Haudenosaunee Tradition
Haudenosaunee (Six Nations / Iroquois Confederacy: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora)
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
- Region
- Northeastern Woodlands (present-day New York State and southern Ontario)
- Era
- Ancient times
- Deities
- 4
About
Two nations, one entry
The Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse, also called the Six Nations or, by an exonym, the Iroquois Confederacy) are Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and, since the early 18th century, Tuscarora nations. They are sovereign nations today, with their own governments, and Haudenosaunee people practice, teach, and retell these traditions now, not only in a documented past. This entry follows only what the Confederacy and its constituent nations share publicly themselves, plus scholarship recorded with, or in direct collaboration with, Haudenosaunee tellers, and it leaves out anything described as belonging to a specific medicine society or ceremony.
Sky Woman, the Twins, and Turtle Island
In Haudenosaunee tradition, in the Sky World above, a woman falls through a hole torn open when a great tree is uprooted. Waterfowl slow her fall and set her on the back of a Great Turtle, who offers to bear the earth; other animals dive into the primordial waters beneath the Turtle to bring up a pawful of mud, which grows across the Turtle's back into the world, later called Turtle Island. Sky Woman's daughter is born on this new earth, and the daughter in turn gives birth to twin grandsons: the good-minded Sapling, also called Skyholder or, among the Mohawk, Teharonhiawagon ("He Holds Up the Sky"), and the hard-minded Flint (Tawiskaron), born in a way that costs their mother's life. Sapling and Flint go on to shape the features of the world, one making it fertile and easy to live in, the other making it difficult, and different nations and tellers place different weight on how their contest ends. This is cosmological tradition, not a dated history; it is told in the present tense by the people who tell it, not assigned a calendar year.
Sources for this material disagree on details large and small: which animal succeeds at diving for the mud (muskrat, in many Seneca and Onondaga tellings), what becomes of the twins' mother, and how firmly Flint is defeated versus simply withdrawn. Arthur C. Parker's Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923) and J.N.B. Hewitt's Iroquoian Cosmology (Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports 21 and 43) record these variations from Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk tellers by name; Hewitt was himself Tuscarora. This entry follows their lead in presenting variants side by side rather than flattening them into one version.
The Peacemaker and the Great Law of Peace
A separate, later strand of tradition, one the Confederacy calls history as much as sacred narrative, tells how the Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa) brought the warring nations together under a shared government. In the accounts the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy publish on their own websites, the Peacemaker, sent to end the fighting, is joined by Hiawatha (Aiionwatha), an Onondaga man who had lost his family to violence; together they persuade the powerful and feared Onondaga leader Tadodaho, described in both accounts as having snakes in his hair and a twisted body, to accept peace and become the confederacy's Firekeeper. At Onondaga Lake the nations plant the Great Tree of Peace, its roots reaching to the four directions and an eagle set at its top to watch for danger, and the Peacemaker teaches the law of "One Dish, One Spoon" and government by consensus among fifty chiefs.
Historians and the nations themselves date this founding differently: some scholars, working from an oral reference to a solar eclipse, argue for a date around 1142 CE, while archaeological approaches favor a later date, often the 15th century; the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own materials describe it simply as "over a thousand years ago." This site does not pick a single date and presents it as it is presented by the nations: a founding whose exact year is debated, not a settled fact.
What this entry leaves out
Material describing ceremonies of the medicine societies, the False Face Society, and other content the Haudenosaunee themselves mark as restricted or clan-specific is not included here, in line with the guidance of the sources this entry draws on. Nothing here claims to be the single correct version of any story; where tellers differ, that difference is the point.
Cosmology
Sky World Above, Turtle Island Below
A two-part cosmos: the Sky World Sky Woman falls from, and the earth, Turtle Island, built up on the Great Turtle's back below, connected by the great tree whose uprooting opened the way between them.
The Celestial Tree: · The tree that lit the Sky World before it was uprooted, opening the hole Sky Woman fell through. Recorded by Hewitt and Parker as the event that begins the story, not described in these sources as an ongoing axis connecting the two worlds the way Yggdrasil connects Norse cosmology's realms; this site presents it modestly, as the story's opening image rather than a standing structure.
The Sky World
AboveThe Sky World
The world above, lit by the celestial tree, from which Sky Woman falls after the tree is uprooted.
Turtle Island
MiddleTurtle Island
The earth built up on the Great Turtle's back from the mud the diving animals bring up, where Sky Woman's daughter and grandsons Sapling and Flint live and where the Twins shape the land's features.
Visit Onondaga Lake
Deities
The woman who falls from the Sky World through a hole torn open when a great tree is uprooted, and is caught and set on the back of the Great Turtle, whose back becomes Turtle Island.
The good-minded twin grandson of Sky Woman, who in Haudenosaunee tradition shapes the world's fertile land, food plants, and easy rivers, opposite his hard-minded brother Flint.
The hard-minded twin grandson of Sky Woman, born in a way that costs their mother's life, who in Haudenosaunee tradition shapes the earth's difficult features in contest with his brother Sapling.
The turtle on whose back Sky Woman is set as she falls from the Sky World, and whose back, built up with earth by other animals, becomes Turtle Island, the Haudenosaunee name for the continent.
Stories & Myths
A woman falls from a torn-open hole in the Sky World, is caught by waterfowl, and set on the back of the Great Turtle, whose back the diving animals build into Turtle Island.
Sky Woman's grandsons, the good-minded Sapling and the hard-minded Flint, shape the young earth's features in opposite directions, one toward ease and abundance, the other toward difficulty.
The Peacemaker and Hiawatha persuade the feared Onondaga leader Tadodaho to accept peace, uniting the warring nations under the Great Law of Peace at Onondaga Lake.