Perhaps the thing was no more than a mere anecdote for Hitler, but in 1942 the Iroquois Confederation declared war on Germany, apart from what the Washington government did. A sample of the autonomy with which this already old entity works, formerly also called the League of Six Nations, and that today, with nearly 49,000 members (plus another 5,000 in Canada), it even issues its own passports , different from the Americans, who use their politicians and athletes.
The Iroquois Confederation was the union of five peoples that inhabited the northeastern United States:the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, to which the Tuscarora were added in 1722, totaling just under six thousand people. The Iroquois name is not autochthonous but was given to it by white settlers - specifically the Frenchman Samuel Champlain - although using the Algonquian word irok-ois. Or so says one of the theories because there are others and none of them have been effectively corroborated. Nowadays it tends to fall into disuse because it was considered a derogatory term.
They also called themselves by two names:Nadowa and Haudenosaunee (or Hodinonhsioni), which means "town of the big house", alluding to the great long cabin located in their capital, Onondaga (in the present state of New York). ), which had a gate at each end, each guarded by a member of a different tribe (an eastern Mohawk, a western Tuscarora) and where decisions were debated; in that sense, they had a third appellation, Ongwanonhsioni, that is, "builders of great houses".
It is not known exactly when the confederation was created. In the article dedicated to its founder, Deganawida, we saw that possibly in the second half of the fifteenth century, although some authors delay the date to 1535 (because it is that year when Cartier writes down the first references to the Iroquois) or even later, to 1570, while there is no lack of indigenists who do the reverse and exaggeratedly advance it to the year 1142, to make it coincide with an eclipse that predicted the union, according to legend (although there was also one in 1451).
Let's go with that legend. It tells that Deganawida, born miraculously, had a mystical vision that prompted him to propose a great union of all the tribes. He managed to carry it out with the help of Jigonhsasee and Hiawatha, who believed that this initiative would end the constant wars that hampered the progress of their people. He had a hard time convincing them, but it was finally achieved thanks to a miraculous resurrection of Deganawida (whose people he originated from is not known for sure).
Deganawida then dictated the Great Law of Peace, a kind of fundamental rule written through a wampum (a beaded belt) and that consisted of one hundred and seventeen articles, granting legal and political equality for the five tribes. It is said that the US Constitution is inspired by it and the fact is that it established councils of representatives of both sexes with equal voting rights, who elected chiefs or sachem to form a central council, a protoparliament.
They made the final decisions by voting and from among them a sachem was selected. supreme but controlled by the councils and dismissable. Likewise, warlords and a council of elderly women were elected, who were the ones who proposed the topics to be discussed and the candidates, just as a women's council was created as a counterweight (although the sachem must always be a man). All this brought peace among those five-six nations and Deganawidah was then nicknamed theGreat Peacemaker .
But that peace was relative because the Iroquois Confederation had no problem waging war on others, as the Algonquians, Hurons and Innus experienced in their flesh, who ended up allying with the French and that led to the War of the Beavers, which We also dedicate an article. In any case, that system constituted a curious and particular form of assembly democracy that was the reference for the declaration of war against Germany on June 13, 1942, read the next day on the steps of the Capitol in Washington:
This declaration was independent, like the one that any sovereign state could make, and it was based, as we see, on ethical and justice criteria. Something especially interesting because it came to reproduce a situation that had already occurred when the American Revolution broke out. The Iroquois Confederacy was invited by the British Empire to join it, thus reactivating the old alliance against France. However, there was an internal disagreement on the matter:the Mohawk and Seneca were in favor but the Oneidas and Tuscaroras preferred to support the settlers while the Cayugas and Onondagas were inclined to maintain neutrality.
Quite a dilemma, since the Great Law of Peace required that there be unanimity when making decisions. And it was impossible to reach it, which was a double problem. On the one hand, the internal tension; on the other, the distrust that the settlers had, remembering that the Mohawks had fought before on the side of the crown. So in 1779 George Washington decided not to risk the safety of the Northeast and sent General John Sullivan to make a preemptive strike against the Confederacy.
The settlements were razed to the ground one after another, achieving the strategic objective:to render the Iroquois useless as a fighting force. When independence was proclaimed, compensation was paid to the tribes that had declared that they were on the side of the patriots (oneidas and tuscaroras), granting them extensive territories and privileges. The rest were forced to give up their lands and most of its members emigrated to Canada (which was a British colony), which is why a second confederation was later organized there that coexisted with the other.
By the time World War II broke out, things had smoothed out and changed a lot:on the one hand, Canada had become an independent country; on the other, the US and the UK were firm allies. The Iroquois considered themselves brothers to all of them and in 1941, when Roosevelt read his address to the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they decided to stand with them to face the Nazi ignominy. It was then that the spark arose that led the Iroquois Confederacy to make a declaration of war on their own, just as they had already done in 1918, during the previous war.
In a way, it was an angry reaction to the appeals court ruling which, titled Ex parte Green , confirmed the Nationality Act of 1940, according to which American tribes were subject to federal law even though a treaty had historically declared them sovereign. In theory, the treaties signed by the Indians and the government were perpetual, but they usually dealt with issues related to land ownership, tribal rights and, in short, issues related to their way of life. In this case there was a purely political initiative involved.
On September 16, 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act (The Selective Service and Training Act, also known as the Burke-Wadsworth Act), had created the first compulsory military service in US history, requiring all males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six to enroll ( entering the war would increase the segment between eighteen and forty-five). This included Native Americans and the Iroquois didn't like that.
One of them named Warren Eldreth Green (hence the title of the judgment) filed a challenge to the Nationality Act but, as we said, the court ruled that he was a citizen even without his consent, based on a 1924 Congressional act that had granted citizenship to all Indians. Consequently, the Iroquois Confederacy was not, in practice, the independent nation that its members believed, something that was insulting to them.
To avoid being subject to the Selective Training and Service Act , which they considered to have been done without their consent, the Iroquois decided to make their own declaration of war and authorize their own to enlist in the allied armies to fight against the Axis, claiming to be considered one more allied nation (and, anecdotally, saying that they appointed honorary boss to Stalin). In other words, the result was the same but because they wanted to.