2. The people of the Confederation considered themselves to be a chosen people
United chiefly by language, the member tribes of the Iroquois called themselves the Ongwehoneh, which translates to “real human beings”. What that implies for members of other tribes, and for the Europeans who settled in the region is in the eye of the beholder. According to oral tradition, the only record of the precolonial period, the Peacemaker explained the relationship between the five tribes (later six), symbolized by taking one arrow from each, which were bound together. The arrows represented Peace, Reason, Justice, Health, and Righteousness. This led to later claims the United States included arrows in the Great Seal based on the Iroquois imagery. In the first iteration of the Great Seal, 13 arrows appear in the talon of an eagle, representing the 13 original states. The Congressional committee which designed the seal made no mention of the Iroquois in their debates or notes.
While the confederation maintained a more or less peaceful relationship within the member tribes, they were often at war with rivals, the Huron and Wyandot of the lakes, the Shawnee and Miami of Ohio, and the Cherokee of the Carolinas and Tennessee. Canadian tribes, the Erie, Abenaki, and others, were pressured by Iroquois expansion. The Mohawk, recognized by the confederation as the “Keepers of the Eastern Door”, gained the reputation of fearsome warriors, noted for their brutality toward prisoners. During the Beaver Wars of the 17th century, Mohawk and other warriors of the Iroquois fought the Huron and other western tribes, determined to establish a monopoly on the fur trade with the Europeans. It was during the Beaver Wars that European traders first openly supplied the Iroquois with firearms, and French suppliers attempted to break the confederation by negotiating separate treaties with individual tribes.