A Voice from the Eastern Door
A Voice from the Eastern Door
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By Doug George-Kanentiio It is well established, and universally acknowledged, that the Rotinonshonni (Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois) created a unique system of governance based upon natural law as codified by Skennenrahowi, the Peacemaker. He worked with the individual nations for many years before establishing the world’s first true alliance of free nations, now the oldest united nations. In doing so he replaced the rule of despots with leaders who were selected by the people with strict qualifications as to candidates and with the a...
©by Doug George-Kanentiio Over the course of our history, we have had many leaders during peace and war. Most of us know of Captain Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Hendricks, Red Jacket, Handsome Lake, Leon Shenandoah, Mary Jemison, Clinton Rickard, Levi General-Deskahe, Audrey Shenandoah, Maisie Shenandoah, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Arthur C. Parker and Ely Parker but there have been many others who have been eclipsed by the settler writers of Native history. Their version of our story would have us accept that we did not have people of great...
By Doug George-Kanentiio As we all know there is great power in what we name, in what we elect to use to identify who we are. We are taught by traditional custom that the natural world is attuned to the human voice and is aware of our presence as we walk upon Mother Earth. We are told that the food crops, the medicines, the animals, the winds, the plants respond to our aboriginal names and that healing is affected when we use those names to address the spiritual beings and within the circles of the various medicine societies. The use of Mohawk...
By Doug George-Kanentiio Perhaps it is not that the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hostile to Indigenous people but that in her legal career they had no presence, no bearing. They were, as she is cited in writing, advocates for a distinct status which was ‘rekindling the embers of sovereignty that long ago went cold”. Justice Ginsburg was a rightfully praised defender of human rights and specifically those of women. She wanted them to enjoy full equality under American law and to brush aside those elements of dis...
By Doug George-Kanentiio Recently I watched the film “Little Big Man” which remains one of my favorite movies given the outstanding performance by Chief Dan George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation north of Vancouver, BC. Although Dan George is not a relative he did meet my uncle Angus “Shine” George when he was playing professional lacrosse in the late 1930’s. My uncle said Chief George would perform songs and dances between periods of the games which my uncle would stand and watch. Decades later my brother Dan George, now a retired US Marine, w...
By Doug George-Kanentiio “I think no institutional achievement of mankind exceeds it (the Confederacy) in either wisdom or intelligence” John Collier, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1933-1945 One of the great things the Rotinonshonni Confederacy has done is to follow its lawful obligations to offer refuge, care and support for individuals, bands and nations in need of a safe place. It is central to the teachings of Skennenrahowi to insure the Great White Pine connects the sky ward and the earth that all may see and the Four White Roots sha...
By Doug George-Kanentiio There is appropriate anger in the US over the killing of George Floyd in May, caused by a chokehold and compression on his neck by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Despite many witnesses, some of whom recorded Floyd's dying, with Chauvin to release his knee which was forcing Floyd's face into the pavement, the officer refused and for over 8 minutes maintained the pressure until Floyd died. There are other instances when American police have used deadly choke holds including that of Eric Garner in 2014...
Source: By the Cleveland Historical Team Submitted by Doug George Oghema Niagara of the band Pishqua, tribe Osauckee of the Algonquin nation, was born amid the thunderous sound of the Niagara on September 10, 1865, in the Hut of Two Kettles on the Tuscarora Indian Village in Lewistown, New York. Cleveland became his home during the first decade of the 20th century. He came to be known among white men as Chief Thunderwater and built an impressive career as a business leader and civic booster...
By Doug George-Kanentiio That an American police force assaults and kills a member of an ethnic minority is not unusual for Native people who have endured murderous and deliberate violence applied upon them by those who are supposed to serve and protect. In Canada and the U.S., Native people have been attacked and have died at the hands of the police, at times in the most brutal of ways. In Saskatchewan a Cree man, Lawrence Wegner, dies after the Saskatoon cops take him on a “starlight tour” in January, 2000 and abandon him far from she...
By Doug George-Kanentiio A recent question came up in the Quora forum asking what life was like in North America in the year 1300. This is my response for Akwesasne specifically: Breathing clean air, drinking pure water, great fishing and hunting, plenty of food, no religion, lots of leisure time, wonderful camping and swimming, no jails, no schools, no starvation, no “lords”, no masters, no corrupt popes or predatory priests, no social or economic classes, no pollution, abundance of animals, plants and trees, no kings, no castles or chu...
By Doug George-Kanentiio That an American police force assaults and kills a member of an ethnic minority is not unusual for Native people who have endured murderous and deliberate violence applied upon them by those who are supposed to serve and protect. In Canada and the US Native people have been attacked and died at the hands of the police, at times in the most brutal of ways. In Saskatchewan a Cree man, Lawrence Wegner, dies after the Saskatoon cops take him on a “starlight tour” in January 2000 and abandon him far from shelter in sub...
By Doug George-Kanentiio Akwesasne Mohawk I was fortunate to work with a highly skilled, compassionate and effective group of first responders called the Akwesasne Emergency Team. A volunteer, mostly female, unit serving the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory; the Team saved hundreds of lives and was highly respected by the Mohawk people. We all had certain levels of training including instruction on something called “triage” in which the lead EMT had the authority to make critical decisions as to which patient in a multi victim incident received med...
By Doug George-Kanentiio, Akwesasne Mohawk When I was growing up on Akwesasne Mohawk Territory there were social habits which reflected an historical response to the devastating communicable diseases which came close to wiping out our ancestors. Beginning in the early 17th century illnesses such as smallpox and influenza struck the Iroquois hard. As with the Native nations along the Atlantic coast European borne viruses caused the death of millions of people. The European colonial powers had tried in vain throughout the 1500’s to establish s...
By Doug George-Kanentiio In Canadian lore, the raconteurs of old spoke of La Chasse Galerie (the flying canoe) and among the Mohawk the Raksothas (grandpas), told scary stories about the Flying Heads which roamed deep in the forests. But one of the most disturbing myths is the one in which Indian Act band councils are labeled as “First Nations”. They are not. Band councils were created from the 1876 Indian Act and designed to undermine and replace centuries of traditional governments across Canada. They were and are extremely limited in the...
By Doug George-Kanentiio Akwesasne Mohawk In 2016 I wrote a column about the situation at Standing Rock and the ecological harm coming about through the use of fossil fuels. I cited an Iroquois prophecy about the coming of a time when human beings would disturb the earth by extracting things deep within her. Long ago there were species of plants and animals of great size. The animals are described as lizard like brings and the plants similar to today’s tobacco and ferns. These species became extinct and were covered by the earth. There were spe...
By Doug George-Kanentiio The Laws of Burgos were enacted by Spain on December 27/1512 in response to the massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Native people in the Caribbean by the Spanish invaders. The murders were so blatant as to compel the king to investigate and come up with a series of laws meant to curtail the killings. It led directly to the creation of the encomienda system in which Spanish “lords” were given Natives to control subject to the following rules. In effect, the encomienda established the federal “trust” and Ind...
By Doug George-Kanentiio I have been asked about my thoughts regarding the passing of Ray Cook, a man I had known for over 40 years. He was one of the most passionate of writers, a believer in the viability of his heritage as a Mohawk citizen and one committed to a long-standing tradition among the Rotinosionni (Haudenosaunee) in that we had a central role to play in the affairs of the world. He realized we needed alliances now just as we did in the past. During one of our episodic crisis-this one in 1979-Ray had the unique idea of promoting...
By Doug George-Kanentiio As we all know there is great power in what we name, in what we elect to use to identify who we are. We are taught by traditional custom that the natural world is attune to the human voice and is aware of our presence as we walk upon Mother Earth. We are told that the food crops, the medicines, the animals, the winds, the plants respond to our aboriginal names and that healing is affected when we use those names to address the spiritual beings and within the circles of the various medicine societies. The use of Mohawk...
By Doug George-Kanentiio I attended the April 29 session at Kana:takon in which Jeremy Bouchard, an attorney with the Gowling law firm in Ottawa, made his pitch to have former students of the “Indian Day Schools” at Kana:takon, Kawehno:ke and Tsi Snaihne sign forms regarding their negative experiences at those places. As we know the teachers in those schools prior to the 1980’s committed acts of violence against the children without consequences and caused demonstrable harm by condemning Mohawk culture, stripping children of their langu...
By Doug George-Kanentiio I have written previously the current issues involving the use of cannabis and its attendant controversy began with the racial fanaticism of Harry J. Anslinger, the director of the US office of narcotics, and William Randolph Hearst, the infamous “yellow journalism” newspaper publisher of the early 20th century. Both despised ethnic minorities and sought to attack and undermine people of color by pressuring the federal government into making marijuana, a recreational substance with no known additive qualities, into maki...
By Doug George-Kanentiio, Akwesasne Mohawk One of the more admirable traits of the Mohawk people is the ability to shake things up, to disturb the complacent, to agitate, confront and demand. It was no mere chance that Skennenrahowi, the Peacemaker, decided to enter Mohawk territory first as they had the most formidable reputation, one based on cruelty, vengeance and plain meanness. His reasoning was that if he could shift the Mohawks away from being artists of war to proponents of peace, he could affect similar changes in any people, at any...
By Doug George-Kanentiio When I watch the reports of the thousands of people coming north from their homelands in Central America I do not see Hondurans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorians; I see Indigenous people, our southern kin, fleeing countries which have become overwhelmed by vicious gangs whose drug money comes directly from sales made in the United States. Those gangs use violence to force compliance and terror to recruit new members. The national police agencies have been incapable of protecting their citizens resulting in the painful...
One of the basic rights of any people is to decided who, and who is not, a member. This determination is done among families, religious groups, fellowship lodges, motorcycle clubs and nations. It is one of the most important elements in defining true sovereignty along with culture, jurisdiction, land and history. The Mohawk Nation has long had a rational and methodical way to acknowledge citizenship. It could be a status resulting from being born on Mohawk territory to parents recognized as citizens or it could be secured by following the path...
Credit goes to the Mohawk leadership for trying to find a way to relieve the extraordinarily high utility rates paid by homes throughout Akwesasne. Those costs take a major bite out of the budgets for the families, a situation which is galling whenever one drives across the International Bridges, looks to the west and sees the St. Lawrence Power Dam, the largest source of hydro electrical power in the region-and knowing that both the land and the water used by that facility are a part of our resources, never ceded, never sold. The amount of...
There are many stories regarding survival in rough times. Here is one. There once was a man who lived in fear about the future. He foresaw a time when there would be hunger and poverty, when the climate would be one of long cold weeks, as the ground lay frozen beneath a weak sun. He decided that he would secretly hoard all the food he could get along with other things he thought people would need and thereby come to him to trade for the things he did not have. For many weeks he gathered dried corn, hid away racks of smoked meat, dug deep holes...
