This one-dimensional vision of Native Americans was new. Having lived alongside Native communities for generations—during war, peace, and constant trade—the colonists had ample evidence that they were capable of self-government. Native people maintained distinct customs, laws, and forms of sovereignty, many of them in defiance of both British and colonial authorities. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the nations of the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Confederacy centralized political, military, and diplomatic practices. Throughout the 1740s and ’50s, Benjamin Franklin commented on the durable forms of union exercised by the Iroquois, whose confederacy, as he wrote, “has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble.”