While its exact etymology is debated, the term Iroquois is of colonial origin. Haudenosaunee ('People of the Longhouse') is the autonym by which the Six Nations refer to themselves. In 2010, more than 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people lived in Canada, and over 81,000 in the United States. Historically, however, they were competitors and enemies of the Iroquois League nations. They are considered Iroquoian in a larger cultural sense, all being descended from the Proto-Iroquoian people and language. Lawrence Iroquoians, Wendat (Huron), Erie, and Susquehannock, all independent peoples known to the European colonists, also spoke Iroquoian languages. Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley. At its peak around 1700, Iroquois power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes– upper St. For nearly 200 years, the Six Nations/Haudenosaunee Confederacy were a powerful factor in North American colonial policy, with some scholars arguing for the concept of the Middle Ground, in that European powers were used by the Iroquois just as much as Europeans used them. The Confederacy came about as a result of the Great Law of Peace, said to have been composed by Deganawidah the Great Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Jigonsaseh the Mother of Nations. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations. The English called them the Five Nations, comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (listed geographically from east to west). They were known during the colonial years to the French as the Iroquois League, and later as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee ( / ˌ h oʊ d i n oʊ ˈ ʃ oʊ n iː/ meaning 'people who are building the longhouse'), commonly known as Iroquois ( / ˈ ɪr ə k w ɔɪ/ or / ˈ ɪr ə k w ɑː/), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of Native Americans and First Nations peoples in northeast North America and Upstate New York.

Warlike indian tribes