About this ebook
When Benjamin Franklin urged colonial delegates to unite as the Haudenosaunee had done, he was acknowledging a truth most Americans never learned: the longest-lived constitutional democracy in North America was built by the Iroquois Six Nations — not the Founding Fathers.
Long before 1787, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy governed through representative democracy, checks and balances, and federal principles that would influence the U.S. Constitution. Their system gave women real political power when European women had none, and kept peace among formerly warring nations for over five centuries.
Iroquois Confederacy: America's First Democracy tells the complete story:
How the Peacemaker and Hiawatha created America's first functioning democracy between 1450 and 1550
Why clan mothers could select — and remove — chiefs in a system more egalitarian than anything Europe had conceived
What Franklin, Jefferson, and other Founders learned from Haudenosaunee diplomats
How the American Revolution shattered the Confederacy, and how General Sullivan's 1779 campaign destroyed forty villages
How the Haudenosaunee have maintained their sovereignty, languages, and governance into the twenty-first century
This is not a romanticized tale. It is honest history — of brilliant political thought, and of centuries of dispossession and survival. The Great Law of Peace was established before Columbus sailed. Its lessons remain relevant today.
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