On the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Cayuga sits with Oneida as one of the two Younger Brother nations, opposite Mohawk and Seneca as Elder Brothers, with Onondaga's chiefs presiding between them as Firekeepers. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy records ten chief titles held by Cayuga among the fifty the founding five nations divided at the confederacy's establishment, the largest delegation of any nation apart from Onondaga's Firekeepers, a standing that reflects Cayuga's place among the founding nations rather than its present landholding, which the eighteenth century dispersal left without a reservation bearing the Cayuga name in New York.
Cayuga, sometimes rendered from the nation's own name for itself as referring to the pipe or to the swampy land around the lake it once bordered, is today spoken by very few people, and language revival work is underway among Cayuga descendants at Six Nations of the Grand River, at Cattaraugus, and in Oklahoma. The Longhouse religion and Christianity are both practiced across these dispersed Cayuga communities, and, as with the wider Confederacy, ceremonial and medicine society knowledge is restricted to initiated members and is not set out here. The Grand Council still recognizes the Cayuga bench and its titles even where the nation's own eighteenth century territory does not survive as a reservation, a distinction between political standing and current landholding that runs through Haudenosaunee history more widely.