Haudenosaunee

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

Iroquois painting of Tadodaho receiving two Mohawk chiefs. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#/media/File:Atotarhoreceivingtwomohawkchieftains.png

The Haudennosaunne ("People of the Longhouse", called the "Iroquois" by Europeans) are an egalitarian, traditionally horticultural confederation of six (originally five) indigenous nations in northeastern North America.

The story goes that five nations (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) lived in a state of perpetual war against each other, until an Onondaga chief named Hiawatha and a Huron named Dengawidah went from village to village and convinced the nations to unite under a Great League of Peace. The confederation formed sometime between 1142 and 1525, according to differet accounts. Peter Gelderloos argues for 1142: "Haudennosaunne oral traditions always maintained this early date, but racist white anthropologists discounted this claim and estimated the league began in the 1500s. Some even hypothesized that the Five Nations constitution was written with European help. But recent archaeological evidence and the record of a coinciding solar eclipse backed up the oral histories, proving that the federation was their own invention." Later on, a sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined the Haudennosaunne.

Culture

In the seventeenth century, the Haudennosaunne lived in large towns, of up to 2,000 people. It was believed that illness resulted from having unfulfilled desires. As a result, Haudennosaunne allowed children almost complete freedom and never punished them. They taught children to be independent and not submissive to authority.

There was a gendered division of labor, but women had a status equal to men's. “In terms of everyday affairs,” the anthropologist David Graeber assesses, “Iroquois society often seems to have been as close as there is to a documented case of a matriarchy.” Society was matrilineal, so a man would move in with his wife once he married. Extended families lived in longhouses, and a woman could easily initiate a divorce by putting her husband's belongings outside.

Decisions

At the most local level, in the longhouse, a council comprised entirely of women made decisions. Longhouses joined together into villages, and villages into nations. Councils at the village and the national levels were made of both men and women. At the league level, only men made decisions, but a women's council could veto decisions that they didn't like. So, women had more power in local affairs and men had more power at the league level. Council members were elected from a pool of possible heirs. They held no coercive power and received no significant material rewards. Councils made decisions by consensus.

Economy

The Haudennosaunne traditionally had no private property, and the economy was based on use-rights. Abandoned land was free for anyone to take, but people could only own as much as they could personally use. In times of shortage, everything was communally owned. Labor was collective and divided by gender. Men hunted, fished, traded, cleared forests, fought wars, and served as diplomats. Women gardened and raised the children. Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer describes traditional Haudennosaunne economies as communist. Haudennosaunne frequently gave each other wampum beads (made from whelks and quahog clams) in rituals and diplomatic acts, but they did not use wampum as currency.

In 1758, the Senecas captured fifteen year-old settler Mary Jemison and adopted her into their society. Later when Jemison was given a choice to leave, she chose to stay among the Seneca. Jemison wrote about Seneca women's farming, weaving, and food preparation: “Our labor was not severe...In the summer season, we planted, tended and harvested our corn, and generally had all our children with us; but had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased.”

Environment

The Mohawks' “Thanksgiving Address” teaches gratitude for the earth, and the Mohawks have for decades been involved in struggles to protect the environment, including a major struggle against General Motors over contamination of Mohawk land with PCBs.

Crime

Anthony Wallace describes how the Haudennosaunne used diffused sanctions to respond to crime:

Behavior was governed not by published laws, enforced by police, courts, and jails, but by oral tradition, supported by a sense of duty, a fear of gossip, and a dread of retaliatory witchcraft. Theft, vandalism, armed robbery, were almost unknown.”

Similarly, Gray Nash explains that without any laws, jails, or police, the Haudennosaunne “maintained a strict sense of right and wrong...He who stole another's food or acted invalourously in war was 'shamed' by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.”

Neighboring Societies

In the seventeenth century, the Haudennosaunne waged war against the Wendat (Huron) that Murray Bookchin described as a “genocidal”. Stephen Arthur responds that the “conflict is better understood as a civil war of political unification among Iroquois speakers...the result was far from genocide of their opponents—rather, it was the political unification of most northern Iroquois peoples” under the Haudennosaunne confederation.

"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).