Iroquois Diplomacy
and speech (Pomedli 1995: 320). Condo-
JON PARMENTER
Cornell University, USA
Peacemaking, as a reflection of broader
concern for formal mechanisms aimed at
constructing and repairing human and
political relationships, resides at the core of
Iroquois culture. Prior to the arrival of Euro-
peans in North America, the five constituent
nations of what would become the Iroquois
League (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas,
Cayugas, and Senecas; a sixth, the Tuscaroras,
joined the league in 1722) engaged in periods
of significant internecine conflict. Iroquois
traditional accounts of the formation of the
league and its governing Great Law of Peace
describe the role of the Peacemaker (a cultural
outsider) in persuading some of the worst
perpetrators of violence to cease hostilities
and reorient themselves to building mutually
supportive intergroup relations. The Great
Law of Peace embodies a complex of ritual
diplomatic protocols, including the public
recitation of speeches, songs, ceremonies,
and the use of shell-bead wampum belts and
strings to resolve controversies and bring
about conditions of peace, unity, and stability
(Fenton 1985). After the arrival of Europeans
in North America, the political acumen of
the Iroquois combined with the geographi-
cal location of their homelands astride key
water-routes linking the Atlantic to the con-
tinental interior made Iroquois conventions
pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in
northeastern North America for the duration
of the colonial period.
Iroquois diplomatic protocol, based on
condolence rites, emphasizes the facilitation
of sincere communication by attending to all
The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy. Edited by Gordon Martel.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118885154.dipl0130
parties’ capacities for clear vision, hearing,
lence ceremonial processes reflected Iroquois
understanding of the significance of frequent
meetings to maintain alliances, settle dif-
ferences, or assuage grief in a pre-contact,
non-literate context. Peaceful relationships
of trade, shared resource-use agreements,
and political affiliation could not be left
unattended for long.
Pre-contact indigenous treaties, pre-
served in the oral traditions of the Iroquois
and neighboring nations, created a crucial
context of expectations for the conduct
of relations with European newcomers after
1603. Pre-contact social, economic, and polit-
ical alliances among Iroquois nations and
between the Iroquois League and their Native
neighbors were executed with stories told,
ceremonies performed, obligations fulfilled,
and memories preserved (Bauerkamper and
Stark 2012: 9). These diplomatic interactions
served as important sites of nation-building
for the Iroquois before and after contact
with Europeans, as they used the forum of
diplomacy to articulate their own sense of
sovereign political identity. Upon arrival,
Europeans had to adjust to what often
struck them as time-consuming Iroquois
diplomatic ceremonialism and deliberative
techniques that involved frequent adjourn-
ments, communal feasting, pipe-smoking,
and behind-the-scenes negotiations “in the
bushes” between key players.
Iroquois tradition identifies the origin of
their diplomacy with Europeans in a c. 1613
agreement negotiated between the Mohawks
and a Dutch trader named Jacob Eelckens
as a precursor to the formal establishment
of Dutch Fort Nassau. The terms of the
agreement were not recorded in writing at
the time, but are substantially validated in
2 IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY
the subsequent documentary record. The
agreement came to be remembered by the
Iroquois via a “Two Row” wampum belt:
a long beaded belt of white wampum with
two parallel lines of purple wampum along
its length. The lines represent the distinct
identity of the two peoples moving along
their respective routes (often associated with
water-borne movement, with the Europeans
in a ship and the Iroquois in a canoe) and
their mutual engagement to coexist in peace
without interference in the affairs of the
other. “Two-Row” diplomacy reflected the
premium placed by the Iroquois on express-
ing mutual respect among alliance partners
and ensuring reciprocal commitments were
met (Parmenter 2013).
Iroquois diplomacy generated an extensive
body of evidence from the early seventeenth
to early nineteenth centuries in what is
now the United States and Canada. Written
records of articles of agreements and min-
utes and proceedings of councils, wampum
belts, and oral tradition all serve as discrete
lines of data verifying the existence of what
are commonly referred to as treaty negoti-
ations. Despite the significant potential for
misunderstanding embedded in complex
negotiations across cultural and linguistic
boundaries, the Iroquois and their settler
neighbors alike came to rely heavily on
treaties as a mutually recognized venue for
building peaceful relations between their
respective nations.
Although fragmentary documentation of
Iroquois peace and trade agreements with
the French in Canada (1624) and the Dutch
in New Netherland (1643) exists, the first
substantial written record of Iroquois treaty
diplomacy relates to a complex series of
negotiations with the French and their Native
allies at Trois-Rivières (in modern Québec)
in July 1645. The treaty reflects Iroquois
awareness of their diplomatic leverage as the
centrally located (and best-armed) polity
among all participants in the discussions
as well as demonstrating the concern of the
Iroquois representatives to communicate how
they viewed trade and peace as intimately
linked. Fascinated Jesuit observers recorded
in detail the brilliant stage-management
of the proceedings at Trois-Rivières by the
Mohawk speaker Kiotsaeton, whose com-
pelling speeches, elaborate pantomime, and
adept use of wampum introduced Iroquois
diplomacy to European authorities (Fenton,
Jennings, and Druke 1985).
The record of Iroquois diplomacy with
the Dutch in New Netherland after 1645
reflects a continuation of these patterns, facil-
itated by a small but significant number of
cross-cultural marriages (almost exclusively
between Dutch men and Iroquois women).
Matrilineal descent reckoning among the
Iroquois meant that the children born of
these unions could be raised by their mothers
as Iroquois without the stigma of illegitimacy,
and such practices were normative among
indigenous peoples prior to the intrusion of
Europeans for the purpose of establishing
mutual ties between different communities.
Notwithstanding this growing cohort of
cultural brokers, disputes surrounding the
physical and economic abuse of Iroquois
traders by Dutch merchants generated sig-
nificant friction in Dutch–Iroquois relations,
and the Iroquois offered no assistance to
the Dutch when English forces arrived and
compelled the surrender of New Netherland
in September 1664.
Immediately after the installation of the
new English regime, leaders from all con-
stituent nations of the Iroquois League
entered into a treaty with English officials
at newly renamed Fort Albany (modern
Albany). Eager to secure peace with the
Iroquois, the English offered favorable terms
of trade, and offered concession on issues of
criminal jurisdiction and non-interference
in Iroquois wars with other Native nations.

Lake Ontario
ONON
CAYU
E ri e
Lake
SENECA
100 miles
200 km
Map 1 Iroquois Confederacy. Source: Martel, G. (Ed.) (2012) Encyclopedia of War. Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
These early ties with the English at Albany
soon developed into the well-known
“Covenant Chain” alliance between the
Iroquois League and the English Crown
(Haan 1987). English and Anglo-American
colonial officials interpreted the relationship
as one that granted them sovereign authority
over Iroquois nations (and, more importantly,
their land), but the Iroquois maintained that
their ties to England were best understood as
freely chosen allegiance, conditional on good
behavior and not exclusive – the Iroquois con-
tinued to conduct independent diplomacy
with the French in Canada until the British
conquest of 1760. “We are born Freemen,” an
Onondaga leader named Otreouti reminded
the Canadian Governor Joseph-Antoine Le
Febvre de La Barre in 1684, and possess the
“power to go where we please, to conduct
who we will to the places we resort to, and to
buy and sell where we think fit” (quoted in
Parmenter 2010: 178).
As conflict between the English and French
colonies in North America escalated follow-
ing the export of European dynastic wars
across the Atlantic beginning in 1689, the
IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY 3
R.
ce
en
wr
La
.
St
MOHAWK
ONEIDA
Mohaw
DAGA
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GA
Hudson R.
Iroquois took steps to adapt their diplomacy
to an official stance of neutrality. The Iro-
quois engaged actively with both competing
empires on the periphery of their homelands,
balancing skilled negotiations conducted
by an experienced corps of diplomats with
calibrated direct involvement in warfare
that preserved their reputation for mili-
tary strength. This approach kept both the
French and the English interested in secur-
ing their allegiance, or at least discouraging
the Iroquois from choosing sides against
them. Early practitioners of what we would
recognize today as “shuttle diplomacy,” Iro-
quois diplomats moved frequently between
key colonial political centers in Albany,
Philadelphia, Montréal, and Québec, gather-
ing intelligence at the edges of their territory
and returning to its center at Onondaga (near
modern Syracuse) to make decisions about
potentially divisive issues of war and peace
(Parmenter 2007).
The scale and complexity of colonial-era
Iroquois diplomacy is exemplified in the
joint treaties the league negotiated with the
French and English at Montréal and Albany
4 IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY
during the summer of 1701. Over 1300
Native representatives of nations spanning
from Acadia to the upper Mississippi River
Valley traveled to Montréal to attend an
Iroquois-brokered comprehensive peace
treaty. In the final treaty signed on August 4,
1701, the various nations agreed to cease
hostilities, accept French mediation in sub-
sequent disputes, and allow the Iroquois
access to hunting territories north of Lake
Ontario and west of Détroit in exchange for
western nations’ access to English traders
at Albany. French authorities also formally
recognized Iroquois rights as neutrals in any
subsequent war between England and France.
Six days earlier, another legation of Iroquois
diplomats secured a comprehensive peace
and trade agreement with Anglo-American
representatives in Albany that committed
the latter to protecting Iroquois access to
hunting grounds in the upper Great Lakes.
These jointly negotiated treaties reaffirmed
the sovereign standing of the league and also
its status as a key arbiter of international
relations in northeastern North America
(Parmenter 2010: 248–73).
Eighteenth-century Iroquois diplomacy
is often remembered for large-scale treaties
with the British colonies of New York and
Pennsylvania, which derives from the interest
of individuals like Philadelphia printer Ben-
jamin Franklin in publishing transcriptions
of Iroquois treaties for an interested reading
public on both sides of the Atlantic (Kalter
2006). In a number of these treaties, includ-
ing the 1722 Albany Treaty and the 1744
Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois acted as
the lead Native American nation negotiating
land claims with multiple Anglo-American
colonies. Colonists’ reliance on the Iroquois
as diplomatic partners in these endeav-
ors rested on the perception of Iroquois
suzerainty over a number of smaller Native
nations (a perception that many of those
nations contested) and the fervent admoni-
tions of William Johnson (a New York fur
trader who parlayed his ties to the Mohawks
into an appointment as British colonial
Superintendent for Indian Affairs in 1756)
that the Iroquois represented the fulcrum in
Great Britain’s struggle with France in North
America (MacLeitch 2011: 45–84).
Notwithstanding the abiding colonial
objective of Anglo-American officials to
secure clear title to land formerly held by
Native peoples, review of the eighteenth-
century treaty record to 1760 reveals that
Iroquois diplomats not only sought com-
pensation for lands they claimed to have
conquered in the past, but they also con-
cerned themselves with securing rights of
free movement across colonial boundaries
(including between French and English
colonies) for particular purposes such as
trade, conducting independent warfare
against Native enemies, and visiting kinfolk
residing in the St. Lawrence River Valley.
The extent to which the Iroquois secured
concessions and recognition of specific
rights from the Anglo-American colonies in
eighteenth-century treaty diplomacy derived
in no small part from their simultaneous
maintenance of diplomatic ties to the French
in Canada, who in 1748 acknowledged Iro-
quois neutrality in writing as a guarantee
of security for their colonists (Parmenter
2004: 68).
Iroquois warriors fought privately as allies
for both the French and British during the
Seven Years’ War (1754–60) while Iroquois
political leaders worked to preserve the
league’s official diplomatic neutrality. On the
eve of the British victory in the months of
August and September 1760, skilled Iroquois
diplomats arranged for their British allies
to recognize the territorial integrity and
political rights of Iroquois people residing on
the periphery of French Canada in a series

of treaties negotiated during British Gen-
eral Jeffery Amherst’s expedition down the
St. Lawrence River to Montréal (Parmenter
2007: 74–75). The Iroquois emerged from the
Seven Years’ War secure in their relationship
with Great Britain but the departure of the
French from Canada required them to adopt
new diplomatic strategies to deal with their
sole remaining colonial alliance partner.
In a context of limited choices and sub-
stantial pressure from an aggressive settler
population that considered itself entitled to
trans-Appalachian lands ceded by France
in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the Iroquois
turned to a policy of exchanging other Native
nations’ lands for the security of their own
while bolstering their status as the British
Crown’s key negotiating partner. The 1768
Fort Stanwix Treaty between the Iroquois and
Great Britain had the distinction of being
the largest Indian treaty council to that date
(over 3000 Native people attended) and also
witnessing the largest Indian land cession in
colonial American history. After more than
two weeks of deliberations, Iroquois leaders
accepted a monetary payment valued at over
$1.7 million (in 2016 US dollars) in exchange
for a boundary line that protected nearly
all of their settlements west of the Mohawk
River Valley while surrendering millions of
acres of land in the Ohio River that were
then occupied by other nations such as the
Delawares and Shawnees (Campbell 2012:
163). These nations rejected the legitimacy
of the Iroquois cession and responded to set-
tler intrusions with violence, inaugurating a
series of bloody frontier conflicts that spilled
over into the Revolutionary War era.
When relations between Great Britain and
the thirteen American colonies devolved to
open military conflict after 1775, the Iroquois
attempted to preserve their longstanding
diplomatic neutrality and initially found both
the British and Americans willing to accom-
modate their request. The British, who hoped
IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY 5
for a quick and decisive military victory to
reintegrate the colonies into the empire, did
not wish to risk the negative publicity of rely-
ing on allied Iroquois fighters early in the war
effort. The Americans, dogged by an associ-
ation with land acquisitiveness, were more
than happy to encourage Iroquois neutrality
early in the war. By 1777, however, the failure
of the British to achieve the desired rapid mil-
itary victory over the American insurgents
led them to enlist the aid of allied Iroquois
warriors in offensive campaigns that targeted
backcountry settlements in New York and
Pennsylvania. Unable to sustain diplomatic
neutrality any longer, the Iroquois League
met in January 1777 to metaphorically “cover
the Council fire,” effecting a temporary sus-
pension of political operations that permitted
individual nations to follow their own pref-
erences. The Oneidas and many Tuscaroras
opted to ally formally with the United States
while most Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas,
and Senecas retained their affiliation with
Great Britain (Graymont 1972: 113).
The terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris
that ended the Revolutionary War led to a
renewal of active diplomacy for the Iroquois,
albeit under greatly constrained conditions.
The British cession to the United States of
all lands between the Appalachian Moun-
tains and the Mississippi River contained no
protections for their allied Native Ameri-
can nations. Embarrassed British Army and
Indian Department officials arranged for the
creation of reserves for the Six Nations along
the Grand River (near modern Brantford,
Ontario) and for the Mohawks at the Bay
of Quinte (near modern Kingston, Ontario)
in 1784 and within a year approximately
2000 Iroquois people of all the league nations
(perhaps one quarter of the total population
at the time) relocated to Canada (Fenton
1998: 601–2). Those who remained on the
American side of the international boundary
would experience competing diplomatic
6 IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY
solicitations from New York State officials
and representatives from the US federal
government for the next decade.
Authorities in New York State, eager to
secure revenues from the sale and taxation
of surrendered Iroquois land for themselves,
challenged the legitimacy of the federal
government’s claim to exclusive power to
negotiate peace treaties with Indian nations
outside the boundaries of states (under Arti-
cle IX of the Articles of Confederation) by
advancing the argument that the Iroquois
were “antient Dependants” of New York
and “placed under its protection, with all
their territorial Rights, by their own consent
publickly manifested in solemn and repeated
Treaties” (quoted in Sadosky 2010: 131). Only
by weakening the perception of the Iroquois
as an independent sovereign Indian nation
could New York State authorities make good
on their attempt to evade Congressional
claims to jurisdiction over negotiations with
the Iroquois.
The conflict came to a head in two treaties
held at Fort Stanwix in 1784 – Governor
Clinton hosted (but did not conclude) a state
treaty in the month of September, followed
by a federal treaty in October. Ultimately, the
Iroquois chose to accept the terms offered by
the federal negotiators in October 1784 as the
least worst option of four available to them:
(1) resuming war with the United States
(not tenable at the time); (2) relocating en
masse to Canada (not universally popular);
(3) accepting political subordination to New
York State (which threatened the prospect of
massive, rapid land loss); (4) making peace
with Congress. While federal authorities
rejected the former “Covenant Chain” frame-
work of fully reciprocated sovereignty, the
1784 treaty contained language protecting
immediate areas of Iroquois occupancy while
taking all land beyond those bounds as a
guarantee of peace (Sadosky 2010: 137–38).
Iroquois discontent with the terms of the
1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty grew, particularly
among Senecas, Onondagas, and Cayugas
who had relocated to the Niagara Region
and “rekindled” the League Council fire at
Buffalo Creek. Iroquois leaders at Buffalo
Creek noted the absence of protections for
continued Iroquois movement into and use
of lands (especially for hunting purposes)
ceded to the United States in 1784 and sought
a restoration of the status quo reflected by
the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty, which included
such protections and also prescribed a much
more favorable settlement boundary line.
Federal efforts to resolve Iroquois grievances
in a January 1789 federal treaty at Fort
Harmar (modern Marietta, Ohio) failed.
A payment of $3000 for lands the United
States had claimed by conquest in the 1784
Fort Stanwix Treaty represented the only
alteration of terms offered in 1784.
The growing intensity of Native American
resistance to American settlers’ intrusion into
trans-Appalachian lands by 1790 prompted a
shift in federal authorities’ attitudes towards
diplomacy with the Iroquois. Formal recogni-
tion of the Iroquois League’s historic position
as a neutral intermediary between settler
colonies and Native nations bordering Iro-
quois homelands offered the prospect of
removing the Six Nations from the United
States’ formidable list of Indian enemies.
Such an approach also presented an oppor-
tunity to bolster the federal government’s
newly asserted exclusive claim to conduct
diplomacy with Indian tribes (via the Indian
Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790) (Calloway
2013: 110–11).
The November 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua
confirmed a direct relationship between the
Six Nations and the Executive branch of the
federal government, clarified each party’s
territorial and legal jurisdiction and pro-
vided mechanisms for dispute resolution (in
many ways echoing the original kaswentha

principles of early colonial diplomacy regard-
ing shared sovereignty), restored some of
the western land ceded by the Six Nations
at Fort Stanwix ten years previously, and
committed the United States to perpetual
annuity payments as compensation for lands
surrendered by the Iroquois after the Revolu-
tionary War. The written terms of the Treaty
of Canandaigua submitted to the United
States Senate for ratification failed to offer
formal protection for Iroquois rights to hunt
on lands ceded to the United States since 1784
but were sufficient to dissuade the Iroquois
from joining in the Ohio nations’ war against
the United States (Oberg 2016).
Most scholars consider the 1794 Treaty
of Canandaigua the end of independent
Iroquois diplomacy notwithstanding thirteen
other treaties negotiated by the Six Nations
with the federal government from 1792
to 1857, and forty-two treaties concluded
between the Iroquois and New York State
from 1789 to 1846 (even after its surrender
of such capacity to the federal government
with the ratification of the United States
Constitution). Nearly all of these treaties
(state and federal alike) related to land trans-
actions, including unsuccessful attempts to
persuade the Iroquois to accept removal to
trans-Mississippi lands. Much of the empha-
sis in the post-1794 federal treaty record
with the Iroquois involved efforts to override
state purchases and occasionally to provide
redress for particularly egregious land grabs
(Hauptman 1999).
While the Iroquois remained open to
formal diplomacy as long as settler authori-
ties permitted, during the nineteenth century
they adopted petitioning as a means of articu-
lating their concerns, complaints, and desires
to officials tasked with managing their affairs
(New York State Legislature 1783–1831;
Haake 2015). Cayuga chief Deskaheh took
this process a step further in 1924 when he
attempted to make formal appeals for redress
IRO QUOIS DI PLOM ACY 7
to Great Britain and subsequently to the
League of Nations following the Canadian
government’s imposition of enfranchise-
ment and elective governance on the Six
Nations territory. Neither the British nor
the authorities in Geneva offered him a
formal audience (Hauptman 2007: 124–42).
Inspired by Deskaheh’s example, subsequent
twentieth-century Iroquois political activists
have called consistently for the return of
treaty-making with both Canada and the
United States as a critical component of
restoration of their sovereign national stand-
ing eroded by colonialism (Akwesasne Notes
1974). Since 1977, Iroquois leaders have also
advocated for their sovereign nationhood
with international travel on independently
produced passports (Akwesasne Notes 1978:
36–48). In traditional Iroquois homelands,
annual commemorations of the 1794 Treaty
of Canandaigua have taken place since 1961
as a means of honoring the terms of agree-
ment between two nations while offering a
venue for public education and the expression
of grief, anger, and disappointment at past
failures as well as hope for the future (Schein
2000: 190–91).
SEE ALSO: Alliance Diplomacy; Minorities
and Diplomacy; Neutrality; Unequal Treaties
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SUGGESTED READINGS
Abler, T. (2007) Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the
Allegany Senecas. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press.
Aquila, R. (1983) The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois
Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Asch, M. (Ed.) (1997) Aboriginal and Treaty Rights
on Canada: Essays on Law, Equality, and Respect
for Difference. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press.
Banner, S. (2005) How the Indians Lost Their Land:
Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Densmore, C. (2007) Red Jacket: Iroquois Diplomat
and Orator. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
Engelbrecht, W. (2003) Iroquoia: The Development
of a Native World. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Uni-
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