Dating the Iroquois Confederacy

By Bruce E. Johnson

Akwesasne Notes, Vol. 1 #3 & #4

The Rotinonshonni (Iroquois) Confederacy, one of the world’s oldest democracies, is at least three centuries older than precious estimates, according to research by Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields of Toledo University Ohio. Using a combination of documentary Sources, solar eclipse data, Iroquois oral history, Mann and Fields assert that the Iroquois Confederacy’s body of law was adopted by the Seneca (the last of the five nations to ratify it) August 31, 1142. The ratification council convened at a site in Victor, New York. The site is called Ganondagan by the Seneca.

Mann was a doctoral student in American Studies at Toledo University of Ohio; Fields, an astronomer, is an expert in the history of solar eclipses. Seneca adopted the Iroquois Great Law of Peace shortly after a total eclipse of the sun.

Mann and Fields are the first scholars to combine documentary history with oral accounts and precise solar data in an attempt to date the origin of the Iroquois League. Depending on how democracy is defined, their date of 1142 would rank the Iroquois Confederacy with the government of Iceland and the Swiss cantons as the oldest continuous functioning democracy on earth. All three precedents have been cited as forerunner of the United States system of representative democracy. The Rotinonshonni Confederacy functions today in upstate New York; it even issues passports.

The date that Mann and Fields assert for the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy is more than 300 years earlier than the current consensus of scholarship; many experts date the information to the year 1451, at the time of another solar eclipse. Mann and Fields contend the 1451 eclipse was total, but that it’s shadow fell over Pennsylvania, well to the southwest of the ratifying council’s location.

According to Mann, the Seneca were the last of the five Iroquois nations to accept the Great Law of Peace. In an academic paper titled, “A Sign in the Sky: Dating the League of the Rotinonshonni,” Mann estimates that the journey of Deganawidah (the Peacemaker) and Hiawatha in support of the Great Law had begun about a quarter century earlier with the Mohawks, at the “eastern door” of the Confederacy. The 1451 founding was proposed in 1948 by Paul A. W. Wallace, who gathered Iroquois oral history in his White Roots of Peace and other works, In her paper, Mann suggests that Wallace knew enough of the Seneca’s oral history to realize that a solar eclipse was a key element to determining the founding date. Wallace was also fluent in German, the language in which he would need to read T.R. Oppolzer’s Canon der Finsternisse, the best historical eclipse tables available at the time. The first pre-contact solar eclipse in Seneca country occurred June 28, 1451. Mann believes that Wallace did not dare rick an earlier date because of the academic politics of the late 1940’s. “As late as 1949”’ writes Mann. “White scholars were trying to insist that Europeans…had invented wampum – a backbone artifact to the League!”

The argument that the Iroquois League was established substantially before contact with Europeans is supported by oral history accounts. Mann and Fields cite Paula Underwood, a contemporary Iroquois oral historian, who estimated the League’s founding as 1090 by using family lineages as temporal benchmarks. Another traditional method to estimate the founding date is to count the number of people who have held the office of Tadadaho (speaker) of the Confederacy. A graphic record is available in the form of a cane that the eighteenth century French observer Lafitau called the “Stick of Establishment” and modern-day anthropologist William N. Fenton calls the “Condolence Cane”. Mann and Fields used a figure of 145 Tadadahos (from Mohawk historian Jake Swamp) and then averaged the average tenure of other lifetime appointments, such as popes, European Kings and Queens, and US Supreme Court Justices. Cautioning that different socio-historical institutions are being compared, they figured into their sample 333 months from eight European countries, 95 Supreme Court Justices, and 129 Popes. Averaging the tenure of all three groups, Mann and Fields found an estimated date that compares to the 1142 date by the eclipse record and the 1090 date calculated form family lineages by Underwood.