I hope you will bear with me as I take a moment to impart a bit of history that is, I think, important for a clear understanding of this period in our nation’s history. If you are at all like me, in order to visualize scenes well, it is necessary to have an understanding of the forces at work in the world at this time.
Long ago, before the white man ever stepped foot on the North American continent, there was a Native American confederation that was established for the purpose of bringing peace to the land they called Turtle Island (the known world at that time), and to abolish war forever. That confederation was and still is called the Iroquois Confederation or the League of the Five/Six Nations.
The confederation was composed of five—and eventually six—Nations who were related by custom, language and blood. These Nations were the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondagas, the Cayuga and the Seneca. In the early eighteenth century (sometime around 1722) the Tuscaroras joined the confederation, making the league six instead of five nations.
What is called the Great Peace of the Iroquois came about because of two men, Deganawida and Hiawatha (the real Hiawatha, not the Hiawatha of Longfellow’s poem). Both of these men had a vision of ending war and the fear associated with war, and bringing peace and unity to a people that would not only make the people strong, but would allow the people to live their lives in freedom.
The Council of the Great Peace was an extraordinary government, unparalleled in European culture: It made each man, woman and child free of government rule, and provided strong provisions to ensure that the chiefs remained responsible to the people. So strict and astute were these laws that if any chief began to serve his own needs, instead of those of the people, the offending chief was at once removed by the elder women of the tribe. That such men lived the rest of their lives in disgrace was evident.
Within the council a majority could not force the minority to their will. All had to agree before any law or action came into being, thus debate and oratory were highly valued. The Great Peace was a government truly of, by and for the people, and it influenced Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. When it came time to set up our own government and constitution, Benjamin Franklin studied the Iroquois Confederation in detail. This is a fact that I didn’t learn in school, and in case you didn’t either, I thought I would bring the information to your attention.
There truly was a spirit of freedom and independence that filled Native America long before the white man “discovered” America. This was so much the case, that it was unwittingly written into James Fenimore Cooper’s books. In his prose, one can lay witness to a taste of this spirit. In fact, if one were to watch Michael Mann’s most recent rendition of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and listen to our hero, Nathaniel, one can hear him state that he is not subject to much at all. Such was the attitude prevalent throughout Native America. It was a country of free men and free women, and no subjects were to be found.
From my studies I have come to believe that it was this concept of freedom and independence that met and influenced the first European settlers. Indeed, the European people who came to the shores of America had not been indoctrinated in the idea of freedom of thought. Instead, the Europeans came to America to escape oppression, and a government that considered people little more than chattel; the right to have an individual thought was almost nonexistent. Instead the “Divine Right of Kings”, where the King owned everything and everyone, ruled England and Europe.
Although the doctrines of Greece influenced our Founding Fathers considerably, not even in Greece was the concept of equality and the idea of being beholden to none better embraced than in Native America. This was particularly so amongst the Iroquois, who gave our founding country so much.
So remember, when one conceives of the idea of American freedom as we have come to know it, those roots grow deep in Native America.
It is also a truth to say that without the Iroquois’s covenant chain that bound them to England, and England to them, the French and Indian War would have very likely ended with a different ruling body over the American continent. It was the Mohawks who guarded our northern borders against French invasion. It was the Senecas who guarded the western borders against the French, for French reign included not only Canada at that time, but much of the Ohio Valley, leaving the English and the American settlers choked on the Eastern coast, unable to go West.
Sandwiched on land situated between the French and English settlements sat the Native Americans on ground they had owned for centuries. Because the Native Americans were also a people who had raised some of the finest warriors in history, the English and French vied to obtain the loyalty of the Iroquois, often spreading fear and rumors, one against the other in the attempt to gain their support.
The French and Indian War was called such because several Canadian Indians did side with the French. Many of those Indians were of Algonquin stock, but some were Christian Mohawks who had come under the influence of French Jesuits, and who had left their homeland in what is now New York for Canada. That this pitted Mohawk against Mohawk, brother against brother, was not forgotten by the Iroquois and is one reason why, during the Revolutionary War, many Iroquois people were determined to remain neutral.
During the time period when this book takes place, the French and Indian War was in full swing. The Iroquois—specifically the Mohawk living along the Mohawk River in upper New York State—were aligned with the English and the Americans.
I am happy to have shared this journey back in time to a period in the history of Turtle Island (the world at that time) that was most heroic.
Karen Kay