Hiawatha, best known as hero of the five nations. Hiawatha was a great chief, as I spoke of on the previous page. He was born in 1520, his name means "He makes Rivers". My mother told me Hiawatha's story from her days visiting the nearby Mohawk reservation where I grew up. Many people confuse the real Hiawatha to the second Hiawatha from the famous poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The real Hiawatha was said to have lived in New York in the 1500's, he made an attempt to end clan warfare and bitter fueds among the tribes by founding the "Five Nations". The five tribes were the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and the Seneca. They all lived in what was later dubbed upper New York state, and in 1772, a sixth tribe had joined the group. The Tuscarora from North Carolina. The tribes were known as the Iroquois Confederacy.
It was through Hiawatha's vigilence and teachings of navigations, agriculture and the arts, that Hiawatha was able to slowly bring to an end, the babrbaric practices of torture until death of prisoners of war. The Iroquois confederacy remained strong until the American Revolution, the tribes were then split in who was to fight on the British side and who on the American side. The Iroqiois Confederacy still retains itself near Syracuse New York, Hiawatha may well have been a medicine man, as well as a magician. |
