Hi, and welcome back to the Maple History Podcast.
Today, I'm happy to have my friend Heather here to talk about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
also known as Five Nations, and then the Six Nations, or the Iroquois League.
Oh, so many names.
I cannot wait to hear about them.
Yeah, it is confusing.
Yeah, so what we're going to talk about today are two foundational stories.
The first is the Sky Women's Story, which I had briefly talked about in the last episode
about the Wendat Confederacy.
And the second story is the Great Law of Peace.
And the dog is in the room, and he's trying to steal our cookies.
But we will not let him prevail.
No, Henry.
I won't even think about it.
Actually, this is the first time I've had, so I've set up a little studio, which is my
bedroom.
It's very cozy and comfy.
And it's a little strange having an adult friend in your bedroom.
It's just not.
Usually, we just kind of, when you go to your friend's bedroom, it's because you're putting
your coat on their bed for a party.
And we are just set right up here.
It will be great.
Okay, so the history of the Haudenosaunee people has been broken up in three epochs that
are based around three profits.
The first epoch is the story of the Sky Woman.
Second is the epoch of the League.
And the third is the epoch of Handsome Lake.
So we are currently in the epoch of Handsome Lake.
And Handsome Lake is a person with a great name.
I think it's a fabulous name.
And he lived in the late 18th, early 19th century.
So we won't be talking about him today because his prophecies and teachings relate to the
European interactions and the reactions to that.
So these are sort of three eras through which the history of these nations is kind of divided
up.
Yeah.
And the ceremonies that they use, so weird wearing my reading glasses and looking at
someone.
Okay, so one of the challenges of telling these stories is that they are oral traditions
that have been written down by historians and anthropologists, which I am now retelling
orally.
There's an interesting article about the tensions between anthropologists, ethnologists, and
the Haudenosaunee people of present day.
Some interesting ideas that were discussed about the transference of knowledge.
So the knowledge keepers contend that by writing things down, it changes it and can divide
the people.
Just not everyone agrees to or sort of subscribes to the exact way it gets written down.
So your then stuck with that because it's been written and reproduced.
And it's the thing that other people see as opposed to it being living inflexible,
depending on the teller kind of idea.
Exactly.
And each nation has their own twist on things because I would imagine if you're telling
the story to your people in your nation, you would probably play a larger role.
I see.
Yeah.
So as a living oral set of stories, it's able to be sort of suited to audiences at a moment,
at a place, at a time, in a way that once it's written down, you're stuck with it.
That's right.
That's right.
And by it being written down, excuse me, it gets imbued with a westernized view of authority.
Like, this is the version.
Yeah.
And if you're retelling it, you're telling the story wrong.
That's not it.
I read it like this.
And the knowledge keepers are like, no, that's not how it works.
And it's really hard to grasp from my perspective or from a western perspective.
And I'm like, well, that's the story.
If we're thinking about our stories of, say, the Bible, like...
Where the written version of it.
Although even the written version, it's kind of nice to think about how maybe this is showing
how even those written things are not as set in stone and not as sort of strict as we might
think they are.
Yeah.
Like for the four gospels, there's different...
And the other gospels that didn't make it in because they didn't fit.
Yeah.
But the questions of authority get wrapped up in interesting ways.
Well, that's cool.
So one way I think about it for oral history is to think about an album versus a lot
of live show.
So there's a lot more feeling and understanding of the music by being present at a concert
with other people than listening to a studio recording.
So that's kind of how I've categorized it in my mind.
Like just to kind of get a...
An understanding from my western perspective.
So the knowledge keepers, sometimes I'm going to shorten it to keepers, have long been revered
by the Haudenosaunee.
So the elders, sometimes called men who know everything, which I suppose are great.
Like, yeah.
Okay.
So if you keep an eye out for a talented young man, they would mentor.
Okay.
And then they would demonstrate feats of memory and that would bring prestige to the person.
So let's set the stage for where these stories would be told and to whom.
So the Haudenosaunee nations are the Senecas, Mohawk, Anandagas, Anaidas, and Kayyukas.
And I'm using these names because I looked up the Haudenosaunee on like their official
website and they use these names.
They do show the indigenous language versions, but they continually refer to them as these.
Whereas to contrast from the last episode where I chose not to use Huron, I use Wendat,
it seems to be this is...
That's the practice of the community and what they're putting out in the world.
They've accepted.
They've chosen to use the name.
So right now we know them as the Six Nations, but the Tuscaroras joined in 1722.
So that's coming later.
So they're not in for these initial set of stories, gotcha.
So and how they got in and the idea of adoption into the nations is a whole interesting concept.
Well, now Henry wants to have some tea.
Henry, don't even think about that cookie.
Oh, it was a close one.
Yeah, you don't have that.
The cookie is still safe.
I'll just eat it and then it'll be gone.
Sorry, Henry.
Oh, he's looking at me with such hungry eyes.
Okay.
So village life was quite similar to the Wendat.
Just general life was similar to the Wendat.
They lived in long houses that would have been held by the maternal family or what they've
referred to as the ongoing family.
There would be three to five fires in each long house and two families would share each
fire.
So it would be on one family way on one side of the long house, fire in the middle and
the other family on the other side.
And the long houses were generally about 25 feet wide and would average about 80 feet
long, but some could be up to 200 feet long.
Which would be huge.
Yeah.
And clear the trees to prepare the new fields.
Women raise the children and tend to the fields.
So very similar to a Wendat.
Is it the same where I think you were saying last episode that ever is it 10 to 15 years
was when typically groups would move to a new location?
Is it same kind of like sort of in one place, but also larger scale kind of uprooting and
moving to a new spot with the fields I think you were saying it was?
Yeah, it was the fields.
An interesting thing about that is that the I was just reading a camera in which one of
these books, they're all very big.
They were talking about how yes, they would move the fields because the soil was depleted.
But the hunting grounds would stay the same.
Oh, okay.
Right.
So sure where you have the archaeological remains of the decayed village, that's what
we see.
And we're like, oh, well, they moved around all the time.
Well, no, they had because the prey came and went.
They wouldn't deplete all of the prey.
So you mean that they would have sort of an area where your hunting grounds are and you
would move where your kind of housing and fields are set up, but you're still in the
same kind of region or something like that.
So when you're living in the village that's built and the fields are made, the men would
be clearing the trees just next door.
Right.
So you're not shifting like 50 miles away.
Yeah.
In a huge, it's not like a massive migration where you have to do a huge amount of trekking
across.
Yeah.
You're kind of just slowly shifting over more.
Okay.
Because it doesn't, building a long house, they're very good at it, but it wouldn't be
a quick process.
You're not building in a week.
So you'd be like, oh, we're going to build so and so is house.
And then we'd build next person's house.
Okay.
They would work together.
Yeah.
So the first time you're living in a house, you've got a new house.
You've got to go to the house.
You've got to be a little bit of a mess.
Give the society its structure and relate what the duties are of the members and the
groups within it.
And it was in the winter time that was for storytelling because stories were engaging,
like fully engrossing hours and hours.
And if you're hunting or telling the field, you can't listen.
They don't want you listening to the story.
You don't have time.
You've got other stuff you need to do.
And I'm going to show you a way back in the 1930s.
It definitely gives a top down view of the Haudenosaunee and women play a small role in
the book, which is being corrected in other sources.
So I've got some other articles that brought up some interesting points about what he misses.
What do you miss?
Oh, I just wasn't looking for it.
I guess at the time.
What the other articles bring up is the role or the complete balance that they had.
I'll talk about a little bit more, but there was the chiefs and the council, but there
is the women's council.
And the chiefs would tell their versions of these stories and especially the great
law of peace, part of the ceremony was telling the story again.
But the women had their own version, but they would tell each other.
This seems to be the theme.
Many versions of these stories.
Oh, my gosh.
It's dizzying.
Yeah.
Like trying to read through because they would jump from like, okay, well, oh, the Onondaga
say this and then this and then, but within the same paragraph.
And then they try and then they go back into the next part of the story and then like,
oh, which, wait, is that Seneca?
Is that I guess it's like the written version just doesn't work as well if that's just not
the way this works.
So the fact that it's slightly confusing to encounter the stories in a written text is
maybe fitting, I guess.
Yeah.
That's a good point because they're trying to make it as correct as possible.
Yeah.
But you can't.
And to cover all their bases and therefore you have to go through all these things and
that's sort of what I'm doing too.
My version is much more condensed.
So I guess as you're listening, if you've heard a version of this story and you're like,
wait, that's not what I heard.
You're great.
You're right.
Your story is right.
This story is also right.
Like there's just, yeah, it's hard to get it wrong.
I'm maybe I'm trying to say I'm sure there's always a way, but there are many ways of
right and they have their different contexts probably.
Exactly.
There are several versions that were recorded by ethnologists of both the Sky Woman and
the Peacemaker story.
And this really started in the 19th century.
And what was interesting is that especially the great law of peace story, it was unknown.
Like it was like the first they'd heard of it.
So they saw the structure of how they had their chiefs and things like that, but they
this is of the researchers sort of coming into it.
Okay.
And one of the articles that I read, they said that it was actively not told.
Yeah.
I'm like, this is ours.
Yeah.
Maybe the sacredness of it.
Who knows.
So these come from the chiefs and knowledge keepers.
So chief John Gibson and Seth Newhouse were two of the main sources.
They told multiple versions to the researcher to the.
Yeah.
Gibson, he was from one nation, then he was adopted into another nation and became a chief in
that nation.
So he knew the different, he knew the different, spoke the different languages and knew the
different stories.
And is he a settler historian or is he an indigenous historian?
Yeah.
Okay.
He was, I want to say, an idol and became a hot guy.
I can't honestly, I can't remember now.
I can't look it up and.
But he was someone who had grown up with an.
He had grown up with it in the communities.
And he became this renowned knowledge keeper and chief partly because he was blinded in
a lacrosse game.
Oh, wow.
No way.
Okay.
So he being really good at storytelling and he refocused his energies into the stories.
Yeah.
All right.
So as I mentioned, it's, this is not the authoritative version.
Please do not take it as such.
This is just one of them.
If you want to go online, there's some great YouTube videos with different versions.
So that's an option.
Okay.
All right.
So let's start with the, the sky woman myth.
So it begins in the sky world.
There are beings like human like beings.
So similar, like this gods.
And they live very similar similarly to the way the Haudenosaunee people lived.
So they lived in bark covered lodges, but the only light came from the flowers of the
tree of light.
There was no sun yet.
And one of the versions has sky women have an incestuous relationship with her brother
and gets pregnant by combing her hair.
And the boy gets sick and dies while she's pregnant.
And then in an expanded version of this, the two young people.
They don't have that relationship.
And they go live with their uncle who he dies and the dead were revered and she would go
and visit him.
And as in part of this, she received instructions that she's going, she used to marry the chief
in the next village.
And so she dutifully goes and travels to the village to let him know of the, let him the
chief that she's to marry of the plans.
This is what's happening.
And as part of the marriage custom, she used to make him a corn porridge.
So in the story, this goes awry because she must make this in the nude and she keeps
getting splattered with super hot corn porridge, which leaves with her horrible blisters.
Then she and her husband lay down together feet to feet and they sit up and their breath
mingles and she becomes pregnant.
Oh, all right.
That's the way to do it.
Yep.
One version.
So Fenton, one Fenton, he says that he believes that the indigenous people would have found
this very funny.
Okay.
This is like, this is like the family friendly euphemism version of here's how it all got
started.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cause I'm like, you know, we're like, they're feet, huh?
Okay.
All right.
Sure.
Feet plus breath.
Yep.
Bing.
So the marriage between sky woman, also known as fertile flower and sky chief, also known
as standing tree is a little drama filled.
The sky chief becomes brooding and jealous and depressed because of sky woman's pregnancy
and the community rallies behind him to heal him and they hold a dream feast.
So he has a dream where things are withering and dying and the flowers on the tree of light
only produce darkness in the dream.
The tree of light is uprooted and he and his wife sit on the edge of the hole and cast
flowers down satisfying the desire shown in a dream is important to the health of a person.
So all the community make this happen and they pull the tree up.
So sky woman, of course, is on board and she sits down with her husband at the edge of
the hole and they begin to toss flowers down into the abyss below sky chief has other plans
though.
And he chucks sky woman through the hole.
Oh, yeah.
And you remember that one of her names is fertile flower.
So I think that was, there was kind of some portion.
Yeah.
Flowers in.
Yes.
Yeah.
Interesting that it's sort of like satisfied the desire of the dream, but then this seems
a very literal way of doing that to be like, okay, we're literally going to.
Approved the tree, like interesting twist in the story.
So he puts the tree back.
Oh, and sky woman just free falls.
So they've broken it up into different kind of epoch.
So it's like the sky world epoch.
And now we're in the next stage.
Okay.
So the animals swimming and flying around the endless sea below see her and devise a plan
to get her to safety.
In the different versions of different writings, they say the animals hold a council and I
got to love that they're holding a council.
The animal council.
Let's have a meeting.
So the ducks fly up and take hold of her and other creatures take turns swimming to the
bottom of the sea together dirt to put on the great turtles back.
Only the muskrat is successful, but dies in the effort.
And I always found that kind of bittersweet.
Yeah, buddy.
So the ducks land her safely and then she helps spread the dirt, which as she goes life
plants and things like that.
The fertile flower thing.
Yeah.
Comes in.
So sky woman gives birth to a daughter who grows up quickly, which is a common theme
in these stories.
You'll see this again.
So she is courted by several animals and she chooses turtle.
There is another version where she's swinging on the tree and it's the West Wind that impregnated
her.
With the turtle, he lays arrows beside her and she wakes up pregnant.
I mean, we're into the euphemism territory again.
Yep.
So either way, the daughter is pregnant and she hears the twins she is carrying arguing
in her body.
So we're back to twins again.
We're back to twins.
So the first born is known as Sky Holder, also known as Good Minded, thrown away, sapling
and their creator, which also makes it really confusing because they switch of who is the
creator and who or they use they interchange the names as they're telling a story.
I'm like, oh, okay.
I see the fact that there are four names and then it gets written down and they're okay.
Yeah.
And then they're telling the story and then they switch back because they're using a different
name because it's part of different story and it's, I don't say.
So once you get the coding of the names, you can kind of have a sense of where the
different directions are from different communities.
Cool.
So confusing.
Very confusing.
So the second born, he was impatient and he cut through his mother's armpit to get out
killing her and he was born with a comb of flint on his forehead and was ugly and warty
and nasty looking and he's known as flint, ice and evil minded.
So the grandmother just covers her daughter's body and flint convinces her that his brother
killed her.
So she tosses, let's call him.
Flint?
No.
No, we'll call him good minded for now.
Oh, okay.
So she tosses good minded away into the brush and so he goes and seeks out his father.
So he finds the turtle and he's called the turtle who holds the earth in his two hands
who teaches him skills like firemaking, house building, hunting and gives him corn.
So the next, so it's kind of his hero's journey, I guess.
He gets banished, but he ends up in a place where he has guidance and...
He finds his Yoda.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the next stage, he's changed his name.
So the good mind is he's now calling himself sapling, which so I'm going to continue with
that until then.
So the next stage sapling created many things, but is always contrasted by the now evil grandmother
and his brother Flint who have teamed up to be a menace to the world in opposition
to sapling.
So sapling makes medicine plants.
So Flint makes poison ivy.
Sappling creates rivers.
So Flint creates rapids and falls and so on and so forth.
Same with the animals.
So sapling makes all the game animals, but Flint traps them in a cave.
When sapling rescues them, Flint also tricks sapling into releasing some vicious animals
and monsters that would have been better to stay in the cave.
This goes on until finally sapling and Flint have their big showdown and battle each other
to the death.
Sappling prevails and Flint is sent packing and sapling begins the next era, which is the
era of creating humankind.
Is there any sense of where a sky woman, the grandmother is at this point?
She might have gone back to sky world.
Okay.
Yeah, she kind of fades.
So she's not a part of the story usually at this point.
Not really, no interesting.
Okay.
So sapling becomes...
It switches.
So saplings become one of the first...
One half of the first couple and they plant crops and develop ceremonies that are created
in honor for the creator, which sapling also becomes.
Right.
It's very confusing.
Okay.
Okay.
And that's...
There's a reason these stories can take hours and hours because I'm sure it makes sense
if you've...
If it's fully formed.
So sapling slash the creator leaves and then comes back several times to give them the
three sisters of corn, squash and beans.
Sometimes it's sky woman who gives the three sisters, depending on the story.
The creator also helped create the clan system and he does return to sky world eventually,
but there's always the thought that he will come back and help.
There is a belief in reincarnation that we can see when Haudenosaunee give adopted people
a name of a deceased loved one.
So there's kind of like...
They're always kind of there and they can return.
Okay.
Now the most important myth that differentiates the Haudenosaunee from the Wendat is the
peacemaker myth.
So the Haudenosaunee lived very similar to the Wendat and they had the same kind of
sky woman stories or a version thereof as I mentioned.
They lived in the long houses, had a clan system where you couldn't marry someone if
you're in the clan.
They were agriculturalists with a woman taking on that work and the men hunted and governed
and the women had their own counsel.
But the Wendat did not have a dramatic origin story for their confederacy.
Mm.
Or if they did, it wasn't recorded.
But it was more based on kinship and mutual aid rather than a set, very detailed narrative
and constitution.
Oh, okay.
So the Haudenosaunee nations were surrounded by enemies.
The Wendat had allies with the Inu, the Ojibwe, the Patun, Ottawa, and others.
On the other hand, the Haudenosaunee were enemies with all of those nations and then some including
the Mi'gma and more down in the States.
So like the Susquehannak and like, is there?
Nobody seemed to like them.
I don't, I was.
So and even the name that we grew up knowing, the Haudenosaunee by the Iroquois was based
on a derogatory name in both the Wendat and Algonquin languages, which meant snake.
Oh, yeah, I remember you mentioning this.
So yeah.
It's like, ooh, that's a bit of a progression.
And that's the one that made it into sort of the European parlance when they were first
made, leading up with different groups.
Yeah, because the French met up with the Wendat for the most part.
Okay.
They also met up.
So Cartier met up with this, we called them the St. Lawrence Iroquois, but I don't know
how or when that name came to be another name that is being used for the St. Lawrence Iroquois,
that Cartier met kind of at the St. Lawrence there.
They are the Stadaconans.
Oh, that's another because they had that one of the villages.
So the name that they sort of indigenous name there was very different than the Haudenosaunee.
It would have clearly been too different.
Yeah.
And a lot of people do think, oh, they met the Iroquois.
No, they met a different group, but the dialects would have been the same.
So the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee speak Iroquois and dialects.
So different, but then there's the different versions therein.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
So the need for a bonded and well-structured confederacy seemed to be much more important
for the Haudenosaunee.
They had no friends.
They got to have their group system to face the rest of the world.
Yep.
Perhaps as I read more, I can get a better understanding of why they pissed everyone off.
But right now, I don't know where that comes from.
It's just sort of an assumption that sort of a baseline, this is how it is in all of
the stuff you've been making.
Been at war forever.
But the connections between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee are continuous.
I'll get to it, but I'm going to spoil her here.
But the great peacemaker, he's Wendat.
Hmm.
So I'm like, okay.
But I don't, it didn't say why he chose to do that.
Why he came to the Haudenosaunee people to create this peaceful alliance among the five
nations, not among between them and other groups in the area, just internally within
that group.
Yeah.
Okay.
Why is he Wendat?
Sure.
All right.
So the great law of peace, this is, this is quite an epic.
So the story opens with people and nations at war.
There's fierce, fierce fighting among the nations and within the nations.
Basically everybody's fighting.
It's just brutal warfare.
People being killed all the time.
Cannibalism is rampant.
And there are many refugees of some of the male hunters and the female agricultureists
who are trying to escape the violence and find some peace to raise their crops and
live in the article, a sign in the sky dating the league of the Haudenosaunee, Barbara
Mann and Jerry Fields.
They talk about what the wars were really about and that it was an ideological war between
hunters, kind of the traditional hunters versus newly empowered agriculturalists.
And this was the context for the constant warfare going on as the background or sort
of starting point for the great peace story.
And the cannibalism was part of that.
And cannibalism is like fully taking power of the person, of the enemy or perceived enemy.
And is this the one that you were saying earlier, is the story that was deliberately withheld
and not told to Europeans coming through?
So then is it a relatively recent thing that versions of it have been like available and
written down for people like you interested in learning more?
Yeah.
And is it harder to find them or does it seem like it's more sort of open to those being
available now?
This was so that the same time they wrote down the Skywoman story, they wrote down the
great law of peace.
So I was both in the 19th century and early 20th century.
So it was like late 19th.
So in the earlier arrival of Europeans, you wouldn't see it.
But then by the time you get to the 19th and 20th century, that's when you're getting
written versions of it circulating more widely.
Okay, cool.
And one of the people wrote that the idea of nationalism was becoming very popular in
the mid 19th century.
So post-Napoleon and the 1848 revolutions and different things.
So that could be where the interests came from, maybe from the ethnologists.
And we're like, whoa, how did this came to be?
Because the Haudenosaunee nation, they had just kept on doing their thing.
They just didn't write it down.
Yeah.
But now there might be more of a sort of interest in pursuing that and seeing like, hey, can
we find out what nation means over here?
That's right.
Because it's becoming much more of a pressing concept that everyone wants to know about.
No, interesting.
Yeah.
Even on PBS, they're saying things like this is the first democratic government in North
America, which I'm not disagreeing with or disputing.
And then they're saying that it influenced Jefferson.
Okay.
And I'm like, hey, the lines of sort of causality there seem less clear to you.
Yeah.
How would he know?
I mean, maybe he maybe just knowing that they had a nation, maybe that, but they wouldn't
have known the story, right?
So they couldn't have used the full story.
Because the story was not a thing that was told at the time.
Yeah.
They just would have seen in like the practical.
So they would have seen it existing at that moment, but they wouldn't have known sort
of the lore and the stories that kind of grounded it.
Yeah.
And the ceremonies and things like that.
So they would have been like, oh, yeah, well, they have a nation.
These five nations are together.
They knew that.
That was, they definitely knew that.
So to make that connection, it's a little like, like to like they wouldn't have known
that they had this constitution and the structure of how they conducted conflicts and things
like that.
They would have.
So all of that was woven into the story and not things that were sort of communicated
outwardly.
Yeah, they just would have lived it.
Yeah.
Okay.
And the people and the Haudenosaunee chiefs and the clan mothers, they would have known
this, but they wouldn't like, you're not, you're not one of us.
Yeah.
You don't get to know this.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we've got the scene where, you know, it's like chaos all around battles and brutal
killings and eating of people, which is horrible.
So two of these refugees are a mother, let me say it's an indigenous name, Kahato Katha,
which means end of the field and her daughter Kahata suck, which means she walks ahead and
they were living in Wendaki, which is the Wendat territory.
So that was kind of been what they called it.
And they kept themselves totally isolated, but the daughter mysteriously becomes pregnant.
So it must have been some feet again, feet or arrows laid beside her or who knows, or
the wind came by.
So her mother was upset by this, but she had a dream.
And in that dream, she was informed that the baby would be special and would bring lasting
peace.
So this baby is Deganawita, who will become the peacemaker.
I'm going to call, I'm not going to use the name Deganawita anymore because that's considered
a sacred name.
Okay.
So he's peacemaker from now on.
In some versions, the mother and daughter tried to drown the baby, but he kept popping
back up into their house alive and well.
They tried this three times, but he survived them, which showed his great positive spirit
power, power.
Whether it is the version where they tried to drown him or the version where he was lovingly
reared, he grew to adulthood quickly, which is a common story trope in Haudenosaunee myth
and forward.
Yeah, grown up.
Okay.
So he's using soap operas today.
So little kids aren't great for great movers of plots.
So now he's so he's an adult and he knows he wants to go on his mission.
So he built a white stone canoe.
So he could travel down to the embattled Haudenosaunee territory to Haudenosaunee territory to spread
his message of peace.
So it's this white glittering stone canoe.
Not the typical material one thinks.
No.
So he went to the Mohawk territory and told him his peace message.
One of the ways he used to convince him is he offered to let them try to kill him so
he could demonstrate his power.
So the peacemaker climbed a tree and sat on top and the Mohawk, they cut down the tree
with him on top and saw it tumble down a cliff and into a body of water below a river.
And they thought, well, that ought to do it.
But peacemaker was in his cabin in the morning cooking breakfast.
So the Mohawk were on board.
They believed his message.
So some believe that his first stop was to Jigan Sase who was the leader of the cultivators.
So one of the agriculturists and she's considered the mother of nations.
This is in the Mohawk group or is this the next one after that you mean?
She's separate.
She's separate.
Okay.
So sometimes they say yeah the order in which it goes.
Okay.
So Jigan Sase has a bunch of titles but so she was like it's a powerful clan mother and
she was providing food for the traveling warriors.
She her house cabin was on a path.
And so they were going warriors to and from the attacks both sides.
Okay.
So she is providing food to whomever regardless of what their alliance is.
That's right.
So she sort of stands apart from any of the strict sort of like one clan, other clan,
one group of the group.
Okay.
But she's still supporting the warfare.
So that's why peacemaker comes to her.
So what peacemaker arrives, she gave him food and asked him what he was doing and where
he's going.
And so he told her about his message of peace, which peace meant physical and mental well-being,
peace among people, righteousness mean behaving well, advocating for fairness, supporting
the civic rights of all.
And lastly power the organization of councils and understanding the will of the people.
So this really resonated with Jigan Sase.
And so she was peacemaker's first devoted convert and would continue to play a very
large role in the story and in the organization of the league itself.
So what is the great law of peace?
So it's the good word power and peace.
It was to give society a structure from civic life with the organization, the hierarchy
of chiefs among the nations, including the role of women who chose the chiefs.
But there was always balance.
So the families and household would be matrilineal and women would hold their own councils to
choose the chiefs and decide if they wanted to go to war and things like that.
And the counterpoint to that would be that they would bring that information to the
men who would then carry out their desires of what they wanted to happen.
And so this was the system that the peacemaker kind of instigated or introduced.
Yeah.
Okay.
I remember remembering the Wendat had something similar.
The women were very much involved with choosing the chiefs, but maybe not in such a formal
way with the ceremonies.
Or maybe they did.
I, there's a lot of details that not all the stories are out and around for kind of
reading itself.
Yeah.
Or, yeah.
And the book about the Wendat is thicker than the other one.
So I'd be in there somewhere.
I just missed it.
Okay.
So a key to understanding of this, a Haudenosaunee means people of the long house, which was
to demonstrate that the five nations considered themselves to reside in one house together
as a family.
So that really encapsulates the concept.
So an important aspect of how the nations would come together is through songs and ceremonies,
particularly the Edge of the Woods ceremony and the Condoleant ceremony.
They're kind of combined.
So the third important character in the saga that plays an important role in the development
of these ceremonies, and that's Hayawasa.
Okay.
Have you heard that name?
Yes.
Yeah.
That's like the one of the all, oh, hey, I know that.
We know this one, yeah.
But I didn't know who we was.
I just knew the name.
So interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I feel like any of the knowledge I have is more localized to when I lived out West.
So around like the Tanaha or on the coast, the Coast Salish.
So these are all new things to me.
Yeah.
So peacemaker leaves Jugon Sisah to continue his travels and to spread his message.
And Jugon Sisah, she stays around and she evangelizes to all the people who are coming
to.
And that probably works real well if there's a lot of people coming back.
That's right.
Yeah.
Which, which, widely, she's a good candidate.
Exactly.
So peacemaker learns of a warrior named Hayawasa, who is a cannibal in most stories.
He's maker sees Hayawasa dragging a human body home to eat and climbs to the top of
Hayawasa's house to watch and to find his moment to approach this dangerous man.
Hayawasa prepares the body and begins cooking bits of it in the pot.
And when he's ready to eat, he sets the pot down and sees peacemaker's reflection looking
back at him.
This shocks him because he thinks it's his own face, but it is so beautiful.
So he has a revelation that this beautiful face that he has cannot belong to a cannibal.
And so peacemaker sees his moment to approach Hayawasa to give him the message of peace.
Together they go hunting and they get a deer, they bring it back and eat together.
And peacemaker told Hayawasa that deer meat was what humans were meant to eat, not each
other, which pretty straightforward messages start off with.
So again, not all messages have Hayawasa as a cannibal.
So if you prefer a version with less cannibalism.
It is out there as well.
You can find it.
So the most dramatic part of Hayawasa's story is the loss of his beloved daughters.
Sometimes it's his wife in different versions, but mostly it's his daughters.
Sometimes it's seven, sometimes it's three.
So through a mysterious illness, or perhaps by an evil shaman, he kills two of his daughters
and then a third was trampled to death when people rushed to view a giant bird coming
from the sky world.
Yeah.
So one way or the other, all of his daughters have died and he is bereft with grief.
And this is before or after the meaning with peace.
I think it's after.
It's very...
So it's not sort of like the origin story of why he is a warrior.
It's something that is after the fat war.
I mean, I'm not sure if it needs to be that strict of a timeline.
I'm just curious if it's part of the causality of like how this warrior came to be or just
part of the lore of who this person is in general.
I had the same question because I was...
I tried to pick it apart.
It seems that he was the warrior and he...
I guess he had this family already and then this happened after he met peacemaker.
If I'm wrong, people can send a comment or an email.
But maybe there's different versions.
Don't know.
All right.
His daughters are all dead and he is wandering the territory in deep despair and he comes
upon a lake and ducks see him and they fly off all of a sudden and they took the water
with them.
I like that the ducks are back.
We have the ducks before.
I like that we've got ducks again.
It's continuity.
So when the ducks fly off, they take all the water and they reveal a layer of shells beneath.
And so, Hiawatha takes these shells and he calls them Wampum and he makes...
He strings them together.
And so he's stringing these...
There's Wampum deep and grief and he puts them on a pole and just...
He's sitting morning.
Just devastated.
And is this the first time the Wampum comes into the stories?
Yeah.
So this is where Wampum comes from.
It's like the Wampum trees and things.
Okay.
And even though Wampum I think comes from more like East Coast, it's made I think.
Might be the Susquehonic people.
Okay.
Like it's part of the trade system.
Okay.
So it's not a thing that typically is found at the bottom of all the lakes.
No, I don't think it's in Lake Ontario.
But it's a thing that comes and is sort of seen as significant or something like that.
Okay.
So he's grieving and he's saying that if anyone was grieving like him, he would offer them
the condolence of Wampum and bring comfort to them to help them move forward unburdened.
And Hiawatha was spreading his message about condolence Wampum, but he himself was still
in deep sorrow.
So the peacemaker saw his tobacco smoke piercing the sky in prayer and went to him.
And Hiawatha was saying, this is what I would do if I found anyone burdened with grief.
So the peacemaker stepped forward, wiped the tears from his eyes so he could see again,
lifted the blockages from his ears so he could hear again and lifted the blockages from his
throat so he could speak again.
And this is the start of the condolence ceremony.
And that's integral to installing new chiefs in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
So it becomes part of the system.
There's the ceremonies for people assuming positions of power.
Interesting.
So now that Hiawatha was cleared of his grief by the condolence ceremony, he was able to
continue being peacemaker's chief spokesperson and sharing his message of peace.
And one version I read is that peacemaker had a speech impediment.
So that's why he needed Hiawatha to be his voice.
And to end the woman whose name I am blanking on.
Gigans to say.
Gigans to say.
So finding people to be the spokespeople for the message.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Yeah.
And other versions, it's just, they're just a team.
OK.
So then they go on to the Senokas and they're not ready to join.
They're holding it up, holding up the agreements or they're in negotiations.
So all this, this isn't, this isn't happening in like a month.
This is happening over an extended period of time.
Yeah.
OK.
So the Seneca are holding up these agreements and not wanting to ratify the constitution.
So there's something holding them back.
And the peacemaker is trying to negotiate with them, talk to them and convince them of his
message.
And so he told them to watch for a sign in the sky.
So they do.
The sun goes out for a little bit.
So there's an eclipse and this we're like, all right.
I guess fine.
Yeah.
So celestial messages.
Yeah.
So they come across many other obstacles, but the worst and most obstinate is the evil
chief, Tada Ho, who was the monstrous leader of the Onondaga.
In most versions, he is a grotesque monster, also a cannibal with snakes in his hair, snake
head mittens on his hands.
And memorably, he had an enormous snake-like penis that he wrapped around his shoulders
and waist.
Oh, well now.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like it doesn't quite work as euphemism there, but we're back into some kind of symbolism
about, yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
I'm sure someone who is an expert on Haudenosaunee literature could really get into it.
Has many more things to say about that.
Yeah.
Like Fenton talked about it a little bit.
It might be a reference to sexual violence in the world, which is very much not something
that happens amongst indigenous people.
It's very frowned upon.
It's not the right term.
But you've been talking that it wasn't the type of taboo as well.
Yeah.
So it was a different whole different kind of sexuality.
You know, people were more free, but having sex by force was not something that seems
to be a common problem.
OK.
But it's mentioned it.
It's a possibility.
Whether it's as a possibility.
It could have just be someone's historians interpretation.
I don't know.
OK.
OK.
So they need this dangerous evil.
Sometimes he's called a wizard, which I think is also great.
This is like a snake.
So he dwells in a swamp and he's a cannibal.
And he is a key player in the final showdown for the peacemaker, Hiwatha, and Jagansase.
So the league is nearly complete and has all the other leading chiefs on board and they
have set up the administrative rules for debate and compromise.
But they need to figure out how to get Tadata Ho on board.
Jagansase, Hiwatha and peacemaker devise a plan.
First they finalized parts of the Constitution with the other chiefs and clan mothers, but
they need to straighten Tadata Ho's broken mind.
So they create the peace hymn.
It's also called the Six Songs.
And that becomes part of the ceremony, a big part of the ceremony.
And Jagansase also knew that such a powerful chief needed to be enticed to agree to join
the league.
She decided that the Anandaga should be the firekeepers of the league and have 14 chiefs
and council, which is the most, I think the Mohawk have 10.
And there's other ways.
Anyways, there's 50 in total.
OK.
So dividing out who has the chiefs as part of the sort of power negotiations for figuring
out the balance of the overall.
And Jagansase takes the main role in this.
And she's the determining factor of how this is really going to happen.
So with their plan ready and their song and everything, Hiwatha and the peacemaker, they
go to Tadata Ho.
In some versions, peacemaker changes Tadata Ho's body from its monstrous form, which could
also have included bear claws for feet, turtle claws for hands.
And we cannot forget whatever's going on with the penis.
Kher tried to clip it.
Oh, to get it back.
Kept growing back.
OK.
Did that three times, three times is like, that doesn't work after three times clearly.
Yep.
There's some other forces at play here.
Yeah.
And so the other chiefs join where I guess they talked to him, they talked it down.
I told him.
It was confusing.
And other version, Hiwatha cut the head of it off.
And that did the trick.
So.
So as peacemakers, he seems to take care of the physical deformities and Hiwatha calmed
his mind by combing out the snakes in his hair.
Combing out the hair was a common metaphor used to convey the soothing of a troubled mind
or figuring out the meaning behind dreams, which I think makes sense because it's kind
of it's meditative and you're being taken care of by someone else.
Like if you're like brushing someone's hair is a soothing and loving thing to do.
So I could see where that comes from.
All right.
So that Todata Ho's mind and body were recovered.
Jugon Sase placed the antlers of the chief firekeeper on Todata Ho's head, inaugurating
the first leak.
So the names of the characters in the story, they actually become the titles of the chief
firekeeper to this day and the head of the clan mothers.
So Todata Ho becomes the, you're the Todata Ho as if you're the chief firekeeper.
You're the Jugon Sase of if you are the head of the clan mothers.
Interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
And you've talked about to how there's sort of a sense of the possibility of reincarnation
and I have no idea if this is part of that, but just like be a sense that there's a role
that can be filled by different people, but has that power or that hierarchy.
Yeah.
Part of the condolence ceremony is calling in the, I guess, kind of renaming the person
to be the other person.
Right.
So sort of assuming that position and holding the tradition and part of the ceremony, they
name the 50 original leaders.
So that's part of like the, the memorization of all this story of reciting the great law.
And why it also would take many days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that is, it's a, it's a religious ceremony.
It's, it would be like, I don't know, like maybe like getting a new pope or something like,
you know, that kind of like where we don't kind of know all the, it's not really common
to know all the details.
There's things that happen behind closed doors and these things that are public and there
are things that are just, yeah, that makes sense.
Okay.
So I love ink that's been spilt determining when the Haudenosaunee Confederacy started.
A lot of them use the eclipse as a key to unraveling the mystery of the inaugural year.
And real, honestly, it's really the Western kind of historians are like, well, they really
need to know when it started.
Like it's like, and the indigenous knowledge keepers like, it's just been for like a really
long time guys.
It's been forever.
Like they, you know, some would say it's like a thousand years and some will say it's
3000 years.
It's because time, it's not because it's not kept by records.
It's kept by lifetimes and stories and things like that.
And so it really highlights the clash between traditional academia and the understanding
of history held by the Haudenosaunee knowledge keepers.
So the stories are passed down from elders and recorded by anthropologists and ethnologists
in the 19th century and they're in, they are immensely valuable, but so are the oral
traditions of the knowledge keepers to the present day and how they experience it.
And probably also how it shifts and adjusts in different ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even I was even reading just quickly last night was looking at more information about the
condulant ceremony to try and make sense of it all.
And I had a little article popped up about how clan mothers are reimaging it to help
people with trauma today.
So the stories purpose and function can actually also shift according to what's needed at a
particular moment or in a particular context.
Yeah.
Because the trauma of today is very different.
Yeah.
So in more complex.
All right.
So since I'm history person, I'll Western let's figure out where the date is.
So we have an answer.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Maybe.
Anyways, so some historians date the age to the mid 16th century, which is right around
the time of Cartier's arrival to North America.
And some consider the league response to the Europeans arrival and the need to defend
against them.
And one of the arguments is that so even if they hadn't met Cartier themselves, they
would have known about them and they would have known about the Spanish because the trade,
right?
Yeah.
The trade systems.
So then you something new was coming along that would require some additional like organization.
Yeah.
And fortification and palisades.
So in the article a sign in the sky, they refute this claim by showing evidence of
the palisaded villages and cantalism warfare centuries before the Europeans arrival and
the keepers date the league at varying times, but it's always much older than the more conservative
historians.
Okay.
So sort of like at least as old as 15th century, but yeah, potentially very much longer term
than that.
Okay.
So in the expression of passive time can be obscure, obscure for those of us like me,
not immersed in Haudenosaunee culture.
So like I said, they'd say, you know, it's a thousand years, which actually is outright.
Not necessarily an exaggeration.
Yeah.
But they use different methods to calculate time.
They would use life spans.
So it almost like a generation, like how many generations ago and they'd use terms like
the youth of a grandmother, like that kind of like is like this different ways of that
makes sense because like they don't have a clock.
They don't have a calendar.
They have seasons and time and they know when the animals like come out and they know when
the trees change and they know when the winter is going to like all that.
So it doesn't, it's not as precise.
So man and fields use clues to figure out the most likely date and they use the eclipse
as the key factor and also using the knowledge keeper's views.
So they're trying to really balance it and be open minded.
So one of the dates is 1451.
Apparently there's a eclipse that like it has to be a total eclipse from the stories.
So you have a few very distinct possibilities in what you bring the astronomy in.
Exactly.
So that's a popular date and it's somewhat close to what the traditional historian, the
conservative historians and anthropologists like William Fenton and Bruce Trigger think.
But there's another, the other possibility is the eclipse of 1142 and that's the one
that man and fields believe fits the best.
With the eclipse data combined with other factors, they have set the date of the ratification
of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as August 31st, 1142.
That's like very precise, a very long time ago.
So it's a thousand years ago, I mean, it's like 900.
Again, I just was quickly checking online, seeing what they're saying about the eclipse
and the historian.
And then now there's some, they're saying there's another eclipse that was in the year
around the year 900 or something like that.
So it seems like the knowledge keepers were right.
It's about a thousand years.
And so I know you mentioned at the very beginning that the Haudenosaunee were kind of enemies
of all the other people around.
So it's an idea that they were enemies for a thousand years with all of the other groups
surrounding them.
That is sort of a consistent revs run at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it gets so in the next episodes and when I get into like Champlain and things like that
and we get into Jean-Durbre Boof and the same room among the heroines and things like that.
And what they call the morning wars.
Like hello, it's good morning or like morning grief grief.
Okay.
In the war, when they would have, they're kind of like vengeance wars.
So you know, someone gets killed, they go to battle and you know, ten went out or killed.
So they're like, okay, well, they're killed.
So then they go and attack the Mohawk and they take ten prisoners.
This is what you're talking about last time, right?
In the last episode with that sort of like almost trade off in a certain sense of like
equal or balance or something like that.
Yeah.
And they're balancing, they want so and the concept of adoption and the torture and like
sometimes they torture them a bit and then they adopt them into the family and they become
devoted members of the family and then they will then go and fight their old former family.
It's really from a Western perspective, it's just like, whoa, that's wild.
It was accepted and that was part of why the torture and all these things, it was, it was
all relevant to their spiritual understanding of how you could be adopted into a family
and how you can how like lines of kinship work and how the sort of transfer can happen.
And adoption is totally and they become and they're given a name of a dead person.
Right.
That's right.
I remember mentioning that.
But just the psychology of that is really difficult to understand.
Yeah, even the meaning of what a name entails and the giving of and receiving of and accepting
of or adopting even the word, like the word adopting, it sounds like those types of things
were circulating and kind of giving up your old family in such a complete way is really
interesting.
Yeah, the Condole and Sarah May and all those things.
Those things come later or those are still those are part of this longer timeframe part
of the longer timeframe.
So apparently they've been going on for a thousand years.
That's so yeah, totally agree when the historians that are on PBS are saying that it is the
oldest democracy in the Western or in North America.
But you know, if they cribbed off of the Confederacy constitution to make the American constitution.
So I know less about the geography and I think you might have mentioned this in the
earlier episodes, but where is the space exactly that we're talking about here?
So the Wendat territory is more on the northern shore of Lake Ontario and go to Lake Simcoe
and to Georgian Bay.
Okay.
And Haudenosaunee territory is south of that and it's flanked by the Hudson River.
Also not south of the Ontario direction, but sort of going farther east and into Lake
Upstate New York today.
Yeah, in Quebec area.
So and then the St. Lawrence would also be one of the boundaries.
And so that's why they're going into war with the Wendat and the E-New and the Jibwe.
Okay.
Also, they're a Jibwe or more to the west a little bit.
And then to the east of the Wendat, you're getting into Mi'gma territory and then down
to the south, you've got Susquehana and I don't know.
There's a bunch of other ones.
I can't remember.
Okay.
There's a huge number in here, but so you're looking at kind of the southern side of like
Ontario over to the east.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the territory includes a lot of New York state.
Okay.
When the Dutch come, they're going to be dealing with the Haudenosaunee a lot.
They deal with some of the other ones too, but it's more the English who have the East
Coast ones.
Okay.
Because New York state and New York city, there was New Amsterdam right until then we
get into American history and I don't know all the numbers and all things.
Yeah.
I'll have to get into some of that because the borders aren't there.
The borders aren't work the same way.
No, at all.
Yeah.
So because there isn't a border.
And then eventually there is and then when is the hard border will go from there, but
that's not until when did the Revolutionary War end?
I don't know.
Started 1776, right?
Sounds right.
And then carried on for a while.
Let's go 1780s.
And then you get the United Empire loyalists and that's when the Haudenosaunee are fighting
on different sides.
Some are fighting with some are fighting against and so that gets very complicated.
And that's when you get into and after that, that's when you'll get into why Handsome
Lake came to give the prophecy.
Or the third epoch to reunite everybody and give the message of how you're going to deal
with the problem of the Europeans.
Gotcha.
And so going way back is the Sky Woman story also a constant presence throughout that
like thousand year period or is it something that is earlier than that?
Probably older.
Okay, because that would be before having the Confederacy stuff.
So that one is considered like one of the early early early.
And they would probably it's probably even more ancient really because and it would have
been adapted and they would have it's probably with the introduction of corn.
Okay.
It probably isn't around there or maybe earlier and then they had to reimagine and get corn
in there somehow because of it would have evolved as needed according to what was around.
And corn came around like I want to say 500 AD.
So and then but it wouldn't have been like would it take in a while for it to take over
as the main source of food just because it takes a long time to cultivate to learn to
cultivate in a efficient way and to cut down forests with no metal tools.
Yes.
They had ways I don't know I can't remember I read they choked the they choke off the
tree and then they hack at it and then they but it's a big process.
Yeah, and they have to let the stumps rot and like so it's like a long time.
And so that kind of gets back to that would have taken a long time and that transition
would have been slow and then all of a sudden they're like oh my gosh this way of life
of corn and beans and squash being the main source of food which is held by the women
or done by the women and hunting is more supplementary which is hunting and warfare
are very connected.
Right.
So that's the.
So there's a big shift of yeah the roles within a community as the agricultural come
from the guns come in and then that was what so one of the in a sinus guy what's one of
the things they talk about is like why the camel cannibalism came up and why it was this
clash of ideologies of two different ways of life of this hunting way of life or this
agricultural way of life and then so you needed they needed a great story and a great
peacemaker so I'm not saying that the peacemaker didn't exist as a person but it serves a function
within a broader idea of a shift in kind of ways of life.
Yeah and yeah so that's how they came to be and so yeah I wanted to I wanted to make sure
that I have the the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee people to fully understand who they are as
a nation people and culture before before any European arrivals on the scene that there
is like yeah an established system here yeah and that they weren't just waiting for them
and then I'll do the same with the MiGma because I'll need to talk about them because the interaction
between the MiGma and the French is different it's different and it goes a little better
and is that what's coming up next?
Next is going to be Cartier and the St. Lawrence Iroquois aka Stada Catacona people and then
after that it's like what happened to the static one where they go I'll talk about that
who will yeah can't wait okay thank you very much Heather I really appreciate you coming
thanks for having me this was so fascinating
