Haudenosaunee Political Philosophy and the Great Law of Peace

The Haudenosaunee (meaning "people of the longhouse," and long known to Europeans by the exonym "Iroquois") Confederacy united five nations of the eastern Great Lakes and upper New York region — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca — under a shared political and legal order known as the Kaianere'kó:wa, the Great Law of Peace. Oral tradition credits its founding to Deganawida, remembered as "the Great Peacemaker," a Huron-born prophet who, together with his Onondaga spokesman Hiawatha, is said to have persuaded the warring nations to bury their weapons beneath the roots of an Eastern White Pine, the Tree of Peace, and to adopt instead a constitution of collective deliberation. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, migrated north from the Carolinas and formally joined the confederacy around 1722, after which the League became commonly known as the Six Nations.