Haudenosaunee

Iroquois Confederacy Flag, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

From Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works:

The Haudennosaunne, called the Iroquois by Europeans, are a matrilineal egalitarian society of eastern North America. They traditionally use several means to balance gender relations. Whereas European civilization utilizes gender division to socialize people into rigid roles and to oppress women, queer, and transgendered people, the gendered division of labor and social roles among the Haudennosaunne functions to preserve a balance, assigning each group autonomous niches and powers, and allowing a greater degree of movement between genders than is considered possible in Western society. For hundreds of years the Haudennosaunne have coordinated between multiple nations using a federative structure, and at each level of organization there were women’s councils and men’s councils. At what might be called the national level, which concerned itself with matters of war and peace, the men’s council made the decisions, though the women held a veto power. At the local level, women held more influence. The basic socio-economic unit, the longhouse, was considered to belong to the women, and men had no council at this level. When a man married a woman, he moved into her house. Any man who did not behave could ultimately be kicked out of the longhouse by the women.

Western society typically sees the “higher” levels of organization as being more important and powerful — even the language we use reflects this; but because the Haudennosaunne were egalitarian and decentralized, the lower or local levels of organization where the women had more influence were more important to daily life. In fact when there was no feud between the different nations the highest council might go a long time without meeting at all. However, their’s was not a “matriarchal” society: men were not exploited or devalued the way women are in patriarchal societies. Rather, each group had a measure of autonomy and means for preserving a balance. Despite centuries of colonization by a patriarchal culture, many groups of Haudennosaunne retain their traditional gender relations and still stand out in sharp contrast to the gender-oppressive culture of Canada and the United States...

One example of an anti-authoritarian peace pact with greater longevity than most treaties between states is the confederation enacted among the Haudennosaunne, often referred to as the Iroquois League. The Haudennosaunne are comprised of five nations that all speak similar languages, in the northeastern part of the territory appropriated by the United States and the southern parts of what are now considered to be the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The confederation was formed around August 31, 1142. It covered a geographically huge area, considering that the only options for transportation were by canoe and on foot. The Haudennosaunne were sedentary agriculturalists who lived with the highest population densities, averaging 200 people per acre, of any inhabitants of the Northeast until the 19th century. Communal farming lands surrounded walled towns. The five nations involved — Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk — had a long history of infighting, including wars spurred by competition for resources. The confederation was hugely successful in ending this. By all accounts the five nations — and later a sixth, the Tuscarora, who fled English colonization of the Carolinas — lived in peace for over five hundred years, even throughout the genocidal European expansion and trading of guns and alcohol for animal pelts that caused so many other nations to split or war with their neighbors. The confederation finally fractured — only temporarily — during the American revolution, due to differing strategies about which side to support to mitigate the effects of colonization.

The communal economic life of the five nations played an important role in their ability to live in peace; a metaphor often used for the federation was bringing everyone to live together in the same longhouse and eat from the same bowl. All the groups of the federation sent delegates to meet together and provide a structure for communication, conflict resolution, and discussing relationships with neighboring societies. Decisions were made using consensus, subject to approval by the entire society.

"Warp and Weft," from 'The Years of Rice and Salt' by Kim Stanley Robinson

In The Years of Rice and Salt (2001), an alternate-speculative history written by anti-authoritarian scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), book five, entitled "Warp and Weft," imagines an encounter between a Japanese rebel and the Haudenosaunee in the geographical location now known as New York. Before passing to an examination of this intriguing chapter, a note about The Years of Rice and Salt: this text imagines a world wherein over 99% of Europeans perished from the Black Plague, such that the destruction and contributions provided by Europeans over the past 5 centuries are enacted (to lesser or greater degrees) by other peoples, such as the Chinese and different peoples identifying with Islam (dar al-Islam, the geographical "House of Islam"). For example, in Years, the continents known in our world as the Americas are "discovered" by accident by an errant Chinese naval expedition that gets stuck in the doldrums, while various scientific advances made in European history by people like Newton and Einstein are made by two intellectuals, Iwang and Khalid, from Central Asia (Samarqand, Tashkent, Bokhara). In this alternate timeline, the inter-cultural clash between indigenous peoples and the Chinese is not as totally genocidal as it was with the Europeans in actual fact, though the Chinese did enslave the peoples of the Incan Empire to extract wealth from them, and smallpox and other diseases killed indigenous peoples of the West Coast (the Bay Area of our California). However, the Haudenosaunee resist and survive, playing a formidable role as protagonists advancing global revolution in this book.

In "Warp and Weft," KSR envisions an encounter between a samurai who became a rinon (wandering soldier) after abandoning his cruel master with a council of the Haudenosaunee League. Named Busho, this samurai had settled on what we would call the West Coast of the U.S. with other ronin and Japanese settlers, but then the Chinese invaded and destroyed their community, in their goal of expansion. Busho becomes committed to preventing "the Chinese [from] overrun[ing] Turtle Island as they are overrunning the great world island to the west [Asia], if I could help it." Busho travels east for months to meet the Haudenosaunee, whom he considers "the first people I had heard of who might be able to defeat the invasion of the Chinese." Busho remarks that, outside the Haudenosaunee polity, "Everywhere else in the world, guns rule," and emperors and despots own the land, enslaving the people (374-5). He then speaks of the Haudenosaunee alternative:

"Now, I have watched the Hodenosaunee as closely as a child watches its mother. I see how sons are brought up through their motherline, and cannot inherit anything from their fathers, so that there can be no accumulation of power in any one man. There can be no emperor here. I have seen how the women choose the marriages and advise all aspects of life, how the elderly and orphans are cared for. How the nations are divided into the tribes, woven so that you are all brothers and sisters through the league, warp and weft. How the sachems are chosen by the people, including the women [...]. I have seen how this system of affairs brings peace to your league. It is, in all this world, the best system of rule ever invented by human beings." (376)

Busho warns the Haudenosaunee of the grave threat posed to this revolutionary society by Chinese expansionism: if the Chinese are not resisted, "So it will be, until you look around you, and find there are foreigners all around you, in your valleys, in forts on your hilltops, and insisting that they own the land of their farm as if it were their tobacco pouch, and willing to shoot anyone who kills an animal there, or cuts a tree. And at that point they will say their law rules your law, because there are more of them and they have more guns." (379)

Busho emphasizes the geographical advantage the Haudenosaunee possess, in terms of having a vast ocean dividing them from Asia. He notes this advantage to be special and even indicative of the millenarian "mission" of the League as a political example. After smoking considerable "tobacco," he declares: "You have the finest government on this Earth, no one else has understood that all are noble, all are part of the One Mind. But this is a burden too, do you see? You have to carry it--all the unborn lives to come depend on you! Without you the world would become a nightmare [...]. When the foreigners arrive in their canoes to take your land, you can face them as one, resist their attacks, take from them what is useful and reject what is harmful, and stand up to them as equals on this Earth. I now see what will happen in the time to come, I see it! [...] The people I will become dream now and speak back to me, through me, they tell me all the world's people will stand before the Hodenosaunee in wonder at the justice of its government. The story will move from longhouse to longhouse, to everywhere people are enslaved by rulers, they will speak to each other of the Hodenosaunee, and of a way things could be, all things shared, all people given the right to be a part of the running of things, no slaves and no emperors, no conquest and no submission, people like birds in the sky. Like eagles in the sky! Oh bring it, oh come the day, oh oooohhhhhhhh...!" (386)

Though the connection is not made explicit, it is implied in the Years that Busho's warning to the Haudenosaunee is a critical moment for the development of subsequent history, for the Haudenosaunee later mount an effective resistance campaign against the capitalistic Chinese with the assistance of the anarchistic Travancori League, led by the military commander Kerala ("The Age of Great Progress, pp. 479-547).