Hiawatha

Hiawatha is honored as a co-founder of the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy — the great league of nations of what is now the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. He stands where history meets oral tradition: most likely a real leader, known chiefly through the sacred account his people have carried for centuries.

By that tradition he was a leader of the Onondaga or Mohawk who joined the prophet known as the Great Peacemaker in a mission to end the blood-feuds tearing the nations apart. Where the Peacemaker had the vision but a halting tongue, Hiawatha had the eloquence, and it was he who carried the message from nation to nation.

Together they won over even the fearsome Onondaga chief Tadodaho, and bound five nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca — into one confederacy under a Great Law of Peace. The wampum belt that bears his name still records that union of the five.

The league he helped forge endured for centuries and is counted among the oldest participatory democracies on earth. (He is not the fictional hero of Longfellow’s later poem, who merely borrowed the name.) Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.