The Haudenosaunee is a confederacy that lived in what is now upstate New York and Pennsylvania. Also known as the Iroquois, it included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. These five tribes were bound together by a constitution known as the Great Law of Peace.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is one of the oldest participatory democracies in the world. In fact, researchers have traced the founding of the Haudenosaunee back to between 1090 and 1150 AD.
Seneca historian Paula Underwood estimated the founding date of the confederacy at 1090 AD. She used a tally of generations in oral records.
Barbara Mann, a historian at Toledo University, and her colleague Jerry Fields, an astronomer, traced the Haudenosaunee Confederacy founding back to 1142 AD using a combination of documentary history with oral accounts and solar eclipse data.
Mann and Fields used Condolence Canes to estimate the founding date. Condolence Canes are long wooden cylinders that the Iroquois used to record the succession of council members in the confederacy.
They also counted the number of people who have held the role of Todadaho (the speaker for the confederacy) between its founding and 1995. Mann and Fields then averaged the tenure of more than 300 other lifetime appointments of popes, European kings and queens, and U.S. Supreme Court Justices.
In addition, Mann and Fields consulted astronomical tables. According to the Iroquois’ oral history, the Confederacy was formed after a solar eclipse. The last total solar eclipse before the year 1600 was observable in upstate New York on August 31, 1142.
This makes the Haudenosaunee Confederacy the second oldest continuously existing representative parliament worldwide. The only parliament older than the Haudenosaunee is Iceland’s Althing. It dates back to 930 AD.
Although I discuss the Iroquois as a five-nation confederacy here, it became a six-nation confederacy in the 1700s when the Tuscarora joined. The Haudenosaunee, also known as the Six Nations of the Grand River, currently resides on a reserve in Ontario, Canada.
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