# Haudenosaunee Confederacy

> a living confederacy of six Indigenous nations governed through the Great Law of Peace and their own political traditions

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:indigenous-decolonial:haudenosaunee-confederacy` |
| Family | Indigenous Governance & Decolonial Change |
| Domain | Rights |
| Kind | movement |
| Archetypal function | The Prior Relation |
| Epistemic status | sourced_claim; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Haudenosaunee Confederacy belongs to the **Indigenous Governance & Decolonial Change** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Confederated governance, clan relations, and consensus practices coordinate unity while retaining national identities. U.S. founders interacted with and expressed interest in Haudenosaunee governance; the degree and form of direct constitutional influence remain scholarly debate.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Haudenosaunee Confederacy, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Prior Relation.** a living confederacy of six Indigenous nations governed through the Great Law of Peace and their own political traditions

## Gift

A durable political order that complicates settler narratives of constitutional invention.

## Wound / Shadow

Selective borrowing erases sovereignty and living communities.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Haudenosaunee Confederacy to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Prior Relation enters through Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What is documented interaction, what is influence claim, and whose authority interprets the tradition?

## Game function

**event.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Haudenosaunee Confederacy; another player names a countermove. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **depends on — Settler Colonialism:** Settler Colonialism depends on Haudenosaunee Confederacy by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(cultural_historical; supported)_
- **institutionalizes — Great Law of Peace:** Haudenosaunee Confederacy institutionalizes Great Law of Peace by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(cultural_historical; supported)_
- **depends on — Police Reform:** Police Reform depends on Haudenosaunee Confederacy by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **legitimizes — Civil Rights Movement:** Haudenosaunee Confederacy legitimizes Civil Rights Movement by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Haudenosaunee Confederacy from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Haudenosaunee Confederacy is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: cultural_historical, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
Sentinel factors: Indigenous sovereignty; cultural specificity; contested influence claim. These are descriptive handoff annotations, not a verdict and not a mutation of Engine Output.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Haudenosaunee Confederacy: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [The Haudenosaunee Confederacy](https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/) — Haudenosaunee Confederacy, ongoing. Contemporary self-description of governance, nations, and the Great Law of Peace.
- [S. Con. Res. 76](https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/senate-concurrent-resolution/76) — U.S. Senate, 1988. Congressional acknowledgment of Haudenosaunee influence claims; not resolution of scholarly debate.
- [UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples](https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples) — United Nations, 2007. International declaration concerning self-determination, culture, land, and participation.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
