The six 'Indian' nations that impressed the founding fathers of the United States

Days before July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin invited to Philadelphia the 21 chiefs of the Iroquois nations: the so-called Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which grouped six original peoples from the territories that today are New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Indian leaders lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House, today known as Independence Hall, just above the room where the Declaration of Independence of the United States would be signed.

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The president of that Congress, John Hancock, welcomed them on behalf of the 13 colonies gathered there and called them "brothers", wishing that their friendship would last "as long as the sun shines and the waters run". The Iroquois chief also took the floor and christened Hancock as "Karanduawn, a title taken from the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee which translates to The big tree.

Hancock's and the Congress attendees' objective was to prevent the Iroquois from allying with the British, and the Haudenosaunee's presence expressed a will – at least initially – to maintain neutrality in the War of Independence that had broken out a year earlier and would last for seven more.

But Benjamin Franklin wasn't just thinking about military tactics when he invited the Iroquois. He also saw in them a political model from which they could learn. Franklin had known about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's system of government (called Iroquois by the colonizers) for over twenty years. He had met them in 1744 during the negotiations for the Treaty of Lancaster, where these six nations and three North American colonies had gathered to settle territorial disputes. After that, in 1751, Franklin sent a letter to his editor, James Parker, in which he ironically stated that he didn't understand how it was possible that six indigenous nations – whom many colonizers scorned – had been able to maintain an indissoluble political union, and that the 13 colonies couldn't do the same.

He met them again at the Albany Convention of 1754, and there he heard again the legend that the Iroquois chiefs always told to explain the origin of that union of native peoples 600 years before. "You can easily break an arrow over your knee, but if you take five arrows together and try to do the same, you won't be able to, together they will never break," the Mohawk chief Henrick Theyanoguin then told Franklin, according to Emerson Shenandoah, a member of the Onondaga nation and director of the Center for the Great Law of Peace, dedicated to the history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who explains by phone from New York.

The oldest democracy, born in 1142

Those five arrows referred to the five original nations of the Confederacy: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, but at that time there were already six, because the Tuscarora had joined them at the beginning of the 18th century. It is estimated that the initial alliance dates back to 1142, when the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was created and its democratic system of government and decision-making was also born. A system that still endures today, even though some of the clans within the six Iroquois nations have adopted other practices. A system that disputes with the United States the title of the oldest democracy still in existence.

"Some of the nations like the Onondaga or clans of the Seneca still govern themselves by this system that is nearly a thousand years old: they are the oldest democracy I know," explains Scott Maning Stevens, a member of the Mohawk nation and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.

The impact that the Haudenosaunee system of government had on Franklin is no secret, explains Stevens, it is in several of his writings. So much so that in 1988, one year after the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution, the United States Congress passed a resolution recognizing that "the confederation of the thirteen original colonies into a single Republic received influence from the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as many of the democratic principles that were incorporated into the Constitution itself." The resolution also admitted that "the original framers of the Constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy" and recognized a historical debt to these nations.

For the first time, it was recognized that the Constitution of the United States was not only inspired by ideas from the European Enlightenment, such as those of John Locke, although these carry significant weight, but also by the influence of Native Americans, as historian Bruce E. Johansen had already defended in the early 80s in Forgotten Founders (Founding Fathers), who states that "the Iroquois indeed played a key role in the ideological birth of the United States, especially through Franklin's advocacy for federal union".

"Benjamin Franklin realizes that this is a possible model for the 13 colonies, which maintain their identity and autonomy, but form a kind of union," explains Stevens. "And at the same time, he also recognizes that we are a deeply democratic culture, that we are not governed by kings or supreme chiefs, but that everything we do is through councils and, subsequently, through voting and democracy, and that both men and women have a voice, which was very different from European traditions".

"Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington compared the Haudenosaunee people to the Greeks or Romans in terms of values, because everyone says democracy comes from the Greeks, but they forget the Native American part," adds Shenandoah.

The original legend

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is governed by the Gayanesshagowa or Great Law of Peace, which some scholars consider the oldest known democratic and federal constitution in the world. It is not a constitution written on paper, but on a belt made of white shells and transmitted orally. "It takes days to recite the entire Great Law of Peace," explains Stevens.

"The Great Law of Peace comes from our founding [in the 12th century] – he adds–. We were then nations constantly at war with each other, but a political and spiritual leader appears whom we call the Peacemaker, who has a vision of peace, this notion we call Skano which means Great Peace, and which is precisely what establishes our organizational principles".

According to legend, the Peacemaker and one of his disciples, the warrior Hiawatha, managed to get the chiefs of the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca nations to unite in a confederacy of peace. But the Onondaga were ruled by an evil sorcerer who had killed Hiawatha's daughters and wanted to maintain the war. It was a woman named Jigonsaseh who finally convinced him to join the Onondaga to the alliance. The Peacemaker had made a pact with her: if she managed to stop the war, she could choose the leaders. Jigonsaseh succeeded, and became the first clan mother, the women who choose the clan leaders that make up each nation.

Then the Peacemaker gathered the chiefs of the five nations and during a total solar eclipse, proclaimed the Great Law of Peace for the first time. He fixed it on a belt made of shells that each of the nations had carried, the Hiawatha belt, which became the symbol and flag of the Confederacy. They dug up a white pine tree and buried all the weapons in the cavity that was left, before replanting the tree on top to seal the peace. That is why this Great Tree is the central element of their flag and belt.

"Skano, our word for peace, does not just mean the absence of war, it also means being at peace or in harmony with all the elements of your family, your community, your nation, other nations, nature, and yourself", Stevens explains.

How does Iroquois democracy work?

From the great law also arises the decision-making system that will govern the nations of the Confederacy from then on. A democratic political system in which women have a key role: gathered in mother clans, they are the ones who choose the leaders of each clan in a process that requires maximum consensus. "Our clans are matrilineal; if you are born into a clan, you cannot marry someone from the same clan, you must marry someone from another, and when a man marries, he becomes part of his wife's clan. Each clan chooses a group of clan mothers, who are elected by the people, to act as mediators in disputes and also to choose the clan leaders. Traditionally, they choose male chiefs because they used to be the ones who managed external matters such as war or diplomacy with other nations, while women were in charge of all internal clan matters," explains Stevens.

The mothers are best positioned to choose the leaders "because they have seen the children grow up, they have known them from a very young age and they know very well their qualities and defects, their values," explains the Mohawk professor, and points out ironically that "if the United States had a mother clan system, Donald Trump would never have been elected leader." Furthermore, if any of the chiefs behaves improperly, without listening to their people, the clan mothers can depose him.

Each nation has nine clans: the turtle, the beaver, the heron, the plover, the wolf, the bear, the deer, and the falcon. Each clan has several mothers and a leader chosen by them, although today some of these positions are vacant in some of the nations. They do not have a president, but they do have a kind of supreme leader of the six nations called Tadodaho. "But he has no executive power, he only conveys what has been decided by everyone, he cannot issue executive orders or make decisions on his own," remarks Shenandoah.

Another important part of the Haudenosaunee democracy, which also differentiates it from the democracy of the United States, is that "the law of the majority, of 51% or of 'the winner takes all' is not applied," adds Stevens: "We don't like that. In the Confederacy, everything must be done by consensus, and that, as my grandfather used to say, means that everyone will be a little unhappy, because no one gets everything they want."

It is clear that the founding fathers of the United States overlooked many Iroquois precepts when – eleven years after declaring independence – they wrote the Constitution, starting with women's decision-making power. "Women have always had rights in our nations, from the beginning they had the same rights and full autonomy, they could divorce men, things that women still cannot do today in some nations," explains Shenandoah.

But the influence that conversations they likely had with Iroquois leaders in Philadelphia in those days, while the declaration of independence was being forged, had on Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington is more than proven. However, the good wishes expressed during that Philadelphia Congress in the summer of 1776 were not fulfilled.

Division, war, and reserves

Some of the nations that made up the Confederation did not trust the 13 colonies, believing –correctly– that if they achieved independence they would want to usurp part of their lands, and for this reason, the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga eventually allied with the British. In contrast, the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the American revolutionaries. "The Confederation was divided for the first time in 600 years," explains Stevens.

"When part of the Confederation sided with the British, Washington became our great enemy," explains the Mohawk professor. In the instructions he gave in writing to his general John Sullivan on May 31, 1779, Washington stated that "the immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners as possible, of any age and sex." He ordered that the Haudenosaunee territories "be not merely invaded, but destroyed," with a scorched-earth strategy that "today we would call ethnic cleansing," assures Stevens.

It was then that the Haudenosaunee christened the president of the United States, George Washington, with the name of Hanadagáyas, which means "destroyer of peoples," an epithet inherited by each and every one of the presidents of the United States who have come after him.

The Haudenosaunee territory that Washington ordered razed later became the currency to pay for the efforts of the soldiers who had fought for him. For lack of money, the government of the state of New York "rewarded" the soldiers by distributing among them – at 240 hectares per person – an area of almost 800,000 hectares confiscated from the ancestral territory of the Onondaga and Cayuga nations, through treaties imposed under strong pressure.

From the turn of the 19th century, reservations were created, where the peoples of the Confederation were relegated and which, over time, gradually shrank. "We Onondaga were supposed to have an area of 20 miles by 20 miles (103,000 hectares) in those reservations, and today we have 5 miles by 5 miles (6,500 hectares)," explains Shenandoah.

Today, the six Haudenosaunee nations live in eight reservations in the state of New York and eight more in the Quebec and Ontario regions of Canada. These reservations officially have 120,000 registered inhabitants (about 40,000 in Canada and 80,000 in the USA). And to this must be added some 30,000 unregistered Haudenosaunee descendants who live among the general population of both countries.

"We are still an independent and sovereign nation. We Onondaga continue to make our decisions through our traditional system of government, we do not vote in the United States, nor do we receive money from the United States. We are independent and sovereign, just as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a whole still maintains a great council," explains the director of the Center for the Great Law of Peace. And not only that, the Haudenosaunee are one of the few indigenous nations in the world that has its own internationally recognized passport.

Even today, the Haudenosaunee nations continue to claim their ancestral territory, at least that which George Washington promised them in the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794, which was systematically breached. And even today, the Council of Chiefs of the six nations meets from time to time to debate issues of territory and sovereignty and other common concerns: "Such as climate change and, recently, the installation of large data centers for AI that take our water," explains Stevens.

Now that the United States is 250 years old and its democracy is beginning to unravel under the weight of a president who wants to be an emperor, the Haudenosaunee's shell belt withstands the passage of time. The Great Law of Peace and the democratic system they created nearly a thousand years ago not only served as an inspiration to the founding fathers of the United States, but it is on its way to also surviving their creation.