A Voice from the Eastern Door
A Voice from the Eastern Door
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The game of Lacrosse has been a mainstay among the Rotinonshonni. The first purpose of the game is spiritual. It is a medicine game to be played upon request of any individual, clan, nation or the Confederacy itself. Iroquois Lacrosse is a holistic process that binds communities and the nations of the Rotinonshonni together. This is the reason that we say it was a gift to our people from the Creator. Lacrosse is a “medicine” game because it promotes the health and strength of the Nation, ensuring a continuance of our tradition and an und...
Given the impending world crises in the areas of food and energy, a comprehensive strategy for survival will include a concept of liberation technologies which free people from dependency on economics which are controlled by external interests. Liberation technologies have political cousins, just as colonizing technologies have, and those political cousins need careful consideration. Liberation technologies are accompanied by liberation political structures and liberation theologies. Of these two entities, colonized peoples in the West would...
Continued from last week. Our Strategy for Survival The dialectical opposite of that process would be the rekindling on a planetary basis of locally based culture. Prior to the advent of colonialism, culture was defined as the way of life by which people survived within their own environment, and their own environment was defined as the area in which they lived. Thus, the process of survival involved the use of locally developed technologies which met the specific needs of the area. It was mentioned earlier that technologies have political...
Our Strategy for Survival Continued from last week. The specter of regional famine, or even worldwide famines, cannot be interpreted as the simple product of a world of scarce resources overwhelmed by the needs of expanding human populations. The situation is not that simple. In the United States, for example, a simple program of energy conservation – insulation of dwellings, office and industrial buildings would cut back energy consumption by more than 25% in 10 years, and even given growth predictions in terms of populations and economy, the...
Continued from last week. Our strategy for survival: The invasion of the Western hemisphere by European powers was preceded by centuries of social development which had resulted in societies in which the interests of the few had effectively become national policies, and the interests of the many were without voice in national affairs. In order that we might formulate a strategy for survival in the modern world, it had been necessary that we look at the forces and processes which threaten survival, and to begin to understand the real...
Continued from last week. We, the Haudenosaunee, have clear choices about the future. One of the choices which we have faced is whether to become Westernized, or to remain true to the Way of Life our forefathers developed for us. We have stated our understanding of the history of the changes that have created the present conditions. We have chosen to remain Haudenosaunee, and within the context of our Way of Life, to set a course of liberation for ourselves and the future generations. Our liberation process is not one that is exclusive to us...
Continued from last week. Although treaties may often have been bad deals for the Native nations, the United States and Canada chose not to honor those which exist because to do so would require the return of much of the economic base and sovereignty to the Haudenosaunee. The treaties contain the potential for independent survival of the Native people. The dishonoring of treaties is essential to the goal of the U.S. and Canadian vested interests which are organized to remove all obstacles to their exploitation of the Earth and her peoples. The...
Continued from last week. By pretending that the Haudenosaunee government no longer exists, both the U.S. and Britain illegally took Haudenosaunee territories by simply saying the territories belong to them. To this day, Canada, the former colony of England, has never made a treaty for the lands in the St. Lawrence River Valley. But the truth continues to remain and plagued officials yet today. The Haudenosaunee territories are not and have never been part of the U. S. or Canada. The citizens of the Haudenosaunee are a separate people,...
Policies of Oppression in the Name of “Democracy” Economic History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. Throughout this period many other Native peoples had been moving into our territories to gain some respite from the colonial onslaught. Far to the South, in the colonized area known as the Carolinas, the Tuscarora were faced with imminent destruction. In their drive to gain some more land and economic advantage, English colonizers were using the same techniques which were being employed in the Northeast. In 1713 the dis...
Policies of Oppression in the Name of “Democracy” Economic History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. European Churches, especially in colonial practice, take on their feudal roles as economic institutions. Among natural world people, they are the most dangerous agents of destruction. They invariably seek to destroy the spiritual/economic bonds of the people to the forests, land, and animals. They spread both ideologies and technologies which make people slaves to the extractive system which defines colonialism. In 1704, the fir...
Policies of Oppression in the Name of “Democracy” Continued from last week. Champlain, accompanied by his newly found business partners, marched into the center of Mohawk territory. This war party encountered about 200 Mohawks. The first volley of gunfire killed three men, and the second created such confusion that the Mohawks retreated, leaving twelve men who were taken captive. The period of warfare which follows this incident has come to be known as the “Beaver Wars.” The introduction of trade in beaver pelts inevitably triggered a long se...
Continued from last week. Policies of Oppression in the name of “Democracy” Economy of the Haudenosaunee Our leaders, in fact, are leaders of categories of large extended families. Those large extended families function as economic units in a Way of Life which has as its base the Domestic Mode of Production. Before the colonists came, we had our own means of production and distribution adequate to meet all the people’s needs. We would have been unable to exist as nations were it not so. Our basic economic unit is the family. The means of distr...
Continued from last issue Policies of Oppression in the Name of “Democracy” Economic History of the Haudenosaunee The Haudenosaunee, People of the Longhouse, who are known to many Europeans as the Six Nations, have inhabited their territories since time immemorial. During the time prior to the coming of the Europeans, it is said that ours were a happy and prosperous people. Our lands provided abundantly for our needs. Our people lived long, healthy, and productive lives. Before the Europeans came, we were an affluent people, rich in the gif...
Continued from last issue. Policies of Oppression In the Name of “Democracy” Economic History of the Haudenosaunee The Haudenosaunee People of the Longhouse, who are known to many Europeans as the Six Nations Iroquois, have inhabited their territories since time immemorial. During the time prior to the coming of the Europeans, it is said that ours were a happy and prosperous people. Our lands provided abundantly for our needs. Our people lived long, healthy, and productive lives. Before the Europeans came, we were an affluent people, rich in th...
Continued from last issue. Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Also in 1924, Canada military invaded our territories on the Grand River and forcibly installed a colonial government there. The episode was repeated by Canada in 1934 on our territories at the Thames River community of Oneida. In 1948 and 1950, Congress passed laws giving civil and criminal jurisdiction to New York State, although Congress was never given such jurisdiction by the Haudenosaunee. In 1958, Congress passed Public Law 88-533, the Kinzua Dam Act, which resulted in the...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. The United States entered into solemn treaties with the Haudenosaunee, and each time has ignored virtually each and every provision of the treaties which guarantee our rights as a separate nation. Only the sections of the treaties which refer to land cessions, sections which were fraudulently obtained, have validity in the eye of the United States courts or governments. The mechanism for the colonization of the Haudenosaunee territory is found, in legal fiction, the United States...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. Their reasoning is patently medieval and racist: “Civilization is that quality possessed by people with civil governments, civil government is Europe’s kind of government; Indians did not have Europe’s kind of government, therefore Indians were not civilized. Uncivilized people live in wild anarchy; therefore, Indians did not have government at all. And therefore, Europeans could not have been doing anything wrong – were in fact performing a noble mission – by bringing governmen...
Legal history of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. “It is the market, in one form or another, that pulls out from the compact social relations of self-contained primitive communities some parts of men’s doings and puts people into fields of economic activity that are increasingly independent of the rest of what goes on in local life. The local traditional and moral world and the wider and more impersonal world of the market are in principle destinct, and opposed to each other…” The European “discovery” of North America led to the...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee, continued from last week. Feudal society in Europe appears to have arisen as the result of a number of conditions which existed following the dissolution of the Roman Empire. It was based in a system by which rulers of warrior castes became strong enough to demand and extract fealty from warriors. There arose, generally, an administrative center, usually a castle, and around these were agricultural people who were usually protected from outside aggression by their “lord”, the sovereign of the manor. It app...
Continued from last week. The Obvious Fact of Our Continuing Existence Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Since the beginning of human time, the Haudenosaunee have occupied the distinct territories that we call our homelands. That occupation has been both organized and continuous. We have long defined the borders of our country, have long maintained the exclusive use-right of the areas within those borders, and have used those territories as the economic and cultural definitions of our nation. The Haudenosaunee are a distinct people, with our...
Continued from last week. It is necessary, at this time, that we begin in a process of critical analysis of the West’s historical processes, to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance w...
Continued from last week. The Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal. The Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an unassimilable element to the civilizations of the West. The forests provided materials for larger ships, the land was fresh and fertile for agriculture surpluses, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for the conquering invaders. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, North America was already a leader in the area of the development...
Continued from last issue The area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the homeland, in ancient times, of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. The Semitic peoples, were among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This development led to the early development of towns, and eventually cities. The manipulation of the waters, another form of spirit life, represented another way in which humans developed a technology which reproduced a function of Nature. Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical...
Continued from last issue Spiritualism The Highest Form of Political Consciousness Haudenosaunee Message to the Western World The Haudenosaunee, or the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, has existed on this land since the beginning of human memory. Our culture is among the most ancient continuously existing cultures in the world. We still remember the original instructions of the Creators of Life on this place we call Etenoha – Mother Earth. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We are Ongwhehonwe – the Real People. In the beginning we...
Continued from last issue The Haudenosaunee raised their children from the cradleboard to be participants in the culture. The ways of the People of the Longhouse have always been powerfully spiritual in nature, and it is true that the government, the economy, everything that is Haudenosaunee has deep spiritual roots. The papers which follow are the position papers which were presented by the Haudenosaunee to the Non-governmental Organizations of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September 1977. The Non-governmental Organizations had...
