Title: The Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa) Author: Traditional/Oral, attributed to the Peacemaker (Deganawida) and Hiawatha Creation Date: Oral tradition estimated 12th–15th century, first recorded in wampum belts and transcribed 19th century Location: North America (Haudenosaunee territory)
Summary
The Gayanashagowa, or Great Law of Peace, is the founding narrative and constitutional charter of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, which united the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations (later joined by the Tuscarora) under a system of consensus governance. The narrative tells how the Peacemaker (Deganawida), a divinely inspired figure, travelled among the warring nations with the help of Hiawatha and the powerful clan mother Jigonhsasee to establish peace through persuasion, not conquest. The Peacemaker uprooted a great white pine and cast the weapons of war into the hole beneath it, then replanted the tree — the Tree of Peace — atop the buried weapons, with an eagle perched on its crown to watch for threats. The Law itself establishes an intricate system of governance: clan mothers nominate chiefs, decisions require consensus across all nations, and an elaborate protocol of wampum belts, council fires, and ceremonial procedures governs deliberation. It is simultaneously origin story, legal code, and political philosophy.
Why This Book Matters
The Great Law of Peace is one of the oldest continuously functioning constitutional systems in the world, predating the US Constitution by centuries. Its influence on American democratic thought is debated in its extent but cannot be dismissed: colonial observers such as Benjamin Franklin cited the Haudenosaunee union as evidence that separate polities could federate, and the US Senate formally acknowledged Haudenosaunee contributions to the Constitution in 1988 (Senate Resolution 331). Beyond this possible line of influence, the Great Law represents a sophisticated political philosophy fundamentally different from European models: authority flows upward from clan mothers and community consensus rather than downward from sovereign power; peace is achieved through structural inclusion rather than through the threat of force; and governance is inseparable from ceremony, kinship, and ecological responsibility. It is arguably the most important political text produced in the Americas before European contact.
Historical Context
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was formed to end cycles of warfare and blood feuds among the five (later six) nations of the northeastern woodlands. Dating is contested — estimates range from the 12th to the 15th century, with some scholars arguing for a founding date correlated with a solar eclipse (possibly 1142 CE). The Confederacy became one of the most powerful political entities in northeastern North America, controlling territory from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast and conducting sophisticated diplomacy with European colonial powers. The Great Law was transmitted orally and encoded in wampum belts — beaded records that served as mnemonic devices and legal documents. Written transcriptions began in the 19th century, with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness, as the Haudenosaunee faced increasing pressure from US territorial expansion and assimilation policies.
Literary Significance
The Great Law achieves the rare fusion of narrative power and legal precision. The founding story — the Peacemaker's journey, the transformation of Hiawatha through grief and consolation, the planting of the Tree of Peace — is a mythic narrative of great dramatic force, structured as a sequence of persuasions rather than battles. The legal provisions are embedded within this narrative framework: the fifty chiefs are likened to the rafters of a longhouse, the clan mothers to the fire that sustains it. The wampum-belt tradition represents a form of non-alphabetic literature — visual compositions encoding complex political information in patterns of shell beads. The oral performance at condolence ceremonies can take several days.
Research Notes
No single authoritative written version exists — the tradition is oral, with multiple versions maintained by different nations and longhouses. Arthur C. Parker's 1916 transcription is widely cited but reflects its era's editorial choices. More recent work by Haudenosaunee scholars, including John Mohawk and Oren Lyons, emphasises that the Great Law is a living tradition — it continues to govern the traditional councils of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy at Onondaga. Readers should approach written versions as guides to a living constitutional tradition, not as definitive texts.
The Reading
The Time Before the Peacemaker
Before there was a Confederacy, there was only war. The five nations of the Haudenosaunee — the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca — lived in a darkness of their own making. Blood feuds passed from generation to generation. A man killed in one village demanded a death in another, and that death demanded another, and the chain of killing stretched backward beyond memory and forward without end. Warriors measured their worth in scalps. Women grieved sons who had not yet been born, knowing they would be taken.
In this time of sorrow, there were two men whose suffering was greater than most. One was the man who would become the Peacemaker. The other was Hiawatha.
The Birth and Mission of the Peacemaker
The Peacemaker was born among the Huron, north of the Great Lakes, to a woman who had known no man. His mother and grandmother tried to destroy him three times — plunging him through the ice of a frozen lake — but each time, come morning, the child was found alive at his mother's breast, unharmed. By this they knew he was no ordinary being.
When he grew to manhood, the Peacemaker spoke a message that no one in his own nation wished to hear: he said that the cycle of killing could be broken. He said there was a power greater than the power of war, and that power was reason, and reason could be planted in the minds of men like a seed, and from that seed would grow a peace that could shelter all the nations under its branches. So the Peacemaker built a canoe of white stone. The people said a stone canoe could not float. He set it on the water. It floated. He climbed in and paddled south across the great lake, toward the lands of the five warring nations. By this miracle the people knew his power was real, even if they did not yet believe his message.
The Peacemaker and Jigonhsasee
The first person the Peacemaker visited in the lands of the five nations was a woman: Jigonhsasee, who kept a house along the warriors' path between the Seneca and the other nations. She fed the war parties as they passed in both directions — not because she loved war, but because this was her role, and no one had shown her another. The Peacemaker came to her door and spoke his message. He told her that women would be the foundation of the new order he proposed. The clan mothers would hold authority: they would nominate the chiefs, they would remove the chiefs who failed, they would be the keepers of the names and the lineages.
Jigonhsasee listened. She was the first to accept the Great Peace. For this, she is called the Mother of Nations. Her house, which had fed warriors on their way to kill, became the first council house of the new order.
The Peacemaker and Hiawatha
Hiawatha was an Onondaga, a man of gifts and eloquence, but he was drowning in grief. The sorcerer Tadodaho, the most powerful and most terrible chief among the Onondaga, whose mind was so twisted that snakes grew from his hair and his body was crooked with malice, had killed Hiawatha's daughters — three of them, or seven, the number varies with the telling. He killed them one by one to silence Hiawatha, to prove that peace was weakness and that anyone who spoke of it would suffer. Hiawatha was shattered. He wandered away from his people, mad with grief, walking south through the forests without direction or purpose.
In the forest, Hiawatha came to a lake. The lake was covered with ducks. As he approached, the ducks rose all at once and took the water with them, revealing a lakebed strewn with white and purple shells. Hiawatha gathered the shells and strung them on three strings. He said: "This would I do if I found anyone burdened with grief as I am. I would console them, for they would be covered in night, and I would take the darkness from their eyes, and I would unblock their ears, and I would clear the obstruction from their throat, so that they could see, and hear, and speak again."
This is the origin of the Condolence Ceremony — the ritual that stands at the centre of Haudenosaunee governance to this day. Grief, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha understood, was the engine of war. A man blinded by grief could not see reason. The path to peace ran through the clearing of grief, through the ritualised acknowledgement of loss, through the restoration of the mind to balance. This was not sentiment. It was political technology of the highest order.
The Peacemaker found Hiawatha in the forest and performed the first Condolence — wiping the tears from his eyes, clearing the grief from his ears, removing the obstruction from his throat. Hiawatha could see again. He could hear. He could speak. And what he spoke was the message of the Great Peace. From that day, the Peacemaker was the visionary and Hiawatha was the voice.
The Persuasion of the Nations
The Peacemaker and Hiawatha went first to the Mohawk, the People of the Flint, the easternmost nation and the fiercest warriors. The Mohawk tested the Peacemaker: they threw him from a cliff into a gorge. The next morning he was seen sitting calmly by a fire, smoking, unharmed. They tried to kill him a second time. Again he survived. The Mohawk recognised power when they saw it, and they accepted the message.
From the Mohawk, they went to the Oneida, the Cayuga, and finally to the Seneca. One by one the nations accepted. Four nations had accepted the Great Peace. One remained: the Onondaga, the People of the Hills, the central nation — and the home of Tadodaho, the sorcerer, the destroyer of Hiawatha's family.
The Transformation of Tadodaho
The confrontation with Tadodaho is the climactic moment of the narrative, and it is extraordinary for what does not happen. The Peacemaker does not fight Tadodaho. He does not kill him. He does not defeat him through force. Instead, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha, backed by the combined delegations of the four nations who have already accepted the peace, come to Tadodaho and offer him something no one expected: they offer him honour.
They sing the Peace Hymn. They comb the snakes from Tadodaho's hair. They straighten his crooked body. They heal his twisted mind. And they offer him the highest position in the new Confederacy: the Tadodaho would be the firekeeper, the one who calls the council, the central figure in the governance of the united nations. The position would bear his name forever.
Tadodaho accepts. The last and most formidable opponent of peace is transformed not by violence but by inclusion. He is given a role so essential that his power is not diminished but redirected. This is the structural genius of the Great Law: it does not destroy its enemies. It incorporates them. It makes the most dangerous adversary into the most essential ally.
The Planting of the Tree of Peace
With all five nations in agreement, the Peacemaker established the visible symbol of the Confederacy. He uprooted a great white pine — the tallest tree, the tree whose needles grow in clusters of five, one for each nation. Beneath the hole where the tree had stood, the warriors of all five nations cast their weapons — their war clubs, their hatchets, their knives. The weapons fell into the underground current and were carried away forever. Then the Peacemaker replanted the tree over the buried weapons.
"I plant the Tree of Great Peace," the Peacemaker said. "Its roots spread in the four directions — north, south, east, west. These are the White Roots of Peace. If any nation, any individual, follows the roots to their source, they will find shelter beneath the tree. The eagle that sits atop the tree will watch in all directions, and if it sees danger approaching, it will scream a warning, and the nations will come together to face the threat."
The Tree is not merely a symbol. It is a political architecture made visible. The roots extending in four directions are an open invitation: any nation may join the Confederacy by following the roots to the trunk. The buried weapons are the renunciation of war among the member nations. The eagle is collective vigilance. Every element means something precise.
The Structure of the Confederacy
The Great Law establishes, with remarkable specificity, the governing structure of the united nations. Fifty chiefs — royaneh — are appointed, their titles distributed among the five nations in a carefully balanced arrangement. The Mohawk and Seneca, the "Elder Brothers," sit on one side of the council fire. The Oneida and Cayuga, the "Younger Brothers," sit on the other. The Onondaga sit in the centre, as the firekeepers, with the Tadodaho presiding.
Decisions require consensus. A matter is first discussed by the Mohawk and Seneca. When they agree, they pass the matter across the fire to the Oneida and Cayuga. If both sides agree, the matter goes to the Onondaga, who may confirm or send it back for further discussion. No decision is final until all agree. This is not majority rule. This is unanimity achieved through deliberation.
The clan mothers nominate the chiefs. If a chief fails in his duties — if he acts selfishly, ignores the counsel of the women, or brings dishonour — the clan mothers warn him three times. After the third warning, they remove his antlers of office. He returns to being an ordinary man. The power to create a chief and the power to destroy one both rest with the women.
The chiefs themselves are bound by strict codes of conduct. They must have skin "seven thumbs thick," so that neither anger nor insult can penetrate. They must think not of themselves but of the coming generations — the Great Law famously instructs the chiefs to consider the impact of their decisions on "the faces yet beneath the earth," the unborn, seven generations into the future.
The Law as Living Practice
The Great Law is not a historical document sealed in amber. It is a living practice that continues to govern the traditional councils of the Haudenosaunee at Onondaga. The Tadodaho still presides. The clan mothers still nominate the chiefs. The Condolence Ceremony still clears the grief from the mourning side.
Benjamin Franklin, who dealt directly with the Confederacy in diplomatic negotiations, wrote in 1751: "It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies." The phrasing is condescending, but the admiration is real.
What is beyond contest is the Great Law's intellectual achievement. Here is a political system built not on the concentration of power but on its dispersion, not on the authority of a sovereign but on the consensus of a council, not on the domination of men but on the foundational authority of women. Here is a system that makes peace not through the balance of terror but through the structure of inclusion. Here is a system that measures its decisions not by the needs of the present but by the faces of those not yet born.
The Peacemaker's stone canoe floated. The Tree of Peace still stands.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Paul Wallace's The White Roots of Peace (Clear Light Publishers) is the most accessible English retelling of the founding narrative. Arthur C. Parker's 1916 transcription remains the most widely cited historical edition.
Paul Wallace. The most accessible English retelling of the Peacemaker narrative.
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