A CONSTITUTIONAL LEAGUE OF PEACE IN THE
STONE AGE OF AMERICA
CONSTITUTION
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
1920
A CONSTITUTIONAL LEAGUE OF PEACE IN THE
STONE AGE OF AMERICA.
Bureau of American Ethnology.
In the Stone Age of America the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, five Iroquoian tribes dwelling in the central and the eastern regions of what is to-day the State of New York, established a tribal federation or league, with a carefully prepared constitution, based on peace, righteousness, justice, and power. These five Iroquois tribes spoke dialects of the Iroquoian stock of languages, which is one of about 50 spoken north of Mexico.
After more than four years of a world war, characterized by such merciless slaughter of men, women, and children, by such titanic mobilization of men and weapons of destruction, and by such hideous brutality, that no past age of savagery has equaled them, the peoples of the earth are now striving to form a league of nations for the expressed purpose of abolishing the causes of war and to establish a lasting peace among all men.
So, of more than passing interest is the fact that in the sixteenth century, on the North American Continent, there was formed a permanent league of five tribes of Indians for the purpose of stopping for all time the shedding of human blood by violence and of establishing lasting peace among all known men by means of a constitutional form of government based on peace, justice, righteousness, and power, or authority.
Its founders did not limit the scope of this confederation to the five Iroquoian tribes mentioned above, but they proposed for themselves and their posterity the greater task of gradually bringing under this form of government all the known tribes of men, not as subject peoples but as confederates.
The proposal to include all the tribes of men in such a league of comity and peace is the more remarkable in view of the fact that that was an age of fierce tribalism, whose creed was that no person had any rights of life or property outside of the tribe to whose528 jurisdiction he or she belonged, and that every person when beyond the limits of his or her tribe’s protection was an outlaw, and common game for the few who still indulged in the horrid appetite of cannibalism. So that the doctrine of the founders of the league that all persons by adopting their formulae could fore