Keepers of the Central Fire

Long before this city had a name in any European language, this valley was the center of something remarkable. The Onondaga Nation, whose homeland surrounds what is now Onondaga Lake just south of the city, were the Firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the people the others called Keepers of the Central Fire.

The Haudenosaunee, sometimes called the Iroquois, united five nations into a confederacy that oral tradition and some scholars place as early as the twelfth century, though the date is debated. The five original nations were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, joined later by the Tuscarora in seventeen twenty-two. The Great Law of Peace, or Gayanashagowa, was the constitution that bound them together: it established a Grand Council, a process for deliberation, rules for raising and settling grievances, and a philosophy of governance rooted in consensus rather than coercion.

The Onondaga were placed at the center, geographically and politically. The Grand Council's fires burned among them. They supplied fourteen sachems to the council, more than any other nation, including the chairman, the Tadodaho. They kept the confederacy's wampum records, the physical archive of its history and its agreements.

The Peacemaker who brought this law to the nations planted a white pine, the Great Tree of Peace, and instructed the nations to bury their weapons beneath its roots. Above the tree, an eagle would watch in every direction for threats to the law. From that founding act, the confederacy endured for centuries, longer than the United States has existed, and its principles of representative governance and protected individual rights have drawn comparison, by American historians and the nations themselves, to the foundations of American democracy.

When you drive around Onondaga Lake today, you are circling a place that was, for hundreds of years, the council fire of a continental civilization.