The Iroquois Confederacy

When the American Revolution began, most of western New York, especially the Mohawk River Valley and the Finger Lakes region, was the dominion of the Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of six allied Indian tribes. The Confederacy’s greatest strength had always been their ability to stay united, which ended at the outset of the American Revolution when the Confederacy splintered apart with some tribes supporting the British and others the Americans. For the next eight years, raids and counterraids devastated much of western New York, resulting in a significant decrease in both the Native and European population.

Tom Hand, creator and publisher of Americana Corner, explores the changing dynamics within the Iroquois Confederacy, and why it still matters today.

Photo Credits:
New York State Archives
New York Public Library
Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collection
Government of Canada
Library of Congress

[mcq]

Thank you for this wonderful work. It is a great series and so needed in our times of an anti-American media/school systems. This is shared with many!

[rogerpenske]

Nothing like a good beaver fight, Tom! The jokes just write themselves

[deborahcavel-greant]

Nyá·wę čwé·?n ahskę·nę hęh
(Please again peace?) Which has come to be used as the formal greeting among Tuscarora people, but we usually just say Nyá·wę, (Knee-YWAH-wunh) and take it to mean "Hi!". 😊

Haudenosaunee oral historians ("Keepers") have always dated the formation of the Confederacy back to *antiquity*. While Westerners often say the Six Nations came together shortly before or after contact with Europeans, this is not so. For one thing, the Tuscarora of North Carolina (my own people) were originally part of the Oneida Nation but migrated south over a period of 1, 500 years, only finishing their migration a hundred years or so before contact. But they were in North Carolina long enough to develop a "dialect" so distinct that when forced to migrate back to New York in the early 1700s their speech was unintelligible to those who spoke Oneida in New York. (BTW there are MANY Six Nations people still in NY, Ontario and Quebec. More men than women emigrated in Colonial days. Many emigrant men to the Mohawk Valley (NY) married Six Nations women. Two of my 4th g-grandmothers appear to have been Mohawk women who married the sons of German emigrants to the Mohawk Valley in 1709.

Two PhD scholars (Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L Fields) began their 1997 groundbreaking research report on the dating of the League like this: "Anyone up for a big fight need only mention to an Iroquois the dates offered by Western scholars for the founding of the Rotinonshón:ni (Haudenosaunee) League. ...The post contact "date" ...failing somewhere in the mid-sixteenth century, ...the pre contact date barely so, occurring only a generation before contact in the year 1451. The authors will show, based on Western and Native sources that the Keepers have been correct all along: the Haudenosaunee League was founded on the pleasant afternoon of August 31, 1142" [Source: Mann, Barbara A., Fields, Jerry L; American Indian Culture and Research Journal; 21:2 (1997) 105-163. A Sign in the Sky: Dating the League of the Haudenosaunee]

Oneh👋

[gillewilbanks]

Some problems here. The Iroquois Confederacy did not come in to existence until after the defeat of the British. Before that they were the Iroquois League or the Six nations. “ Forced to move”? That is far to simplistic a statement. As you said, some fought for the British, mostly as mercenary groups. Those were moved, by the British to the Ohio and Canada, which were still under British control. The ones who had not been killing the colonists formed the Confederacy.