Great Law of Peace Brought Iroquois a More Perfect Union

“I am Dekanawidah and with the Five Nations’ Confederate Lords I plant the Tree of Great Peace.“x1 So begins the Great Law of Peace, the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of tribes centered south of Lake Ontario that thrived for 600 years up to the formation of the United States. The preamble of the Great Law of Peace goes on:

I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves. Under the shade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft white feathery down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Adodarhoh, and your cousin Lords.

... there beneath the shade of the spreading branches … shall you sit and watch the Council Fire of the Confederacy of the Five Nations, and all the affairs of the Five Nations shall be transacted at this place before you … by the Confederate Lords of the Five Nations.

Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is Peace and Strength.

If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace …, they may trace the Roots to the Tree and … they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.

We place at the top of the Tree of the Long Leaves an Eagle who is able to see afar. If he sees in the distance any evil approaching or any danger threatening he will at once warn the people of the Confederacy.

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The people of the five nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca—handed the Great Law of Peace down through the generations by reading it aloud from wampum belts. They made the wampum belts with strings of beads formed from lake shells. The beads formed symbols and relations that conveyed meaning to the reader, and lit his memory so that he could tell the law fully and rightly. Knowledge of the Great Law of Peace lasted into the 20th century, when in 1915, Arthur C. Parker, Archaeologist of the State Museum in New York, wrote much of it down into the document we use here.

The Iroquois were one of several tribal confederacies that lived up and down the eastern seaboard.x2 The Founders and Framers of the United States knew their neighbors’ form of government—self-ruled nations united under a common law, where the authority to govern came from the people. And the Founders and Framers soon adopted that form—federal democracy. At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they gave a delegation of 21 Iroquois a floor of Independence Hall to stay in, and seats at the discussions about American independence and government.x3 And the Onondaga leader gave John Hancock, the president of the congress, an Indian name—Great Tree. As the old tribal democracy lived its last days, the world’s first modern liberal democracy was born. Here are some features of the Iroquois Confederacy’s constitution that you might like to compare—for the better or worse—with those of your own national government:

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