Founders Of The Iroquois Confederacy

Union.

The Iroquois Confederacy was perhaps the most complicated governmental organization among the native peoples of North America. The League of the Iroquois, as it was also called, dates back to sometime in the late fourteenth or fifteenth century. The Iroquois peoples lived in the area of present-day Pennsylvania and New York. During this period five Iroquoian tribes—the Mohawks, Senecas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Cayugas —joined together into a political and military alliance. (A sixth tribe, the Tuscaroras, joined the confederacy in 1722.) Before the construction of the confederacy the individual tribes lived in clusters of self-sufficient villages that were separated by large tracts of fishing or hunting territory. Before they confederated, the separate tribes of the Iroquois often engaged in bitter wars of blood revenge. With the creation of the confederation the Iroquois renounced the practice of blood revenge...