The Haudenosaunee Confederacy ( ; ),"Who We Are". Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Accessed October 24, 2025."Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed October 2025. also known as the Iroquois ( ), is a confederacy of Iroquoian-speaking indigenous peoples in northeast North America. They were known by the French during the colonial years as the Iroquois League, and later as the Iroquois Confederacy. They have also been called the Six Nations (Five Nations before 1722).
Their country has been called Iroquoia and Haudenosauneega in English, and Iroquoisie in French. The Haudenosaunee originally comprised (from east to west) the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora people migrated from the southeast and were accepted into the confederacy, henceforth known as "Six Nations".
Haudenosaunee oral history describes the formation of the Confederacy by the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Jigonhsasee under a constitution known as the Great Law of Peace, likely between 1142 and 1660, although there is little agreement on the date. Contact with Europeans began with the arrival of Dutch colonists to North America, which the Haudenosaunee describe as the origin of the Two Row Wampum Treaty. The acquisition of muskets through the fur trade led to a rapid expansion in Haudenosaunee strength during the Beaver Wars, during which time they dispersed or assimilated most neighboring tribes. At its peak around 1700, Haudenosaunee power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St. Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny Mountains into present-day Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley.
For nearly 200 years, the Haudenosaunee were a powerful factor in North American colonial policy. Alliance with the Haudenosaunee offered political and strategic advantages to the European powers, with the Haudenosaunee often holding the balance of power between the French and British colonies. By the 1700s, the Haudenosaunee increasingly aligned with the British under the Covenant Chain, backing the British during the French and Indian War and securing protection from westward colonial expansion through the Royal Proclamation of 1763. During the American Revolution, Haudenosaunee unity collapsed, with the Oneida and Tuscarora fighting alongside the Patriots and the other nations of the confederacy allying with the British. In the wake of American independence and the devastating Sullivan Expedition, many Haudenosaunee fled to British Canada, establishing the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve. Haudenosaunee territory in the United States was further reduced by a series of land cessations and sales. Nonetheless, the Haudenosaunee continue to consider themselves sovereign and independent, attempting to join the League of Nations in 1923 and issuing their own passports.
In 2010, more than 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people lived in Canada, and over 81,000 in the United States. They retain sovereignty over seven reserves in Canada and eleven reservations in the United States, divided between seventeen First Nations and nine Tribal nations.
Names
Iroquois, the traditional exonym for the Haudenosaunee, is of obscure and debated origin. It first appeared in 1603, in the writings of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, and presumably came from the language of one of the Algonquian peoples he encountered. Haudenosaunee, their autonym, means "people of the longhouse", in reference to the metaphorical longhouse formed by the five original nations of the League. This "longhouse" stretched from the Mohawk Nation in the east to the Seneca Nation in the west, the former being designated the "Keepers of the Eastern Door" and the latter the "Keepers of the Western Door". The descriptive term "Five Nations" (or, after 1722, "Six Nations") is also used, particularly in historical documents. A less common, older autonym for the people of the League is , meaning "original people".
Modern scholars of the Haudenosaunee distinguish between the League and the Confederacy. According to this interpretation, the Haudenosaunee League is the ceremonial and cultural institution embodied in the Grand Council, which still exists, while the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was the decentralized political and diplomatic entity that emerged in response to European colonization and was dissolved after the British defeat in the American Revolutionary War. Today's Haudenosaunee do not make such a distinction, and use the terms interchangeably, but prefer the name "Haudenosaunee Confederacy".
History
Formation of the League
The Haudenosaunee League was established prior to European contact, with the banding together of five Iroquoian peoples living south of the Great Lakes into "The Great League of Peace". Many archaeologists and anthropologists believe that the League was formed about 1450, though arguments have been made for dates as early as the solar eclipse of August 31, 1142.. "It was a confederation based on kinship—a symbolic household. They called their confederation Ganonsyoni, which means "The Lodge Extended Lengthwise", that is, a lodge that is "spread out far". All individuals and all the tribes of the Confederacy were considered as one family living together in one lodge. The Mohawks, dwelling furthest east, were Keepers of the Western Door. The Onondagas, situated in the center, were the Fire Keepers as well as the Wampum Keepers. Onondaga was therefore, the capital, where the Grand Council was held and wampum records were kept. The local clan chiefs of each tribe meeting together as a unit were the federal chiefs of the League. The Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas were the Elder Brothers; The Oneidas and Cayugas, the Younger Brothers. The younger and elder brethren sat on opposite sides of the lodge and counseled across the fire with each other. The Onondagas sat in the middle and kept the balance between the two sides."
The founders of the League are traditionally held to be Dekanawida the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Jigonhsasee the Mother of Nations, whose home acted as a sort of United Nations. They brought the Peacemaker's Great Law of Peace to the five Iroquoian nations who were fighting, raiding, and feuding with each other and with other tribes, both Algonkian and Iroquoian. From east to west, the League was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations. Each nation involved had a distinct Iroquoian language, territory, and function in the League. The League itself is embodied in its Grand Council, an assembly of fifty chiefs, each representing a clan of a nation.
There were many other independent Iroquoian-speaking peoples outside the Haudenosaunee League. The Erie, Susquehannock, and Wendat (Huron) lived at various times along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes, often competing and warring with neighboring nations of the League. In the American Southeast, the Cherokee were another Iroquoian-language people who had migrated to that area centuries before European contact.
Seventeenth Century
Haudenosaunee contact with European settlers began with Dutch settlement of Fort Nassau, with whom the Haudenosaunee swiftly established a trading relationship. Haudenosaunee oral tradition holds that this meeting coincided with the establishment of the Two Row Wampum Treaty, a mutual agreement of coexistence and non-interference.
Beginning in 1609, the League fought the decades-long Beaver Wars against the French, their Wendat allies, and other neighboring tribes, including the Petun, Erie, and Susquehannock. Trying to control access to game for the lucrative fur trade, they invaded the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast (the Lenape, or Delaware), the Algonquian Anishinaabe of the boreal Canadian Shield region, and not infrequently the English colonies as well. During the Beaver Wars, they defeated and assimilated most of the Wendat (1649), Petun (1650), the Neutral Nation (1651), Erie (1657), and Susquehannock (1680). Some Haudenosaunee settled in mission villages along the St. Lawrence River, becoming more closely tied to the French. While they participated in French-led raids on Dutch and English colonial settlements, where some Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee settled, in general the Haudenosaunee resisted attacking their own peoples.
By the end of the century, the Haudenosaunee continued several wars against the French. During King William's War (North American part of the War of the Grand Alliance), the Haudenosaunee allied with the English. In July 1701, they concluded the "Nanfan Treaty", deeding some of their conquered land to the English (a large tract north of the Ohio River). Meanwhile, the Haudenosaunee were negotiating peace with the French; together they signed the Great Peace of Montreal that same year, with the participation of the leading Wyandot diplomat Kondiaronk.
Eighteenth Century
In about 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora joined the League, having migrated northwards from the Carolinas after a bloody conflict with European settlers. A shared cultural background with the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, as well as a sponsorship from the Oneida, led to acceptance of the Tuscarora as the sixth nation in the confederacy in 1722; the Haudenosaunee become known afterwards as the Six Nations.
The Haudenosaunee continued to be involved in wars between France and England in the eighteenth century. During Queen Anne's War (the North American part of the War of the Spanish Succession), they helped plan attacks against the French. During the French and Indian War, the Haudenosaunee briefly fought on both sides while trying to maintain neutrality. By the end, the Haudenosaunee joined the British after they took Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac. After the war, to protect their alliance, the British government issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding white settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains. American colonists resented and largely ignored the order, and the British had insufficient soldiers to enforce it. Faced with confrontations, the Haudenosaunee agreed to adjust the line again in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768).
During the American Revolution, traditional League unity broke down in the face of requests for aid from the British Crown.. The Oneida and Tuscarora supported the American colonists, while the rest of the Haudenosaunee League (the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca) sided with the British and Loyalists. At the war's conclusion with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the British ceded Haudenosaunee territory in New York to the United States without provisions for the Haudenosaunee. The Crown gave the Haudenosaunee land in Canada in compensation for the five million acres they had lost in the south, but it was not equivalent to earlier territory.
After the migration of a majority to Canada, the Haudenosaunee remaining in New York were required to live mostly on reservations. In 1784, a remnant of 6,000 Haudenosaunee faced 240,000 New Yorkers, with land-hungry New Englanders poised to migrate west. "Oneidas alone, who were only 600 strong, owned six million acres, or about 2.4 million hectares. Iroquoia was a land rush waiting to happen." By the War of 1812, the Haudenosaunee had lost control of much territory. Another Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed with the new United States in 1784, whereby the Haudenosaunee ceded much of their historical homeland to the United States, followed by the 1794 treaty of Canandaigua which ceded even more land to the Americans. After this, the Haudenosaunee in New York become demoralized, as more of their land was sold to land speculators while alcoholism, violence, and broken families plagued their reservations. The Oneida and the Cayuga sold almost all their land and moved to Canada or the Ohio Country.
In the west