Iroquois the decentralized political and diplomatic entity that emerged in response to European colonization. According to that theory, "The League" still exists. The Confederacy dissolved after the defeat of the British and allied Iroquois nations in the American Revolutionary War. Today's Iroquois/Six Nations people do not make any distinction between "The League" and "the Confederacy" and use the terms interchangeably, preferring the name Haudenosaunee Confederacy. After the defeat of the British, they ceded most of the Iroquois territory to the United States, without bringing their allies to the negotiating table. Many of the Iroquois migrated to Canada, forced out of New
Iroquois intention of the French to use the Catholic Haudenosaunee in the St. Lawrence valley as a buffer to keep the Haudenosaunee allied with the English living in what is now upstate New York away from Montreal, the center of the French fur trade. The attempts of both the English and the French to use their Haudenosaunee allies for their own purposes were foiled as the two groups of Haudenosaunee showed a "profound reluctance to kill one another". Following the move of the Catholic Iroquois to the St. Lawrence valley, historians commonly describe the Iroquois living outside of Montreal as the