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C. 1142


The Great Peacemaker

There were hungry years on the ribbon of the Allegheny Mountains. Among the Iroquoian people of the Seneca, Cuyahoga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk, life was defined by famine, pestilence, warfare, and death. Describing the area in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, science journalist Charles C. Mann writes that the “Adirondack and Allegheny forests … [were] a place of constant violence, and, apparently, intermittent cannibalism.” The five tribes had been involved in generations of revenge killings, answering the slaughter of daughters and sons, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers with equivalent punishment, from the confluence of the Ohio to the Finger Lakes. In the frigid winters, the snow was dyed red, and in the baking summers the green leaves dripped with blood, the entirety of Pennsylvania a veritable empire of bleached skulls stripped bare.

A leader of the Onondaga named Tadodaho was responsible for the deaths of the Mohawk chief Hiawatha’s daughters. Hiawatha decided that such bloodshed had to end. He would find himself the first disciple of a prophet whom Mann describes as a “shamanic outsider who was born to a virgin girl,” emerging somewhere in the traditional region of the Iroquois. Deganawidah, known as the Great Peacemaker, was possibly Onondaga, Mohawk, or Huron, or perhaps born from the very soil itself. His name, however, meaning “Two River Currents Flowing Together,” indicates a western Pennsylvanian origin. Hiawatha helped spread the message of Deganawidah, so that the former was the head, the latter the heart; the first the mind, and the second the spirit; the two joined together in the conversion of their people to the Great Code of Peace.

Tadodaho was the last sachem to be converted to the new faith. Hiawatha and Deganawidah explained the utility of alliance to him by demonstrating how easy it was to snap a single arrow in two, but how difficult it was to do when five were bound together. Fearsome as Tadodaho was, Hiawatha’s forgiveness toward him was the genesis of the Iroquois Confederation, which was to be centered near modern-day Syracuse, New York (where indeed the capital of the Iroquois remains). What would be Pittsburgh, by the eighteenth century a small Seneca village on the eastern banks of the Allegheny known as Shannnopin, was but one small corner of the Iroquois Empire.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes the resulting political order inaugurated by Deganawidah and Hiawatha as a “remarkable federal state structure,” a system which incorporated “six widely dispersed and unique nations of thousands of agricultural villages and hunting ground from the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, and as far south as the Carolinas and inland to Pennsylvania.” Mann described the Iroquois Confederacy as “the greatest indigenous polity north of the Rio Grande in the two centuries before Columbus, and definitely the greatest in the two centuries after.” Based on an eclipse that is central to the tale of Deganawidah, it’s possible that the legendary events of the founding of the confederation known as the Haudenosaunee may be as late as 1451 and as early as 1142. If the earlier date is accurate, than Mann makes the observation that the political alliance would, after the Icelandic Althing, be “the second oldest continuously existing representative parliament on earth.”

In 117 codicils, Deganawidah’s Great Code of Peace specified in exacting detail how the relationship between the five nations was to operate. Fifty sachems from throughout the Iroquois country were to represent the five tribes at occasional longhouse tribunals held near Syracuse; each one of the male chiefs was selected by women who were the leaders of their individual nations. Scholar Barbara Mann (of no relation to Charles) notes in Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas that “men could not consider a charter not sent to them by the women,” leading the other Mann to note that the Haudenosaunee could be regarded as “a feminist dream.”

All collective decisions had to be unanimous, forcing the Cuyahoga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, and Seneca into not just an official policy of compromise, but indeed an entire philosophical disposition that prized such unity above all else. Deganawidah’s Great Code of Peace was a radical document, arguably more democratic than anything produced in ancient Athens. Its fundamental axiom, conceived some six centuries before the Declaration of Independence, was “That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them.”

Eighteenth-century observers credited the Haudenosaunee’s democratic spirit. Cherokee colonist James Adair noted that “Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty,” while the British military officer Robert Rodgers recorded that among the Iroquois, “Every man is free” and nobody “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” While Europe was mired in despotism, and American colonists projected their utopian dreams of human freedom onto the continent, the Haudenosaunee had been engaged in egalitarian self-governance for the better part of a millennium. Still, a direct line between Syracuse in 1142 and Philadelphia in 1776 (and then again in 1787) seems, as Mann writes, if “Taken literally … implausible.” If not for the very least that the Great Code of Peace is profoundly more egalitarian than the US Constitution.

Mann writes that “the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership.” For the Iroquois, the alliance between their nations signified political, social, cultural, and religious emancipation, not just the delineation of how to protect the rights of property owners. Physician and governor of the Province of New York, Cadwallader Colden, noted with admiration in 1749 that the Iroquois had “such absolute notions of Liberty that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” The Haudenosaunee represented the first organized, large-scale, genuine democratic experiment, not in the groves of the Peloponnesus but in the forests that included pre-Colombian Pittsburgh and its environs in the Mid-Atlantic.

Mann writes that American democracy, when imagined in its purest sense, is “pervaded by Indian ideals and images of liberty,” that the nation is “infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture.” A risk, no doubt, in that type of language, the possibility of falling into tired (and dangerous) stereotypes about “noble savages.” But if we remain focused on what the Haudenosaunee Great Code of Peace said, what we do find is something profound: the existence of a democracy in more than name only, a system promulgated by a prophet who was the first to utter that sacred ideal concerning the equality of all women and men, and who had the political endurance to actually enact it—not on heaven, but on earth.

An Alternative History of Pittsburgh

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