Okwaho wanted to grab his friend and hug him. But this was a serious gathering. The Peacemaker and his spokesman Hiawatha were still explaining the workings of the new league. They were speaking of planting a pine tree to symbolize the Great Peace, a tree under whose four white roots the war club, would be buried.

He had to behave with dignity. Tawis was now holding out his arm. Okwaho reached out to grasp it, wrist to forearm, in the old way that friends and relatives would do when meeting each other. He wanted to say something, anything. But his throat felt choked. His vision was blurred. Perhaps dust had gotten in his eyes and made them water.

But just as they were about to take each other’s arms, someone who had broken away from the crowd of Onondaga people from the big village reached them—at a dead run.

“Brothers!” Clouds Forming shouted as she hurled herself forward to grab them both—with as much force as a mountain lion leaping on a deer.

The three of them went rolling to the ground. All of them were laughing, laughing as the people around them were laughing. It was a good thing, this joyous sight of friends reunited by peace. One small sign of how the Peacemaker’s dream was coming true.

author's note

There’s no story more important to the People of the Longhouse, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Nations that that of the Peacemaker. At some point before the coming of European colonists, perhaps 1,000 years ago, the five original Longhouse Nations of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas were engaged in what must have seemed like an endless cycle of bloody warfare with each other. No one was safe—not even women, children and elders. As my friend and teacher Chief Jake Tekaronianeken Swamp of the Mohawk Nation expressed it to me in an interview I did with him in 1992, “We were the worst people in the world.”

That was when a man seen as a messenger from the Creator came to preach another way, a way of unity, peace, and equality. Because his name became so sacred that it is only spoken in ceremony, he is known simply as the Peacemaker. The result of his efforts was the formation of what has been called in English the Great League or the League of the Iroquois. Admired by such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, it has been held up as one of the models for the United States Constitution and American democracy in general.

My aim in writing this novel was twofold. First, of course, was to share with young readers a story that I feel has never been more needed in these times of conflict throughout the world. I’m trying, in a small way, to emulate Chief Swamp, who traveled all over the world during his lifetime planting symbolic trees of peace and telling the story of the Peacemaker’s journey.