Local affairs were the concern of individual communities, but matters of common interest and relations with British authorities were discussed at councils held at the Mohawk village of Kahnawake. This explains why representatives from the League were sometimes referred to as Caughnawagas, when on diplomatic missions, regardless of their origins. Sawaya has mined official reports for information on the election of chiefs, the ceremonies at council sessions, and the significance of kinship terminology in speeches. As in other native councils, oratorical skills were highly valued and consensus was essential to reach decisions. All this is very familiar to ethnohistorians, and there is little new information presented.
Diplomatic relations are the focus of the second half of the book.
After a chapter on the ritual of diplomatic meetings that includes discussions of the importance of wampum, tobacco, and presents in diplomatic relations, Sawaya attempts to demonstrate that the League was a key diplomatic institution in European-Native relations from the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The first is difficult to defend, as it is based on declarations made at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century. During the French period, there is no reference in official documents to a federation of praying Indians. Authorities dealt with individual native villages separately and competition between missionaries in the Montreal region kept Sulpician and Jesuit communities separate. Most of the Natives had migrated to the St. Lawrence as refugees and were dependent on French support.