The formation of the League brought the separate nations into closer contact. It all melded into something we might call, without stereotyping, the Iroquois character. Some sign of that character may be found in the League’s tribal names.
Celtic tribes often named themselves for animals and trees. The Brannovices may have been Folk of the Raven. The Chatti were the Cat People. The Eburones were People of the Yew. Some Germanic tribes named themselves for weapons. The Franks were known for the francisca, a short-handled throwing-ax and close-quarters weapon that was probably the model for the tomahawk. The Saxons’ namesake was the seax, a long-handled bowie knife.
The Iroquois nations named themselves after things of the earth: hills, swamps, stone. We’re not sure what this may say about them, but it could symbolize their spiritual rootedness in the New York landscape. No wonder it ached so much to lose their lands.
We tend to think of the Iroquois League as a single entity. Never forget that these are six nations with histories and identities as distinct as those of England and Italy and they bear examining this way. Let’s start with what may have been the first nation, the Onondaga.
The Onondaga
The Onondaga’s upstate homeland lies between Cazenovia Lake and Onondaga Creek. Today’s city of Syracuse is their heart center. Like their western neighbors the Seneca and Cayuga, they hunted as far north as Lake Ontario and as far south as the Pennsylvania state line. Their name for themselves—sometimes written as Onotakekha—means, roughly, “People on the Hill.”
The Onondaga have a tradition that their nation is the mother of the rest of the Iroquois. In that sense, the Onondaga are the proverbial turtle of the nations, the base of the Iroquois world. They hold the center of its territory.
In one of the nation’s origin traditions, the Onondaga once lived near the St. Lawrence River. Weary of wars with a much bigger society, they came to their historic home centuries before Columbus. Archaeological evidence may back the Onondaga; some of it suggests the midstate influx of an Iroquoian population from northern New York. Others believe the Onondaga, like every other Iroquois nation, developed a cultural identity only after they had lived many centuries in New York.
All Iroquois nations have legends of ancient wars, and the archaeological evidence suggests that there was pressure on early Onondaga territory. Many of the earliest Onondaga sites were fortified hilltops, indicating that the need for defense may have drawn them to unify.
Located in the heart of the Iroquois world, the Onondaga may be the heart of Iroquois tradition. They were the Firekeepers of the nations in the symbolic longhouse that must always be kept in mind when thinking of the Iroquois. The Onondaga were culture preservers. They were holders of the Peace Tree, the white pine of the Peacemaker’s vision, under whose evergreen branches the Iroquois buried the weapons they had once used on each other.
Many figures legendary to all Iroquois were Onondaga. The wizard king Atotarhoh (or Tadodarho, “the Tangled”) became the first presiding high chief of the Confederacy. Like Julius Caesar, his name, Tadodarhoh, has become a title. Hiawatha, the Peacemaker’s helper, may have been the most memorable Onondaga (though he’s sometimes claimed by other Iroquois nations). The unity of the Iroquois is symbolized by a wampum strip made in a pattern called Hiawatha’s Belt (shown on page 4 superimposed on the state of New York). Even the tomb of Prophet Handsome Lake (1735–1815) is in Onondaga territory.
Because of early white settlement of the Syracuse area and the work of white historians like William Martin Beauchamp (1830–1925), the Onondaga are particularly well represented in the literature—as they are today by the young Buffalo, New York-based writer Eric Gansworth. SUNY Buffalo professor and “Faithkeeper” Oren Lyons and Buffalo State College professor Lloyd Elm are other Onondaga teachers of note.
The Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker wrote in 1901 that the Onondaga (with the Seneca) were the least “Whiteman-ized”—his word, our hyphen—of the Iroquois nations. By that we think Parker meant “assimilated.” Only the Iroquois can decide how right he was, but the Onondaga Nation has consistently refused state or federal grants that might compromise its independence. (Gifts from the U.S. government have been known to come with a sting, at least for Native Americans.) The Onondaga Nation seems to have served the Onondaga well. They’ve reclaimed much of their ancient territory near Syracuse.
The Seneca
The Seneca were the largest of the Iroquois nations and usually stereotyped as the most warlike. Though the Seneca core area was the lower Genesee Valley region around today’s Rochester, their sphere of influence was wider, including all of New York state west of Seneca Lake. Since the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, most Seneca have lived on three reservations in western New York, at Alleghany, Cattaraugus, and Tonawanda.
These Keepers of the Western Door were the defenders of the western entrance to the Six Nations territory. They were major players during the colonial wars, including the American Revolution.
The historic name of the Seneca—that of the Roman playwright—is not their own. The Seneca called themselves Nundawaono, usually taken to mean “People of the Great Hill.” The name that comes to us through the Dutch and French, who first heard of them from their Northeastern rivals, is A’sinnaker, usually said to mean “standing stones.” A’sinnaker is likely a corruption of a willful misunderstanding of the Seneca’s original name—thus an enemy sneer gives history its name for a most influential Native American nation.
Onondaga tradition suggests that the Seneca may have been spinoffs of the Cayuga. In the Seneca’s own origin myth, they hail from a hill at the top of Canandaigua Lake. They may have given us more famous
