Can we have a free and equal society? They say that the road to tyranny is paved with good intentions. So can we ask this question at all? Or do we lack the vision? In 1142, five North American tribes, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca, formed a league known as the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois or Five Nations. In 1722 a sixth tribe, Tuscarora, joined, and they became the Six Nations. Their constitution is known as The Great Law Of Peace.
The league had a considerable impact on world history. The Haudenosaunee had equality and liberty for all. That is not uncommon in tribal societies, but the Haudenosaunee influenced the European colonists settling in the United States and 18th-century European thinkers. Freedom, equality and brotherhood became the motto of the French Revolution. They are still the values many people believe societies should pursue.1
Legend has it that three people made it happen, Dekanawida, known as the Great Peacemaker, Ayenwatha, also called Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee, the Mother of Nations, whose home was open to everyone. They proposed the league to end the warfare between the tribes. The warrior leader, Tododaho of the Onondaga, opposed the idea.
Deganawidah then took a single arrow and asked Tododaho to break it, which he did without effort. Then he bundled five arrows together and asked Tododaho to break them too. He could not. Deganawidah prophesied that the Five Nations, each weak on its own, would fall unless they joined forces. Soon after Deganawidah’s warning, a solar eclipse occurred, and the shaken Tododaho agreed to the alliance.
The Great Law Of Peace consists of 117 codicils dealing with the affairs of the Six Nations. Major decisions require the consent of the people in the league. When issues come up, the male chiefs of the clans come together at the council fire in the territory of Onondaga.
The league aims for consensus. Decisions require large majorities of both the clan mothers and the sachems. It presses individuals not to impede decision-making with insignificant objections or frivolous considerations. Referendums decide matters of great importance.
Women have considerable influence and are entitled to the land and its produce. The clan mothers deal with the internal affairs of their tribe. They elect the sachems of their tribe and can remove them from office. Hence, the sachems heed the advice of their female relatives.
Compared to the despotic European societies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Haudenosaunee was a liberal form of government. In the first two centuries of European colonisation, there was no clear border between natives and newcomers. The two societies mingled. Europeans could see from close by how the natives lived. They had a personal freedom common to tribal peoples but unseen in Europe.1
As for the Haudenosaunee, the colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749 that they had such absolute notions of liberty that they allowed no superiority of one over another and banished all servitude from their territories. Colden had been an adoptee of the Mohawks. Other Europeans complained the natives did not know what it was to obey and thought everyone had the right to his own opinion.
Social equality was as important as personal liberty to the North American natives. The European division into social classes appalled them. Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, a French adventurer who lived in Canada between 1683 and 1694, noted that the natives he visited could not understand why one man should have more than another and why the rich deserve more respect than the poor.
The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade the natives to become like Europeans. Instead, many English joined their tribes despite threats of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the local tribes. As Franklin lamented in 1753:
When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, though ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life … and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, when there is no reclaiming them.
The European colonists had to adapt. Otherwise, they could lose their people to the native tribes. That may have helped make American society more free and equal. The American natives may have influenced European philosophers of the 18th century and their ideas of freedom and equality. That eventually led to the French Revolution. Freedom and equality are now basic principles of democratic nations.
The ideals of liberty and limited government influenced the United States Constitution. Equality and consensus did not. The US Seal features a bald eagle holding thirteen arrows bound together, representing the thirteen founding states reminiscent of the bald eagle and the five arrows from the legend of the Five Nations.
The North American natives lived as hunter-gatherers on sparsely populated land. They had little need for higher levels of organisation like a state. Tribes of hunter-gatherers were often equal societies. With the advent of agriculture, farmers had to defend their property, and states with their militaries provided more permanent security. And agriculture can feed more people from the same land.
As population levels increased, people encroached on each other’s freedoms more and more, and the need for authority to settle conflicts and manage other problems grew, for instance, maintaining irrigation works and distributing food. Therefore, advanced civilisations in populated areas had a state. For a long time, the United States was sparsely populated as colonists moved to the West, and the United States needed little government.
Latest update: 29 May 2023
Featured image: The flag of the Iroquois Confederacy. Mont Clair State University website (Montclair.edu).
1. New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). Charles C. Mann. Knopf. [link]
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