Cayuga people

So the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the now six nations of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga,

Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.

And this book is basically an invitation from elders in this world to reconnect with our humanness and with a deeper democracy, which has these amazing principles that are probably very consistent around the world.

We're still close to the earth.

Her father was a Mohawk warrior, and her mother a Christian Algonquin captive who had been brought up and baptized among the French settlers at Three Rivers in Canada.

The Iroquois, or People of the Long House, including the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were enemies of the Algonquin tribes and hostile to the French.

The Mohawks especially were accustomed to make frequent raids on the settlements in Canada, leaving desolation behind them on the St. Lawrence, and bearing with them to their own valley rich booty and also captives to be tortured and burned, or else adopted into the Five Nations of Iroquois to swell their numbers.

If Frenchmen, these captives were often held as prisoners of war, and haughty terms made for their ransom.

Their leading chief, the elected president of this first American republic, lit the central council fire and sat in state among the fifty Oyanders, sachems, who formed the Iroquois Senate.

Ten of these were always Kaniengas or Mohawks, and fourteen were Onondagas.

These two nations and the Senecas were called brothers, while the intermediate Oneidas and Cayugas were always spoken of as nephews because they were younger and less important nations with fewer Oyanders.

Tekakwitha's father may have been one of the ten Mohawk Oyanders, but there is more reason to believe that he belonged to a class of war chiefs who took part only in councils of war.

It was at the time of the Berry Moon that Yesenowes hit the story trail.

Since then, she has journeyed through all the lands of the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Oneidas, the Mohawks, and the Tuscaroras.

Like the storyteller of old, Yesenoes wandered from lodge to lodge of the Iroquois.

Anio, she would call.

It was formed for intertribal security, diplomacy, and governance based on the tribe's great law of peace.

The participating tribes were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.

The Dutch and later British engaged in fur trading in exchange for European items such as metal tools, firearms, and alcohol.

Around the same time, French explorers came into contact with the Huron-Wendat Confederacy, who were continually at war with the Iroquois.

And if I don't speak the language, am I less Haudenosaunee? So it was those kind of conversations that we talked about, and I wanted to get more in depth with them, but my master's would've been like 120 pages long.

But, um, it was, it was something to consider, yeah, of like a, I'm, I'm Haudenosaunee even if I only know how to say things on the dinner table in Cayuga or Mohawk or Oneida, and it doesn't take that away if I'm not...

If I'm having, like, sushi for dinner, I'm still as Haudenosaunee as I am if I'm having fry bread or an Indian taco.

Yeah.

The Onondaga sat in the middle and kept the fire, which meant that the Great Council met in their country.

The Oneida and the Cayuga lived in between.

There were five nations when the league was made.

Around 1722, they took in a sixth, the Tuscarora, who had been driven north from Carolina.

Nothing in the British and colonial institutions the colonists lived under looked anything like it.

Then there is the way the council decided.

The Onondaga described three benches around the fire, the Mohawk and the Seneca on one, the Oneida and Cayuga on another, and Onondaga as the firekeepers.

A question passed from bench to bench.

So turns out lacrosse was actually invented by what we call the Iroquois Six Nations, but they prefer their own name for themselves, the Haudenosaunee.

They're originally made up of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes.

And they have this detailed fable through oral tradition of how they invented the sport.

And basically the story is the powerful animals of the forest gathered for a great ball game and they divided themselves as land versus air.