American History Hit - Iroquois Confederacy

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

At its height the Iroquois Confederacy (or Haudenosaunee) - a union of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations - controlled lands from Quebec to Ohio.Its origin story goes back to the legend of the warrior Hiawatha and the Peacemaker. In the end its system of governance may have been an inspiration for the founding fathers.Joining Don to explore the history of the Haudenosaunee is Jen Birch, archaeologist at the University of Georgia.Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongIf you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The tale of Hiawatha is an ancient legend that long predates its retelling by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Disney. It is an origin story of how a warrior and a prophet,

Hiawatha and the great peacemaker, vanquished the forces of division that separated the five great native nations of the northeast. The Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Onondaga, uniting them into a grand alliance called the Haudenosaunee, which roughly translates as people of the Longhouse, later renamed by French traders as the Iroquois Confederacy. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans to North America, these unified nations would create a great society in the continent's dense eastern forests,

developing a system of governance envied and emulated, and to some degree even copied by those same Europeans, seeking to forge their own alliances in a brand new world. Thank you all. I'm your host, Don Wildman, and welcome. When producing a podcast called American History Hit, we must be mindful of a simple fact. The original American story has nothing to do with people like, say, me, a white descendant of English colonists.

For thousands of years, North America had been a continent settled and civilized by complex, tribally structured societies of every sort across the land from sea to shining sea. But as Europeans arrived with aspirations at first to exploit resources and then to fully colonize the land, their ambitions inevitably drew them into conflict with those already here. It is one of several undeniable realities with which modern Americans must reckon if we are to honestly cope with our complicated heritage and chart a more certain and just course into the future. A big part of that journey is more comprehensively,

understanding the people we're talking about. These days, we refer to those original societies as Native Americans, First Nations, indigenous peoples. But while those labels are used respectfully, they're also so general as to seem almost dismissive. We're talking about people living in widespread cultures defined by highly developed languages and customs, who were well on their way to building and evolving greater societies and nations. Want proof? Look at one of the largest and most established of those original nations, or rather five nations united. The Haudenosaunee, or as they were called by the French, the Iroquois, later anglicized to Iroquois. The Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois, was a political and military confederacy of five different tribal nations, largely living in the

Northeast lands now called New York State, right on the front lines of European colonization, and their structure as a governing body would become a strong influence, a model even. for the earliest version of a United States of America only just coming into shape. Here to discuss this remarkable story is Dr. Jennifer Birch, an archaeologist who studies those complex societies of that pre-Columbian Eastern North America era

and who specializes in Iroquoian history. Hello, Jen. Welcome to American History Hit. Hi, Don. Thanks for having me. Okay, first of all, after having said all of that, I need the correct pronunciations, please. Is it Iroquois? Is it Roaqua? Is it Haudenosaunee? Which way do we go here? So as someone raised in Canada, I default to Iroquois, the original French pronunciation,

but living in Georgia here in the southeastern United States, what I hear most commonly here is the anglicized version Iroquois. And for Haudenoshone, it's Haudenishoni. And Haudenishone translates to people of the longhouse. Exactly. We'll talk about that in a moment. As much as possible, and not to be politically correct, I just find it fascinating when I learn these things for real. Hodenosaun is what I will try to say, but Iroquoian Confederacy is what we're talking about today. It's commonly called that. The Iroquoian Confederacy, explain what that

term means and how it came to pass. Who were the member nations in this Confederacy, and why did they unite in the first place? So that is the five nations, right? The Great League of Peace and power that established themselves across what is now upper New York State over to the Hudson River Valley in the sort of 1600s. There are other confederacies as well. So the Huron-Wendat were another prominent confederacy of four nations that lived just south of what is now Georgian Bay in southern Ontario. Just to the west of them were the Tainitante,

or what Europeans called the tobacco nation. That was a confederacy of two tribal groups. and just south of them in what is now sort of southwestern Ontario and the Niagara Peninsula were a group that the Europeans called the neutral because they were neutral in the wars between the Haudenoshone and the Wendat. So much of this has to do with geography. These confederacies, as you're calling them, these alliances between tribes and so forth, which are essentially larger cultures have to do with how lives are spent.

You know, are they settled or are they nomadic? Certainly out west on the plains. those tribes need to move around to follow the source of all goodness in their lives, which are the buffalo herds and so forth. But here in the northeast, and I'm speaking from New York State myself, we have these dense woodlands at this time. Large hills and somewhat mountains, not compared to the Rockies, but the Appalachians are a big barrier there. All of this creates this kind of way of life. And these tribes begin to be settled more than others, perhaps. because they begin agricultural experiments and so forth.

I mean, they develop a whole different kind of culture. Did they get there before the others? I mean, was there something advanced about this area? In terms of getting there before the others, you know, I think that groups that continued to practice a more mobile settlement subsistence strategy, in particular the sort of Algonquin speaking groups in sort of northern Ontario, the Far East Coast, like the Mexicans and the Abinaki, those were intentional choices that, people made not to settle down. We actually have archaeological evidence that some of these groups

were consuming just as much corn as the people who were farming it. So they're aware of this like sort of settled farming way of life and choosing not to engage. In terms of Iroquoian peoples, we know that maize and agriculture enters their subsistence systems around 8,600, but they really don't commit to it until about 1,200 AD. So they're sort of, like you said, experimenting with these new ways of life for hundreds of years before they actually sort of commit and settle down in villages that were occupied year round. But even then, the villages were sort of the women's domains. Women were the core of the longhouse-based extended family. They were the ones who tended and harvested crops, and men were still very mobile within this larger landscape that you describe,

including being, you know, a way for extended periods of time, trading, eventually going to war with one another. So despite this like sort of settling down that we see around 1,200, 1,300, Iroquois peoples were still extremely mobile and ranged widely in the landscape. It's so exciting to think of this time for me, because it just opens. up this entirely new and incredibly interesting world that existed before Europeans come here with all of what we now, you know, so deeply understand. And all the ugliness of the period in time and shame and, you know, these negative things. When you consider that time before, it is such a rich

and interesting culture that's building so close to the land, you know, so deeply involved with nature and so forth. It's another time altogether. So the Iroquois Confederacy help me here. There are five tribes. Can we name them? Yes, and I wish I could pronounce the names of the five original nations of the Haudenoshone, according to sort of their endonyms in their own language, because we primarily refer to them by sort of these names that were given to these groups by Europeans. And so going from west to east, they are the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Mohawk. What was the purpose of these tribes coming together?

What was the first influence that caused this? Well, one of the fascinating things about the way that the League of the Haudenoshone came together is that unlike other Iroquoian confederacies in the Northeast, these five nations remained in their ancestral territories. You know, they still stay sort of geographically distinct. And we think that the reason that these groups allied into what became, what was known as the Haudenoshone Confederacy was a mutual non-aggression pact or a series of mutual non-aggression packs. Because the archaeological record speaks to internal conflict

between certain of these nations, especially in the mid-1500s. The kinds of archaeological evidence that we see for conflict tends to take two major forms, one of which are these really heavy palisades around villages. So they're fortified, heavily fortified. And the second is the presence of human remains bearing what we call it in archaeological or forensic parlance, perimortem trauma. So people who, you know, met a violent end. And their remains made their way into things like midden deposits, pits, basically parts of people where parts of people wouldn't be if they were buried according to the customs of the society. So we see a lot of this in the archaeological record of New York State, sort of in the mid-1500s, and we've interpreted that as

sort of internal conflict, which our later knowledge of how that Confederacy functioned, it included a lot of formal diplomacy, ceremonies that focused on condolence and sort of ending people's grief, and then re-quickening, and so sort of the re-enlivening of spirits and connections. And it seems to be these really formal diplomatic and ceremonial protocols between nations of the Haudenoshone is what allowed them to create such a strong political union while remaining in their ancestral homelands. We all hope to avoid peritmortem, what is it called? Perimortem trauma in life.

Perimortem trauma. My new greatest goal is to avoid that one. Over what period of time are we talking about is the span of this period? This period of initial confederacy formation among the Haudnoshone has really been hotly debated amongst scholars. Some people associate it with a solar eclipse that occurred in the late 1400s, and others say that the Confederacy didn't really come together until the onset of trade with the Dutch in the early 1600s. my preferred way of thinking about confederacy formation is that it was unlikely that it was a single event, you know, boom, one meeting and now we have a Confederacy. But instead it's this ongoing process of alliance formation and maintenance that involved lots of discussions and sort of you can think about Confederation as like an ongoing project as opposed to an initial Genesis event. I understand that in discussing this, I am totally oversimplifying here, but we only have a half hour.

So we have to break this thing down. There's a really interesting story. Is it a myth? I'm not sure about Hiawatha and the Peacemaker. Help me with his pronunciation. Degandawia. That's the one. Degandahuea.

These two individuals play a major part in this Confederacy. In what way? Like you said, it's unsure whether or not the peacemaker legend is indeed a legend or is based on actual events, and as with most things, there's probably, you know, a kernel of truth and a bunch of elaboration that's associated with this. But the gist of it is that there is a Hiram-Wendat man who comes from the north and who sort of travels through the Five Nations establishing these protocols of condolence and re-quickening, the sort of titular event being approaching this sort of Onondaga sorcerer and combing the snakes from his hair as a metaphor for

turning him from this very violent warlike individual to more of a civil leader. And indeed, the story surrounding this Onondaga leader leads to the Onondaga sort of forming the central hearth of the Confederacy. One of the qualities of these societies or this society, and I understand, I want to to repeat, this is a confederacy of different and unique nations. That's kind of what makes this exciting to talk about because they had arrived at a point where they needed to confederate, I guess, to join up to unite. But they created a unique kind of governance policy, I suppose. And this was really based on how these societies were structured within themselves. I mean, these are sort of non-hierarchical groups. Am I right? Can you explain that term non-hierarchical?

Sure. These groups were non-hierarchical inasmuch as there wasn't any sort of one individual or small subset of individuals who say called the shots. The Confederacy had a council that included 50 leaders or headmen who were selected from the leading families of the five constituent nations. And there's actually a document called the roll call of the founders where there are 50. titles associated with these leadership positions. What's also important to note, though, is that while this wasn't a hierarchical society, neither was it egalitarian in the way that we think about egalitarianism as everybody being equal, because there was definitely ranking. The Haudenoshone conceived of the relations amongst member nations in the same way that we might think about kinship or like a family structure. And so there are actually relationships between nations where

sort of one group was called the elder brother and the other was called the younger brother. So even though there's no sort of formal hierarchical system of leadership and the way that we might think about, you know, a state with a monarch who has ultimate power and authority, there were subtleties and gradation in the ranking amongst different constituent individuals and groups. And this would have a lot to do with the power of women. I suppose, in this society as well. Matriarchial authority, if you will, I mean, came from the way of life they were living.

Yeah, so Longhouses were based on sort of an elder woman, her daughters, their children, and their husbands, which would mean that in any given Iroquoian household, you've got a bunch of related women and a bunch of unrelated men. And women elected men to those political offices. So the women had a lot of power to sort of, have called the shots behind the scene in terms of naming individuals to sit in those leadership positions. Women could also organize council meetings and organize war parties, whereby if a member of

their family was killed by an enemy, they would invite war chiefs to their house and demand retribution. And then they would supply these military campaigns with things like moccasins and the food that was required for them to go out, avenge these deaths, and bring prisoners back to either be adopted into the family or ceremonially tortured and sacrificed. Wow. Yeah. That's true of all Native American cultures, really. When you go across the whole nation throughout history, women held the key. They were they were the ones that were calling the shots. It's going that way now. Thank goodness. Even in Euro society. The name Hauden Ashani, we've referred to many times. It translates roughly speaking to people of long houses.

And this refers literally to an architectural structure in these communities. How did this structure evolve and how was its design projected into the community as a whole? You've got your physical longhouse and your metaphorical longhouse here. So the physical longhouse sort of evolves in the 1,200s and 1300s as people are settling down into these permanent village communities. And And this is when we think, and I mean, we're basing this all on archaeological evidence, but that this is when you start seeing these matrilineal family groups forming and these lineages becoming really influential in terms of community affairs. So you can imagine that, you know, big longhouses can contain big influential line lineages. That in terms of those ranking structure is actually held, you know, some balance of power in these communities. But the Longhouse as metaphor is the principle upon which the League of the Hauden Shoney was formed.

And so the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mokak are sort of strung out in a horizontal band across what's now upper New York state. And they actually thought about themselves as nations occupying hearts within this massive geographic metaphor of the Longhouse with the Seneca and the Mohawk at the eastern and western and ends, conceiving of themselves as doorkeepers. Now, the doorkeepers are responsible for the defense of the Confederacy and also the defense of the Longhouse. So you had prominent warriors, their families were placed at the ends of the longhouses to actually be that front line of defense in terms of the house. And it's just so cool that they extended this whole metaphor out

to the Confederacy as a whole, because once we get into the historic period and you start reading the accounts of people like Champlain and the Jesuits. It's the Seneca and the Mohawk that are the most militaristic in terms of these large-scale military campaigns that ultimately by the 1650s lead to the Haudenoshone, dominating and displacing all of the other Iroquoian peoples of the Northeast. By the time we get to the late 1600s, they are the dominant political group, having either displaced or absorbed all other Iroquoian peoples under the banner of the Confederacy. We'll be right back with more from Jen Birch after this short break.

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Subscribe to the ancients, wherever you get your podcasts. Was there someone in some kind of charge of these nations in this Confederacy? Did it switch around through the ages? Were the Mohawks more powerful than the Seneca and so forth? The answer is yes.

The answer is probably a longer story than we have in our 30-minute window here today. You know, one of the things that is important in terms of thinking about foreign policy and external relations is that different groups sort of quote unquote owned trade. So if a prominent family or nation were the first to establish a trade, say as it was for the Mohawk with the Dutch, they controlled that trade. It wasn't like our sort of capitalist sort of market system. One of the important things in terms of thinking about sort of, it's not so much about dominance as it is about like relations. and the positions that different individuals and groups were able to occupy based on these extensive webs of relations.

Because there really wasn't coercive power, right? It was in these societies, it was antithetical to how they functioned, to think that you could make someone do what you wanted them to do. The whole point of a Confederacy is to allow the whole to achieve strategic collective aims. without sacrificing local autonomy. So the Confederacy would never interfere in the affairs of an individual village. It was more about those, you know, achieving those broader overarching goals.

One of the new projects I'm working on is with a group of scholars who study things like Germanic tribes during the Roman Empire, Viking armies in the North Sea. And so all of these groups that are not, they're not states. They are these confederated, very mobile, very militarized polities that manage to achieve amazing feats of like territorialization and even like things that look like imperial conquest,

but without having any sort of overarching centralized political structure. There's certainly compacts and agreements in place that allow groups like the Haudenoshone to dominate the entire northeast from the St. Lawrence Estuary all the way across to what's now Michigan in the later 1600s without any centralized authority. One of my colleagues who works in the Viking Age calls this hydroarchy. So instead of heterarchy where you got just one head to cut off,

think about like a hydra monster. And you can keep chopping at those heads, but you're never going to bring the entirety down. What was the need for even the competition? I mean, what is the population at this? time? Are we talking about thousands and thousands of people or what? For the Iroquoian groups of the Northeast, it's been estimated that both the Haudenoshone and the Hiram-Wendat had about 20,000 to 30,000 people under the overarching Confederacy

umbrella in the early 1600s. But the demographic piece is really important here, Don, because in the 1630s, virgin soil epidemics start sweeping through the northeast. smallpox, and then as we get more European settlers, other kinds of diseases as well. And in the 1630s and 1640s, the Haudenoshone were experiencing a profound demographic crisis. It's estimated that they lost something like 40 to 60 percent of their population to these epidemic diseases. And one of the reasons why it's been suggested that their externally motivated conflict, really picked up in this period was the desire for population replacement.

So we actually start seeing less evidence for prisoner sacrifice in the archaeological record and more evidence for adoption and incorporation of newcomers. Sometimes these groups would be brought right into the communities. And in some cases, as with the sort of dispersal and incorporation of the Huron-Wendat, they would bring them into these nations and sort of set them up in satellite communities. And it's estimated that by the 1660s or 1670s, that some 50% of the Haudenoshone or the people under that Confederacy umbrella were actually incorporated outsiders that had been displaced, defeated, and sort of brought in under that umbrella. Prior to those emergencies, those epidemics, were they a warlike people? Was this part of their lives or not?

It's hard to say all, you know, back pedal. Archaeologists are very good at identifying sort of concrete evidence for things like technology, demography, subsistence. What it's very hard for us to do is address whether or not a group of people were, quote, unquote, warlike or not. We know what the evidence is in the archaeological record. We can look at ethno-historic accounts and even sort of like emic insider accounts of the society. And like, it's very clear that for all Iroquoian societies, being a warrior and being a man, we're sort of synonymous with one another. Youths are inculturated into these identities as soldiers and as hunters from a very young age.

Success in warfare was the easiest way for a young man to achieve status and prestige in the society. So, you know, you don't want to look at a society and say, oh, everyone's warlike. because certainly there are individuals who sort of were more or less along that spectrum. But it seems that at least when we get to the 1600s that Haudnishone political philosophy was that the world is war, right? The world is embroiled in a constant state of warfare. And only through these formal ceremonial and diplomatic protocols can we achieve peace as a confederacy. with peace being the desired state of affairs within the Confederacy,

but the world being at war beyond those relationships. We're skipping over so much, and that's what's exciting about this, is there's a vast amount of education to go through. I want to get to the encounter with the Dutch, the Dutch leading, of course, to the Americans after that. It must have been quite awesome for these early Europeans to come into contact with these so-called savages in their minds, only to find out that they were incredibly organized, incredibly social, have laws, have governance, all the rest of it.

I mean, here we are these desperate Europeans at first with bare purchase on the coast and seeing that there's this whole world that came before them. Many of those colonists, right up to Ben Franklin, had great admiration for what the Iroquois were able to create. Yeah, and indeed, isn't it just that ability to act as? as a confederated or federated whole while also maintaining autonomy at the state level that must have inspired, you know, the construction of some of these explicitly American political arrangements. Exactly. I'm thinking of the Articles of Confederation. I mean, quite directly. And yet the merciless Indian savages. Yes, exactly. Well, that's the whole hypocrisy of the thing. The Articles of Confederation, largely of the mind of Ben Franklin and others, but the idea of the United States of America as first form, out of the gate is based on a document called the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation makes the point that a strong federal government is unnecessary if the states are operating independently and functioning properly. That was the initial idea of the United States that it should be a confederation of unique states, not unlike the Iroquois up there in New York. How conscious was this comparison? How much can we really say someone like Ben Franklin? took this idea from what he saw of the Native Americans. I think you really need a better scholar of American history than someone who is educated in the Canadian school system to answer this question.

I don't know. I think Canadians are really smart about this sort of thing. But one thing that I can say is that when the original Haudenoshone League sort of ceased to be was when the Mohawk dissented in terms of the position that the League would take in the Revolutionary War. And as much as the Mohawk wanted to decide with the British and the rest wanted to, I believe, stay neutral. And so that led to sort of the dissolution of the league because they could not agree on a way forward. And so we see that echoed in American history as well, right? It's when the states can't agree on how to move forward as a nation, these things can come apart. I just think it's really important in dealing with, you know, how, let me speak as an American down here,

the sense that this country had to evolve from one thing to the next, you're talking about a confederacy that is completely based on a different way of life, and yet so tempting because it was working so well. And so how easily to project upon our own settlement of the coast of North America, this same idea will be separate but equal states. We'll only unite as much as we need to in order to function separately. That ends up developing down the ages into a completely different idea. Some people would like to revert way back to that same time in the Articles of Confederation. I mean, this is what's so exciting about this time is that you can really, as an American, if you're interested in American history, you really have to go back before the Europeans. It's not quaint. It's very important and it's very lively and very rich.

We're talking about the Iroquois, but when you go further and move across the nation, it's equally interesting and equally complex. That is so important to do, and I hope through this. program, we will eventually cover the entire continent. That's absolutely the case. Here in the Southeast, you know, you have groups like the Muskogee Confederacy who are absolutely powerful and fascinating. And there's a rich history that goes back, you know, 5,000 years.

If your listeners are interested in learning about places like Poverty Point, which is in northern Louisiana, it's the UNESCO World Heritage Site. But it's this massive complex of mounds and earthworks that anchored essentially. essentially trade networks that extended for hundreds of miles in every direction from the site. And so there were thousands of years of social and political and economic experimentation that took place in North America that resulted in things like Poverty Point, Hopewell, Cahokia. And so it really is this North American indigenous political history rivals any of the most interesting parts of European history. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Cahok and Hills are incredible stuff to see right near St. Louis. Jennifer, where can we read about your books and so forth? Where do we find more about you?

You can find out more about me on my University of Georgia faculty page. I have written many books and many articles and will not enumerate them here. But thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Okay. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks a lot. We'll see you again. Thanks for listening to this episode of American Historyhead. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

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