Deganawidah

Native American spiritual leader. According to tradition, he founded the Iroquois confederacy with Hiawatha.

Deganawidah, the prophet whose vision of peace led to the establishment of the Iroquois Confederacy and the ending of centuries of strife between the Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, and Cayuga Nations, was born at an unknown date, most likely between 1400 and 1600 C.E., among the Huron people. According to the oral tradition from which knowledge of him derives, his mother became pregnant though still a virgin. His grandmother had a vision that he would grow up and live among foreigners and raise a great tree of Peace. He would also indirectly be the cause of the demise of the Huron people. To prevent the latter from happening, the two women tried to kill him, but he would not die.

At about the age of 18, Deganwidah left home and made the first convert to the vision of peace that he claimed he had been sent by the Master of Life to deliver. The convert was a young Mohawk named Hiawatha, an eloquent speaker who would become the public voice of his teacher. Under Deganawidah's counsel, Hiawatha changed from a man filled with hate (due to the massacre of his family) to a man of peace. The message called people to three principles: health of body and mind, righteous in conduct and equality and justice among people, and the maintenance of authority. He also wrote a song of peace that he and Hiawatha taught to the people among whom they moved.

When they approached the Mohawks, Deganawidah proposed a test of his message. He climbed to the top of a tall tree that hung over the Mohawk River. He then had the Mohawks cut the tree out from under him. He plunged into the swift river. All thought him dead. However, they found him the next morning cooking breakfast. He explained that the Master of Life had given him power over his own death.

It took him five years to bring the Mohawks, Oneida, Seneca, and Cayuga into the original confederacy based on the three principles. He and Hiawatha then moved to Onondaga land, the land ruled by the man who had killed Hiawatha's wife. Here he performed a miracle of healing on the chief, who was mentally ill. Deganawidah is said to have combed the snakes (evil and insane thoughts) from his head. The chief became an immediate convert. At the ceremony creating the League of Five Nations, he led in the planting of a Tree of Peace, and uprooting another tree, the peoples' weapons were symbolically tossed into the hole. The league was a representative democracy well known to Benjamin Franklin and has been seen as one of the models upon which the United States government was finally created.

Deganawidah was only about 23 years old when he completed the task of uniting the people. According to the tradition, he then got in a canoe and left. Where he went and what eventually happened to him is unknown. The last prophecy of his grandmother came true in 1649 when the league attacked the Hurons and forced the survivors to assimilate into the confederacy.

Sources:

Colden, Cadawallader. The History of the Five Nations: Depending on the Province of New York in America. 1727. Reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958.

Hewitt, J. N. B. "Legend of the Founding of the Iroquois League." American Anthropologist 5 (1892): 2.

Peterson, Scott. Native American Prophecies. New York: Paragon House, 1990.