sales and threats of removal throughout the 19th century. The 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua secured the boundaries of remaining Haudenosaunee reservations in what is now New York and some land claims cases remain ongoing. Today there are eighteen Haudenosaunee reservations and reserves within the boundaries of New York, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Ontario, Quebec, and on the border between New York, Quebec, and Ontario.

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