Free Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner

federal council in addition to her position as a trustee of her ohwachira, and so had a somewhat higher standing and authority than had the male federal chief. 11
     
    The Haudenosaunee world view is based on keeping everything in balance. Women and men each have responsibilities they must carry out to maintain this balance. The clan mother heads the entire extended family that makes up a clan. Since the ancient founding of the League of the Haudenosaunee, which Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields have dated at 1142 C.E., 12 each clan mother has the responsibility for carrying out the process by which the women of her clan select a male chief. The clan mother also has the duty of deposing the chief if he fails to perform his official duties. The man cannot become a chief or remain a chief if he commits rape, which is considered one of the three major crimes—theft and murder are the other two.
     

    Women’s Nominating Wampum Belt

     
    Balance also requires that everyone in the nation have a voice, and decision-making is achieved by consensus in public councils. All questions, including the making of treaties and deciding on issues of war and peace, have always required the approval of both women and men. This ancient democratic government continues to this day, with clan mothers still choosing the chiefs. The women’s nominating wampum belt records this law of the Confederacy of the original Five Nations:
    We give and assign the sacred chieftainship titles and the soil of our land to all of our Mothers, the Women of the Five Nations, and they shall be the proprietors of the same.“ 13
     
    Arthur C. Parker describes the critical female role in the formation of the confederacy which resulted in women having responsibility for holding the chieftainship titles:
    Likewise, in the wampum codes of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, we are told that both Hiawatha, the Onondaga and the Peacemaker, a Wyandot, made their journeys to the tribes with the ‘Great Mother,’ Ji-gon-sa-seh, the Kakwah, and consulted her in every important detail. Without the approval of their ‘Mother of Nations’ and her sanction of Hiawatha’s plans, the integrity of the principles of the confederacy of the Five Nations would have been assailed. But Ji-gon-sa-seh, who was regarded as a descendant of the first Ye-go-wa-neh, the woman who was the mother of all the first Ongwe was sacred to her people, for her word was law and her sanction was necessary in all political measures of inter-tribal importance. 14
     
    The decision to place women in the highest position of governmental, as well as social, authority, was thoughtfully made by the founding mothers and fathers of the Six Nations Confederacy. Hewitt explained:
    The astute founders of the league had made the experiment of entrusting their government to a representative body of men and women chosen by the mothers of the community; they did not entrust it to a hereditary body, nor to a purely democratic body, nor even to a body of religious leaders. The founders of the league adopted this principle and with wise adjustments made it the underlying principle of the league institutions. 15
     
    Even when the Seneca, in a desperate attempt to maintain their land abandoned their traditional system and emulated the United States constitutional form of government—as had the Cherokee—the women still maintained their traditional authority over the land, as Minnie Myrtle wrote in 1855:
    The legislative powers of the nation are vested in a Council of eighteen, chosen by the universal suffrages of the nation; but no treaty is to be binding, until it is ratified by three-fourths of all the voters, and three-fourths of all the mothers of the nation! 16 So there was peace instead of war, as there would often be if the voice of woman could be heard! And though the Senecas, in revising their laws and customs, have in a measure acceded to the civilized barbarism of treating the opinions of women with contempt, where