Dating the Iroquois Confederacy

By Bruce E. Johnson

Akwesasne Notes, Vol. 1 #3 & #4

Continued from last week

Mann and Fields also make their case with archaeological evidence. The rise in interpersonal violence that predated the Iroquois League can be tied to a cannibal cult and the existence of villages with palisades, both of which can be dated to the mid 12th century; the spread of the League can be linked to the adoption of corn as a dietary staple among the Rotinonshonni, which also dates between 900 AD and 1100AD, Mann and Fields contend.

Assertion of the 1142 founding date is bound to raise a ruckus among Iroquois experts who have long asserted in print that the Confederacy did not begin until a few years before contact with Europeans in the 1500’s, or even afterwards. In their paper, Fields and Mann dispute statements by Temple anthropology Professor Elisabeth Tooker, whom they quote as placing the original date “in the period from 1400 to 1600 or shortly before.” Mann and Fields believe that scholars who argue the later dates dismiss the Iroquois oral history as well as solar-eclipse data. Since such scholars use only documentary sources with dates on them, and such documents have been left to use only by non-Indians, the Native American perspective is screened out of history. “It is capricious, and most probably racial of scholars to continue dismissing the keepers as incompetent witnesses on their own behalf,” they argue.

Scholars who insist on proof of the Iroquois League’s origins written in a European language engage in a circular argument, Mann contends. When such writing is the only allowable proof, dating the League’s origins earlier that the first substantial European contact becomes impossible. One must be satisfied with the many European accounts that maintain that the League was a functioning, powerful political entity when the first Europeans made contact early in the 1500s.

Mann also offers another example of what she believes to be the European-centered and male-centered nature of existing history. Most accounts of the League’s origins stress the roles played by Deganawidah, who is called “The Peacemaker” in oral discourse among traditional Iroquois, Aionwantha (or Hiawatha), who joined him in a quest to quell the blood feud and establish peace. Mann believes that documentary history largely ignores the role of a third person, a woman named Jigonsaseh, who insisted on gender balance in the Iroquois constitution. Mann’s argument is outlined in another paper. “The Beloved Daughter’s of Jigonsaseh.” Under Rotinonshonni law, clan mothers choose candidates (who are male) as chiefs. The women also maintain ownership of land and homes and exercise veto power over any council action that may result in war. The influence of Iroquois women surprised and inspired nineteenth-century feminists including Susan B, Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, according to research by modern feminist Sally Roesch Wagner.

While a high degree of gender equity existed in Iroquois law, sex roles often were (and remain) very carefully defined, right down to the version of history passed down by people of either sex. Men, the vast majority of anthropological informants, tended to play up the role of Deganawidah and Aionwantha, which was written into history. Women, who would have described the role of Jigonsaseh, originally the name of a historical individual subsequently becomes a title, as a leader of clan mothers. The original figure of Tadadaho, originally Deganawidah’s main antagonist, becomes the title of the League’s speaker. Occasionally in Iroquois history a title may also become a personal name – Handsome Lake (a reference to Lake Ontario) was the title of one of the 50 seats on the Iroquois grand Council before it was the name of the nineteenth-century Iroquois prophet. According to Mann, “it is only after the Peacemaker agrees to her terms that she throws her considerable political weight behind him…She was, in short, invaluable as an ally, invincible as a foe. To succeed, the Peacemaker needed her.

Jigonsaseh is recalled by the keepers as a co-founder of the League, “alongside Deganawidah and Hiawatha,” writes Mann. “Her name has been obliterated from the white record because her story was a woman’s story and nineteenth-century male ethnographers simply failed to ask women, whose story hers about the history of the League.

The story of how Jigonsaseh joined Deganawidah and Hiawatha is one part of an indigenous American epic that has been compared to the Greek Homer, the Myan’s Popol Vu, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Great Law of Peace is still being discovered by Scholars; as recently as 1992, Syracuse University Press published the most complete available translation. Cayuga Jake Thomas recited the entire epic at the Confederacy’s Central council fire in Onondaga, New York, a few miles south of Syracuse. The recitation usually takes him three or four eight-hour days, during which he speaks until his voice cracks. According to the calculations of Fields and Mann, the Iroquois central council fire has burned at Onondaga for more than 900 years.

Mann and Fields conclude: “the only eclipse that meets all requisite conditions – an afternoon occurrence over Gannondagan that darkened the sky – is the eclipse of 1142. The duration of darkness would have been a dramatic three and a half minute interval, long enough to wait for the sun; long enough impress everyone with Deganawidah’s power to call forth a sign in the sky.”