Haudenosaunee

Land and continuing presence

The historic Haudenosaunee territory spans what is now upstate New York between the Hudson and Niagara rivers, plus adjacent southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and the Pennsylvania-Ohio borderlands. The 1779 Sullivan-Clinton campaign during the American Revolutionary War destroyed many Haudenosaunee villages and orchards, after which the Six Nations dispersed substantially to the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario, to Akwesasne, Kahnawake, and Kanesatake in Quebec and the New York border, to Oneida in Wisconsin, and to Oklahoma (the Seneca-Cayuga). The Onondaga Nation, retaining its ancestral central-fire location south of Syracuse, New York, continues as the Confederacy’s central council fire. The Haudenosaunee maintain the Kaianere’kó:wa in continuous practice today.

Practice and knowledge

The Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — are the Haudenosaunee agricultural foundation; the practice substantially parallels Mesoamerican milpa and likely traces north along Indigenous agricultural transmission networks. Each Sister supports the others (the corn provides the trellis, the beans fix nitrogen for the maize and the squash, the squash shades the ground and discourages pests). The Three Sisters are also central spiritual beings in Haudenosaunee cosmology — Deohaiko (Corn), Onenhaste (Bean), and Onenhakenra (Squash) appear in ceremony, in song, and in the Thanksgiving Address (Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen — “the words that come before all else”) that opens every Haudenosaunee gathering.

Haudenosaunee political structure — the Kaianere’kó:wa — articulates a council of 50 hereditary chiefs (royaner) appointed by clan mothers, balanced consensus decision-making, and the matrilineal transmission of titles and longhouse rights. The structure substantially influenced 18th-century American political thought; Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 letter to James Parker explicitly cites the Haudenosaunee model.

Contemporary

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy continues to issue its own passports (sometimes refused by other nations, sometimes accepted), maintain the Onondaga Council of Chiefs and the council fire, lead the Two Row Wampum renewal-of-treaty-relationship work, and conduct international diplomacy as a sovereign Indigenous polity. The Onondaga Nation School and the Akwesasne Freedom School teach Mohawk-language-immersion curricula. The Akwesasne Mohawks Kanienkehaka Onkwawenna Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center, the Six Nations Polytechnic, and Cornell University’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (in Cayuga ancestral territory) are major Haudenosaunee-led knowledge institutions.

See also

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• Member of: [[lineage]]
• Demonstrates: [[squash]]

Sources

• Haudenosaunee Confederacy official website
• Onondaga Nation
• Akwesasne Notes (historic Indigenous newspaper)
• Wikipedia — Iroquois, Haudenosaunee