The tale of Hyawatha is an ancient legend that long predates its

retelling by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Disney.

It is an origin story of how a warrior and a prophet,

Hayawatha and the great peacemaker,

vanquished the forces of division

that separated the five great native nations of the northeast,

the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Unandaga,

uniting them into a grand alliance called the Hodnoshoni, which roughly translates as

people of the Long House, later renamed by French traders as the Iroquois Confederacy.

For centuries before the arrival of Europeans to North America,

these unified nations would create a great society

in the continent's dense eastern forests.

Developing a system of governance envied and emulated,

and to some degree even copied by those same Europeans,

seeking to forge their own alliances in a brand new world.

Hey all, I'm your host Don Wildman and welcome.

When producing a podcast called American History Hit,

we must be mindful of a simple fact.

The original American story has nothing to do with people like, say, me, a white descendant of English colonists.

For thousands of years, North America had been a continent settled and civilized by complex,

tribally structured societies of every sort across the land, from sea to shining sea.

But as Europeans arrived with aspirations at first to exploit resources and then to fully colonize

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