Haudenosaunee Confederacy, The Government Beneath the Government
Near Syracuse, New York
Before the United States had a constitution, this land already had one. It had been in operation for at least four centuries, possibly longer. Its architects were the five nations of the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. They called their founding document the Great Law of Peace, and it established a confederate government in which sovereign nations delegated specific powers to a shared council while retaining the authority to govern themselves at home.
The council met at Onondaga, the central nation, whose leaders served as keepers of the fire, the diplomatic and spiritual center of the entire confederacy. Wampum belts woven from white and purple shell beads recorded the terms of the Great Law in a form that could be read, recited, and transmitted across generations without writing.
In seventeen fifty-one, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a fellow colonist that it would be strange if six nations of Iroquois could sustain a lasting union while a dozen English colonies could not, citing the Iroquois Confederacy by name as a working model of colonial union. He was not alone. James Madison studied confederate governance structures. The Oneida Nation fought alongside the Continental Army at Saratoga. In nineteen eighty-eight, the United States Senate passed Concurrent Resolution seventy-six, formally acknowledging that the Iroquois Confederacy had influenced the United States Constitution and the Articles of Confederation. The degree of that influence is a question historians debate, and the debate is genuine. What is not in dispute is that Franklin studied it, named it, and argued for it as a model.
In seventeen twenty-two, the confederacy admitted a sixth nation, the Tuscarora, who had been driven north from the Carolinas. Six nations, governed by consensus, operating by law rather than conquest, across territory that stretched from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes.
The Onondaga Nation remains a sovereign government today. Its leaders still hold the wampum belts. The fire has never gone out.
