Product Description: The Iroquois Confederacy served as model for the founding fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution. The Iroquois today continue their proud tradition of representative democracy as they thrive in modern America.

Examines the culture, history, and society of the Iroquois.

Chronicles the history and life up to modern times of the Iroquois, members of allied tribes who spoke the same language.

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This is an account of the five tribes - Onandagas, Senecas, Mohawks, Oneidas and Cayugas - who together made up the Iriquois nation, from their origins in prehistory to their dispersal and confinement after the American Revolution. At the time of the first post-Viking contacts with Europeans, the League of the Iriquois, founded by Hiawatha at the end of the 16th century, were the most powerful of the north-east Native American peoples, and had either destroyed, absorbed or reduced to client status all the tribes around them. The series of mutual misunderstandings between the Iriquois and the French, the English and the new Americans - and their tragic and still evident consequences - have acted to obscure the true nature of Iriquois culture and society both before and after the European invasion. This account draws on a range of archaeological and historical evidence to provide a narrative interpretation of the Iroquois. (view table of contents)

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers. (view table of contents)

Discusses the efforts of the Iroquois Indian tribes to preserve their independence and describes the history of government relations with the Iroquois