Perhaps the least known founder of a law code is Dekanawida, the legendary creator of the Iroquois League of Five Nations and The Great Law of Peace. The Great Law established a remarkable democratic system among Native American tribes in the Northeastern United States before Columbus landed in the New World. It amalgamated several tribes into a federation while Europe and the rest of the world labored under the tyranny of monarchy. It established women as the ultimate voices who would decide who would represent their tribal interests. In the fifteenth century it was unquestionably the most advanced government in the world. The associated legend of Dekanawida suggests he was the sole founder. Following this belief, the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan suggested that the League and Law “was not of gradual construction […] but was the result of one protracted effort of legislation” (1851, 57), a claim that is both difficult to prove and contrary to the way legal systems develop. Nevertheless, various dates have been proposed. The weight of scholarly opinion on the founding of the League has settled on the late fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. But soon after the typescript was completed (1900), William Canfield (1902) linked it to a solar eclipse of 1451. The Indian scholar Paul Wallace (1946) concurs; Dean R. Snow (1982) has explored the documentary evidence and Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L. Fields (1997) have reexamined the astronomical connection. Subsequent research by Native American scholars has settled on 1450 CE. However, the Council of the Confederacy at Six Nations Reservation near Brantford, Ontario, that produced the first written version of the Great Law, suggested an earlier date of 1390, which was followed with a commemorative medal marking the 500-year anniversary of its founding. Kayanesen Paul Williams, who has done the most exhaustive study of the League and the Law of Great Peace, concludes that “there is no clinically provable date of the creation of the League. […] It is enough […] that the League predates European contact” (Williams 2018, 80, 82).

Several decades ago Paul Wallace set aside the idea of a single date, contending that the League “had taken much longer in the building, decades or even generations” (1946, 67). Internal evidence supports an extended period of development. The procedures of this multitribal confederacy, its associated ceremonials, and a cluster of symbols enhancing the law have very deep cultural roots.