The five Great Lakes of Canada and the United States, and the St. Lawrence Riverthat drains them into the North Atlantic. are as big in area as Britain.
These great inland seas make the climate around them milder. They lengthen the season for every crop from grapes and apples to tobacco and corn. Left natural, this land grows thick forests of oak and maple, a deciduous canopy that turns splendid colours of gold, bronze, yellow, red, maroon and orange every autumn. It is like a glorious sunset, and then the leaves drop and the winter snows fall like a white blanket. There are evergreens (called "conifers")--cedar clumps in hollows, spruce on limestone escarpments, and windblown pines along the dry ridges of ancient till and dunes streak that the reddening hills with veins of jade. The till and dunes are left from a huge inland sea that formed after the glaciers melted and retreated.
The "three sisters" of American agriculture -- corn, beans, and squash -- had slowly spread north and east across the continent from Mexico, as plant breeders adapted them to cooler zones. Sometime before the year 1000 A.D. they were planted in the deep aluvial soils beside the great water known in the Mohawk language as Onhatariyo, meaning "Handsome Lake. The English changed the name Onhatariyo into Ontario, and that is how the Province of Ontario which is beside the great Lake Ontario got its name.
Farming brought prosperity, population growth, and power to the nations living there. It also brought new political frictions. To resolve these, five related peoples on the south side of the lake formed a remarkable union known as the Iroquois Confederacy, or Iroquois League. The five nations were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondage, Cayuga, and Seneca, living in that order from east to west across the Finger Lakes country of northern New York state. The Finger Lakes are also from the glacial period, like the five Great Lakes. It looks as though the great Creator had raked his glacial finger nails through the world and the marks filled with water, making the Finger Lakes. There are deep scratches in the ancient, extremely hard granite rocks of the "Canadian Shield" which were made by rocks under the retreating glaciers.
The Iroquois Leage was there long before Columbus came in 1492. It is not know how far it stretched then, but at its height during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the greatest native political organization in North America, its influence stretched a thousand miles from Quebec to Kentucky and from Pennsylvania to Illinois.
There are some terms that need defining. "Iroquoian" means the whole linguistic and ethnic family, regardless of political ties or geographical location; "Iroquois," whether used as an adjective or noun, refers only to the member nations of the Confederacy. To give an example: Scandinavians and English are both Germanic peoples, but they are not Germans. Cherokees and Hurons are Iroquoian, but they are not Iroquois. There is a third term, "Iroquoia." It is a handy namefor the Iroquois Confederacy's home territory. For centuries the Iroquois League had five nations, all founding members; but after the British and Cherokees drove the Tuscaroras from North Carolina, the Tuscaroras were admitted into the Iroquois League around 1720, and they made the sixth of the Six Nations. Since then, the Iroquois Confederacy has been known as the Six Nations.
These Six Nations still survive, still fighting for recognition of a nationhood that they believe they never surrendered to the newcomers who built the United States and Canada around them. They also feel an ironic pride that European colonists took the Iroquois Confederacy as a model when contemplating a union of their own. The idea came from an Onondaga sachem named Canasatego, who spoke for the Six Nations at the Treaty of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1744. He was described by someone who heard him as "a tall well-made man [with] a very full chest and brawny limbs. He had a manly countenance, mixed with a good-natured smile. He was about sixty years of age, very active, strong, and had a surprising liveliness in his speech." Frustrated by the bickering commissioners of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, Canasatego said"
"We heartily recommend Union and a good agreement between you, our [English] brethren ....
Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great weight and authority with our neighbouring nations.
We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power."
While Canasatego spoke, Benjamin Franklin sat taking notes. He was then thirty-eight, and already a printer, writer, and philosopher, but had yet to become the inventor of the lightning rod, and the co-author of the the American Constitution.
Franklin thought about the Iroquois example (as did others) and in 1751 he wrote:
"It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English Colonies."
Yes, Facearmy, his language makes me feel angry, too. Such arrogance on the part of the newcomer!
Anyway, that is how the eagle on the United States shield is the Iroquois eagle and the bundle of arrows in its grasp originally numbered five, and not thirteen. The new Americans gave little credit to the "ignorant savages" from whom theylearned . They made their ceremonial center of Washington beautiful with iconsof Greece and Rome and put Latin "E PLURIBUS UNUM" in the eagle's mouth. Theirhistorians have even tried to deny or make smaller the Iroquois precedent, but the truth is that the settler republic took Indian ideas, as well as Indian land.
In 1851 a school educated Seneca named Hasanoanda, whose English name was Ely S. Parker, met a white lawyer named Lewis Henry Morgan in a book store in Albany,New York. Hasanoanda later became a sachem of the Confederacy, a general in the army of Ulysses S. Grant, and the first Indian commissioner of Indian Affairs.Morgan was moving away from his legal career to a fascination with indigenous Americans. Guided by Hasanoanda, Morgan wrote an influential book "League of theIroquois" which is extremely important to this day. He described accurately and in detail for the first time, the workings of a Native American government:
"Their whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals....
"The government sat lightly upon the people, who, in effect, were governed but little. It secured to each that individual independence, which the Hodenosaunee [Iroquois] knew how to prize as well as the Saxon race; and which, amid all their political changes, they have continued to preserve."
Ever since Columbus in 1493, Europeans had dreamed up utopias in America. Sometimes they tried to build their own; more often they destroyed the ones they found. But Morgan's books on the Iroquois influenced a new breed of utiopian:Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. "This gentile constitution is wonderful!" Engels cried. "There can be no poor and needy....All are free and equal -- including the women."
To be continued.
