"The Huron and the Iroquois believe, as do the Ojibwa, that not just humans have a soul, but animals do, too," Mr Boyden explains.
Tribes could not keep armies or devise a currency, but they could issue their own passports, as the Iroquois have famously done (which made their lacrosse team miss a tournament in 2010, after Britain refused to recognise the documents).
ACCORDING to the "Great Law of Peace" of the Iroquois League, a confederation of six Indian tribes, "The Great Creator… established different hunting grounds and territories and made boundary lines between them".
Whether staving off disease and hunger in a Huron longhouse or taking part in the ritual torture of an Iroquois captive, the characters are vibrantly drawn, with complex inner lives.
Indeed, the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee as they call themselves, are so accustomed to borders (they live astride the one between the United States and Canada) that they have issued their own passports since 1977.
The novel recounts in riveting detail how the arrival of the French, who sided with the Huron in their ancient feud with the Iroquois, upset the delicate political balance of the pre-contact native world.For all its scenes of battle and grisly torture, "The Orenda" is at heart the story of a collision of cultures.
Mr Gore spends more time discussing the constitutional arrangements of the Iroquois (he admires them) than he does estimating the scale of any carbon tax.
The Iroquois, the Sioux and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), even separately declared war on Germany in 1941.But sovereignty has at least three pieces, says Manley Begay at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, a research group.
But when their lacrosse team, the Iroquois Nationals, attempted to use these documents to travel to Britain this month, first the American and then the British authorities turned up their noses at them, forcing the team to drop out of the world championships of a sport invented by their ancestors.American and British officials said the Haudenosaunee passports are too easy to forge.
As inferior suppliers of furs, the Iroquois had a perverse common interest with the French, an inferior source of manufactured goods.
