Great Law of Peace

The Great Law of Peace, known in the Onondaga language as the Gayanashagowa, is the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy, traditionally credited to a lawgiver called the Great Peacemaker, Dekanawidah, working together with his spokesman Hiawatha. Estimates of its founding vary widely across scholarship, though it is traditionally understood to have united the five original member nations, the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca, near present-day Victor, New York; the Tuscarora joined as a sixth nation in 1722. Comprising some 117 articles transmitted for centuries as a spoken narrative reinforced by wampum belts, strings of shell beads whose patterns served as mnemonic records, the law assigned each member nation a defined role within a shared confederate council and used the image of an eastern white pine, the Tree of Peace, as its central symbol of unity. Not translated into English and written down in full until the nineteenth century, the Great Law of Peace is one of the oldest continuously observed governing traditions in North America, and it has been the subject of long scholarly debate over whether, and how much, it influenced the framers of the United States Constitution.