The Great Law of Peace, A Constitution Before the Constitution

Long before any European ship threaded the narrows of the harbor that would become New York, the land was home to one of the most sophisticated governing systems the world has ever produced. Sometime before European contact, oral tradition places the founding centuries earlier, and scholars debate whether it was as early as eleven forty-two or as late as the fourteen hundreds, a man known as the Peacemaker walked among the warring nations of what is now central and western New York. His name was Deganawida.

With him traveled a Mohawk speaker named Hiawatha, whose power of persuasion carried the message where Deganawida's own stutter made speaking hard. Together they gathered the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Seneca under a single great white pine, the Tree of Peace. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined in seventeen twenty-two.

The document they created was the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. It was not written on paper. It was encoded in wampum belts, each pattern a clause, recited from memory by trained speakers for generation after generation.

The law established a Grand Council where sachems from each nation deliberated by consensus. Women held the power to appoint those sachems and to remove them. War required agreement; no single nation could drag the others into conflict alone.

Historians and Haudenosaunee scholars have long noted the parallels between the Great Law and the United States Constitution, separation of powers, checks on executive authority, the principle that leaders serve the people. Whether the framers in Philadelphia consciously borrowed from the Haudenosaunee model is debated, though Benjamin Franklin and others dealt with Iroquois leaders and knew of their confederacy. What is not debated is the prior art.

The Six Nations governed this land, and governed it thoughtfully, for centuries before the word empire was ever attached to New York.