A Peacemaker for Warring Nations: The Founding of the Iroquois League

The League of the Iroquois was a true representational democracy—so much so that the United States Constitution is said to have been modeled on some of its tenets. But how, perhaps a thousand years before the time of Columbus, did the Five Iroquois Nations (the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca) come to end the bitter eye-for-eye warfare among them? What brought them together in an alliance based on the Great Law of Peace? And how was it that a system of Clan Mothers was institut...