Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa)
Decisions made currently around the AI lifecycle have a significant bearing on several generations to come. These decisions may not only alter the course of the present in ways that impact the future but may also affect the choices and resources available to future generations. This, in particular, makes it imperative for us to recognize the weight each of these decisions carry, and calls on us to ensure that our approaches to decision-making are deeply anchored in understanding their impact and consequences. Current laws and policies speak to AI in the now and rarely account for intergenerational impacts. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, or Gayanashagowa, offers us a way to do things differently.
Before we proceed, we want to state that the Great Law of Peace is a living constitution and not a historical document. It continues to govern the internal life of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which comprises the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations, and is held and interpreted by the traditional chiefs and Clan Mothers who carry it, and not by any external scholarly or governmental authority. The Great Law was encoded in wampum, that is, in the purple and white quahog shell belts whose patterns carry meaning and transmitted orally through ceremony and practice. Much of it has never been written down, and what has been written down in English represents a partial and sometimes contested translation of a living governance system that exists fully only in its practice. The Great Law also has a complex relationship with settler law. The Haudenosaunee nations are currently engaged in active legal and political struggles over land rights, sovereignty, and the right to govern their own territories and affairs, struggles in which settler governments have repeatedly failed to honour treaty obligations. Drawing on their governance wisdom while those struggles remain unresolved and without naming that context would be a form of selective engagement that takes the philosophy while ignoring the political claim that accompanies it. We therefore name it directly: The Great Law is not a resource to be borrowed from a tradition comfortably located in the past. It is the living law of nations whose sovereignty is actively contested and whose territories have not been justly settled. We have drawn only on publicly shared accounts of the Great Law, including those made available by Haudenosaunee nations themselves and by scholars working in close collaboration with community members. We welcome correction and deeper engagement from the Haudenosaunee nations and their representatives, and we recognize that the meaning and application of the Great Law is theirs to determine, not ours.
Understanding Gayanashagowa
On the shores of Onondaga Lake in what is now central New York, at a moment that oral tradition places at approximately 1142 CE, a figure known as the Peacemaker, Dekanawidah, brought an end to years of devastating blood feuds among five nations by burying their weapons beneath a great white pine. The result was the Gayanashagowa, or the Great Law of Peace, which is the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (known to settlers as the Iroquois).
Woven into wampum belts of purple and white quahog shells, encoded not in ink but in memory, song, and ceremonial recitation, the Great Law established one of the most sophisticated and durable systems of democratic governance in human history. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under its terms, has functioned continuously for over eight hundred years, making it arguably the longest-running democracy on Earth.
The Great Law has 117 articles and establishes a Grand Council of chiefs from each of the six nations (the Tuscarora joined in 1722), organized into deliberative groupings, namely the Elder and the Younger Brothers. These two groupings are a check and balance on each other. Decisions require consensus, and not a majority vote. A single nation's sustained objection can prevent action.
The Clan Mothers play a very important role. The women of each clan, particularly the female title-holders hold the proprietary right to the Lordship title. Women can both, select and remove chiefs. Political authority in the Great Law flows through the maternal line and is subject to feminine accountability.
The Great Law also bore significant influence on the United States Constitution, a historical fact confirmed in a 1988 United States Senate resolution (H.Con.Res.331). The United States Senate formally acknowledged in 1988 that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy influenced the development of the United States Constitution. This acknowledgment, while significant, has also been contested by scholars on both sides, and it carries the risk of reducing the Great Law to a precursor to Western democratic theory rather than a sovereign and complete governance system in its own right. The Haudenosaunee have consistently asserted that the Great Law does not require Western validation, and that framing it primarily through its influence on the US Constitution misrepresents its character and diminishes its scope.
The Great Law's model of a union of distinct peoples retaining their own internal governance while acting collectively on shared matters, its bicameral deliberative structure, its mechanisms for removing leaders who fail in their duty, and its concept of governance as service rather than power hold tremendous wisdom and value for AI governance.
What The Great Law Unsettles in AI Governance
The Great Law offers AI governance three specific gifts that its settler inheritance threw away. The first is the Clan Mother model, wherein institutionalized, structural accountability is held by those with the greatest stake in communal welfare and the least insulation from its consequences. Current AI governance concentrates authority in technical experts, regulatory agencies, and corporate leaders, who are situated furthest away from the harms AI systems produce. The Great Law insists that those who hold authority over consequential systems must be accountable to those who bear their consequences, and that women must hold formal power within that accountability structure.
The second gift is the seventh-generation principle. The Great Law instructs that decisions must be evaluated in terms of their consequences for seven generations hence. No contemporary AI governance framework operates on anything close to this time horizon. Risk assessments look ahead by a few years, rather than whole generations. Regulatory sandboxes test systems for months. The catastrophic potential long-term consequences of AI to democratic institutions, ecological systems, the diversity of human knowledge and culture, are all systematically excluded from governance processes that cannot conceptually hold that time scale. The Great Law demands that we ask ourselves: What will the AI systems we are building today mean for the world in 2225?
The third gift is the consensus requirement. The Grand Council cannot act over the sustained objection of any of the six nations. This is the architecture of legitimate authority. AI governance processes currently produce outcomes over the objection of the communities most affected, such as communities of color, Indigenous nations, Global South countries, and claim legitimacy for those outcomes on the basis of majority process or technical authority. The Great Law insists that legitimacy requires genuine agreement, not numerical majority, and that the communities who would bear the costs of a decision must be able to say no.
References
Haudenosaunee Confederacy. (n.d.). Gayanashagowa: The Great Law of Peace. https://web.pdx.edu/~caskeym/iroquois_web/html/greatlaw.html
Fenton, W.N. (1998). The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. University of Oklahoma Press.
Grinde, D.A. (1991). Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. UCLA American Indian Studies Center.
Williams, K. P. (2018). Kayanerenkó: wa: the Great Law of peace. Univ. of Manitoba Press.
Gottlieb, L. (2006). Indigenous Democracy: The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee. Fellowship, 72(9-12), 14.
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