The Iroquois (), also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are a group of tribes of indigenous people of North America. After the people who spoke Iroquoian came together as different tribes, which were mostly in what is now central and upstate New York, in the 16th century or earlier they came together in an group known today as the Iroquois League, or the "League of Peace and Power". The first Iroquois League was often known as the Five Nations, as it was made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. After the Tuscarora nation joined the League in 1722, the Iroquois became known as the Six Nations. To this day, fifty sachems who represent different clans of the Iroquois meet at the Grand Council near Syracuse, New York.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, the Iroquois lived in what is now the northeastern United States, mostly in what is today upstate New York, west of the Hudson River and through the Finger Lakes region. Today, the Iroquois live mostly in New York and Canada.
The Iroquois League has also been called the Iroquois Confederacy. Some modern scholars now think the League and the Confederacy are different. According to this belief, the term "Iroquois League" stands for the ceremonies and culture found in the Grand Council, while the term "Iroquois Confederacy" stands for what was the spread out political and diplomatic group that was made after Europeans began colonizing America. The League still exists. The Confederacy broke up after the defeat of the British and allied Iroquois nations in the American Revolutionary War.
Name
The Iroquois call themselves the "Haudenosaunee", which means "People of the Longhouse," or more accurately, "They Are Building a Long House." They believe that the Great Peacemaker came up with the name when the League was formed. It means that the nations of the League should live together as families in the same longhouse. Symbolically, the Mohawk guarded the eastern door, as they lived in the east closest to the Hudson River. The Seneca guarded the western door of the "tribal longhouse", the land they controlled in New York. The Onondaga, who lived in the center of Haudenosaunee territory, were keepers of the League's (both literal and figurative) central flame. The French colonists called the Haudenosaunee by the name of Iroquois. There are several different places this name might have come from:
French transliteration of irinakhoiw, a Huron (Wyandot) name for the Haudenosaunee. Used in a negative way, it meant "black snakes" or "real adders". The Haudenosaunee and Huron were traditional enemies, as the Huron were allied with the French and tried to protect their access to fur traders. French linguists, such as Henriette Walter, and anthropologists, such as Dean Snow, support the following explanation. Before France colonized the Americas, Basque fishermen traded with the Algonquins, who were enemies of the Haudenosaunee. The above scholars think "Iroquois" came from a Basque expression, hilokoa, meaning the "killer people", which changed because of different ways that Algonquins and French pronounced words.
History
Formation of the League
Members of the League speak Iroquoian languages that are very different from those of other Iroquoian speakers. This suggests that while the different Iroquoian tribes had the same historical and cultural origin, they came apart over a long enough time that their languages became different. Evidence from archaeology shows that Iroquois ancestors lived in the Finger Lakes region from at least 1000 AD. After coming together in the League, the Iroquois invaded the Ohio River Valley in present-day Kentucky to find more hunting grounds. The Iroquois League was made before they first met European people. Most archaeologists and anthropologists think that the League was made sometime between about 1450 and 1600, although some people think it was even earlier.
According to tradition, the League was formed through the efforts of two men, Deganawida, sometimes known as the Great Peacemaker, and Hiawatha. They brought a message, called the Great Law of Peace, to the fighting Iroquoian nations. The nations who joined the League were the Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Mohawk. Once they stopped most of their fighting, the Iroquois fast became one of the strongest forces in 17th- and 18th-century northeastern North America.