The Great Law of Peace: The Iroquois Confederacy and the Making of the Northeast

The names come one at a time: a hunting party found in a clearing with its bows broken, a woman carried off, a man cut down among the cattails. In the Mohawk Valley some six centuries ago, each name is a debt. A grieving family can close the wound only with a captive, adopted into the dead man's place or killed to stand in for him, and every captive taken opens a new wound in a village on the far side of the hill.

A stranger from the north, remembered as the Peacemaker, set out to break the cycle, carrying a law from village to village. It was not meant to end all war among human beings. It was meant to break the one rule that kept the longhouses weeping, that every death must be answered with another. With Hiawatha, a man undone by his own grief, he brought the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca together beneath a tree of peace as the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse.

The Great Law held through the Beaver Wars and the Covenant Chain with the English, through the contest for the Forks of the Ohio and Pontiac's War, and it took in the Tuscarora as a sixth nation. The Revolution split it. When that war ended there were two council fires where there had been one, and the Six Nations were left divided between reservations in New York and new lands on the Grand River in Canada.

The mourning wars are long over. The council fire at Onondaga is still burning.