Iroquois: the only European-recognized Native State?

I read on an archive of SHWI that the Iroquois were considered to be an actual nation-state by Europeans, as they showed up on maps as an actual country and participated ornamentally in the Congress of Vienna.

Is this true? Does anyone have materials that back this up? Were there any other Indians given this sort of recognition.

Now I understand why they're the only North American tribe in Europa Universalis 1!
 
You may look at the Spanish America where there was an independent, and recognised as that, Araucan nation (later annexed to independent Chile); the Aztecs and Incans were treated as an independent kingdoms equal in rank to the Castillian or the Aragonese crowns. How many times Cortes claimed how many kingdoms he had given to Charles I!
 
Weren't the Huron also recognised by the French as a sovereign native state in the Americas during the 17th-18th C ? And the Tlaxcalans- didn't Cortes recognise his allies as a separate kingdom ? What about the Navaho and other large southwestern tribes encountered by the Spaniards ?

I s'pose the reason the Haudonosaunee (their own name for themselves) League would've shown up as a separate nation-state entity on European maps of the time is cos they were so damn powerful and showed so much of the signs of European 'civilisation'- cultivating the land, dressing in modest clothes, living in established settlements, etc, and that to that point they were pretty much the only American Indian nation-state when encountered by Europeans who enjoyed that high level of sophistication.
 

Thande

Donor
Well, supposedly the US borrowed some of its governmental models from the Iroquois Confederacy...

Whether that is evidence for or against the Iroquois being 'civilised' is open to interpretation. :D
 
A lot of indigenous American peoples and tribes were shown on maps produced in the 1500s-1700s. When they needed to, Europeans often dealt with them as independent peoples with their own leaders, but rarely as if they were equivalents to other European (or even Islamic and Asian states). True ambassadors were never exchanged as far as I know. With a few individual exceptions, Europeans never accepted the basic premise that indigenous Americans were entitled to the formalized treatment accorded other "civilized" nations. To do so would have given indigeous people undue recognition as the legitimate owners of the continent Europeans wanted to conquer and exploit.
 
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