The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy
The confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations, united by the Great Law of Peace — one of the oldest continuing participatory governments in the world, a major power in colonial North America, and a living nation whose land claims and sovereignty assertions continue.
Events
The Peacemaker Unites the Five Nations
According to Haudenosaunee oral tradition, Dekanawidah, the Great Peacemaker, and Hiawatha persuaded the five warring Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations to bury their weapons beneath the Tree of Peace and accept the Gayanashagowa (Great Law of Peace). The Hiawatha wampum belt records the union. Some scholars, citing a solar eclipse visible in the region in 1142, argue for an earlier founding date; many anthropologists favor a 15th-century origin amid intense interconfederacy conflict.
Location: Upstate New York, United States
The Two Row Wampum and Dutch Trade
Contact with the Dutch at Fort Orange brought firearms, metal tools and fur-trade wealth to the Haudenosaunee. The Two Row Wampum (Kaswentha), an agreement Haudenosaunee tradition records from this period, symbolized parallel coexistence — two nations traveling the same river in separate vessels, neither steering the other. Dutch records confirm the trade alliance era began in these years.
Location: Albany, New York
The Beaver Wars Reshape the Great Lakes
Seeking hunting territory and fur-trade dominance, Haudenosaunee war parties — armed largely through Dutch trade — fought a decades-long series of wars against the Huron (Wendat), Algonquin, and other nations allied with New France. The conflicts devastated several Great Lakes peoples, dispersed communities, and made the Confederacy the dominant Native power in the Northeast.
Location: Great Lakes region
The Great Peace of Montreal
Delegates of the Five Nations concluded a sweeping peace with New France and over 30 allied Indigenous nations at Montreal. The settlement ended decades of frontier war and positioned the Haudenosaunee as diplomatic brokers between the British and French empires — a role formalized through the "Covenant Chain" alliance with Britain.
Location: Montreal, New France
The Tuscarora Join as the Sixth Nation
After wars with British colonists in North Carolina drove them north, the Tuscarora people were admitted to the Confederacy around 1722 as the sixth nation. The league thereafter was commonly known to outsiders as the Six Nations.
Location: New York
The Revolution Splits the Confederacy
As the American Revolution escalated, the Grand Council could not agree on a side. The Oneida and Tuscarora backed the Americans; the Mohawk under Joseph Brant and most Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca fought for the British as Crown allies. It was the first time the Great Law's unity failed in a major war, with lasting political consequences.
Location: New York
The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign Burns Haudenosaunee Towns
General George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to conduct a punitive expedition against the Haudenosaunee allied with the British. Sullivan's forces burned more than 40 towns, orchards and stored crops across the Finger Lakes, forcing thousands of refugees toward British posts at Niagara in a devastating winter of famine.
Location: Finger Lakes, New York
The Treaty of Canandaigua
The United States and the Six Nations signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, in which the federal government acknowledged vast reserved lands and pledged friendship; annuity cloth distribution under the treaty continues to the present. The United States signed it to secure peace and loyalty on its frontier after the Revolution's divisions.
Location: Canandaigua, New York
Handsome Lake's Revival
The Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, traumatized by war, displacement and alcohol's toll on his people, began preaching the Gaiwiio ("Good Message") — a code blending traditional Haudenosaunee ceremony with calls for sobriety, household stability and accommodation to farming life. The Longhouse Religion he founded remains practiced among the Haudenosaunee today.
Location: Tonawanda, New York
Citizenship Imposed and Contested
The US Indian Citizenship Act unilaterally granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country. Many Haudenosaunee rejected it as an infringement of their separate nationhood, and the Confederacy has continued to issue its own passports and assert its treaty-based sovereignty in the century since.
Location: United States
Land Recovery and Sovereignty in the Modern Era
Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Haudenosaunee nations pursued land claims, repatriation and environmental stewardship. In 2022, Syracuse University agreed to return about 1,000 acres of its ceremonial and ancestral lands to the Onondaga Nation — among the largest land returns to any Native nation by a US institution — as the Confederacy continues to govern through its Grand Council.
Location: New York