A Voice from the Eastern Door
A Voice from the Eastern Door
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Continued from last issue. The Haudenosaunee address to the Western World Geneva, Switzerland Autumn 1977 Introduction It was not long ago that the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations, were a powerful people, occupying a vast territory stretching from Vermont to Ohio, and from present-day Quebec to Tennessee. At the period of first contact early during the 17th Century, the Haudenosaunee occupied hundreds of towns and villages throughout the country. “Haudenosaunee” is a word which means “people who build” and is the proper name of the people of the...
Continued from last issue We were in a tall, cavernous room at the United Nations, and this was the last day. Segwalise of the Haudenosaunee Delegation was about to speak. It had been a long week, a week of sleeping maybe three, maybe four hours a night, a week of transatlantic flights and hurried breakfasts and the ever-present need to say things right. A week of pressure and energy – constant energy. Because something had happened in this conference, something was helping. People were locking together and one after another they had t...
Continued from last week This was the message of this U.N. conference. And if it was a message that couldn’t be delivered in its totality, it was because it is not a message of words only. It is about a real world, and about a real people and – and in Geneva, after 500 years of contact, it was a message about how these people, by no means perfect, but with a sane, healthy vision of existence, guided by concepts of unity and reciprocity, the positive values of non-accumulation of wealth and, most fundamentally, an all-encompassing com...
Continued from last week. North and South – the American contingent. The affluence of the North: the poverty of the South. The “under-development” of the South; the “over-development” of the North. And what does it all represent to Indian people? Another Question: What does colonialism mean? Colonialism is the process by which we are systematically confused. Colonialism-from the word colony: to be controlled from afar. Confusion-an agent of control. The confusion takes many shapes and forms (gimmicks) that overlap creating layers, many, man...
Continued from last week. He explained the meaning of the Sacred Pipe. This was his mission – to open the ceremony and to carry and offer the Pipe. He was moved, he said, by all the words he had heard, by the strength that they represented together, how it all fit, and he knew that it was good. Then he spoke of the Pipe, of the origins of the Lakota, of the power the Pipe had and of the many manifestations he had witnessed of that power – how it had been used at Wounded Knee, and at the many trials, how he had seen, over and over, the min...
Continued from last week. Phillip Deer sat in a straight-backed chair, with a red blanket folded on his lap. Now it was late at night, and we were in the basement of a building in Geneva and before him, sitting in a circle, were the group of six men who had been selected by all the delegates to be the principal speakers, to make the initial unifying presentation, on that first day of the conference. There were, Oren Lyons, from the Iroquois Confederacy; Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia; Jose Mendoza, Guaimi from Panama; Russell Means, Lakota...
Continued from last week. Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia, stood up. He too was adamant. “We have heard their speeches,” he said. “All their polite words, all their empty words. No. I am here for my people. I am here to speak out, to tell what we are enduring. I don’t have time to give.” A couple of people who had been working with the NGO committee then tried to explain the situation. It was customary, they said that the hosts and the other observer groups represented would give welcoming addresses. There were about four such groups. T...
Continued from last week. Geneva, 1977: A report on the Hemispheric Movement of Indigenous Peoples The Immigration guards and officials at the Geneva airport were perplexed. The twenty-two delegates from the Six Nations (Iroquois) Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee, were lined up, passports in hand, a little tired after a nine-hour overnight flight but now looking serious and alert as one of their passports had been handed across the glass barrier and the blonde guards with caps on were turning it over in their hands. It was a small, brown book,...
Continued from last week. One word more so that you will be sure to remember our people. If it had not been for them, you would not be here. If one hundred and sixty winters ago, our warriors had not helped the British at Quebec, Quebec would have fallen to the British. The French would then have driven your English-speaking forefathers out of his land, bag and baggage. Then it would have been a French speaking people here today, not you. That part of your history cannot be blotted out by the stealing of our wampum belts in which that is...
Continued from last week. You Mothers, I hear you have a great deal to say about your government. Our Mothers have always had a hand in ours. Maybe you can do something to help us now. If you white mothers are hard-hearted and will not, perhaps you boys and girls who are listening and who have loved to read stories about our people – the true ones I mean – will help us when you grow up if there are any of us left to be helped. If you are bound to treat us as though we were citizens under your government, then those of your people who are land-h...
Continued from last week. About three winters ago, the Canadian Government set out to take mortgages on farms of our returned soldiers to secure loans made to them intending to use Canadian courts to enforce these mortgages in name of Canadian authority within our country. When Ottawa tried that, our people resented it. We knew that would mean the end of our government. Because we did so, the Canadian Government began to enforce all sorts of Dominion and Provincial laws over us and quartered armed men among us to enforce Canadian laws and...
The Last Speech of Deskaheh (on the evening of March, 10, 1925, suffering from a serious attack of pleurisy and pneumonia, he made his last speech. It was before a radio microphone in Rochester. Once more, and more forcefully than ever, he hurled defiance at big nations who disregard the claims of smaller peoples.) Nearly everyone who is listening to me is a pale face, I suppose I am not. My skin is not red but that is what my people are called by others. My skin is brown, light brown, but our cheeks have a little flush and that is why we are...
Time wore on and though a few Englishmen and Canadians spoke up for the Six Nations Indians, though the representatives of the Netherlands and Albania listened sympathetically and spoke of supporting his petition, Deskaheh began to suspect that his cause was lost. News from the homeland was bad. The Canadian Government had announced a “free election,” which would in effect determine whether or not the Six Nations Government of Grand River Land should be dissolved. For this vote, the Canadian Government agent had taken possession of the Six Nat...
The raiders arrested and jailed a number of Iroquois, and though Deskaheh was known to abstain from alcoholic liquors, they searched his house on the pretext of looking for illegal beverages. The Canadian Government then ordered barracks built for the housing of their police and Grand River was suddenly an occupied nation. Deskaheh now began to fight back desperately. With the Six Nations Counsel, George P. Decker (a white Rochester lawyer), as his companion, he again used his passport, this time to travel to Geneva to bring his people’s c...
Deskaheh: An Iroquois Patriot Fights for International Recognition The old chief, Clinton Rickard, lived in a little house near the Niagara County town of Sanborn on the reservation of his nation, the Tuscarora’s. People of the Iroquois Confederacy will always remember that house – not merely because Clinton Rickard had done many good things for his people in his long lifetime, but because at his invitation, another fine man, ahomeless exile, lived out his last days there. Though his name is known to few white people, no loyal Iroquois wil...
Continued from last week. In a way, the Peacemaker was centuries ahead of his time. He set forth a system of government organization which was a marvelously complex enactment of the concept of participatory (as opposed to representative) democracy. Under the rules of the law, councils of women appointed men who were to act more as conduits of the will of the people than as independent representatives of the people. The society was founded on concepts of moral justice and not of statute law and the rules of the society were designed to insure...
Continued from last week. Internally, the law was to be the power by which the people were united ideologically and administratively under a dispute settlement process to which all had agreed to submit and to remove those customs of the past which had sparked conflict and fostered disunity. The path to unity was a difficult one indeed. The territory of the People of the Longhouse had been composed of five distinct countries, each of which sometimes jealously guarded their hunting lands from intrusion by the others. The Peacemaker abolished the...
Continued from last week “Righteousness” refers to something akin to the ideology of the people using their purest and most unselfish minds. It occurs when the people put their minds and emotions in harmony with the flow of the universe and the intentions of the Good Mind or the Great Creature. The principles of Righteousness demand that all thoughts of prejudice, privilege or superiority be swept away and that recognition be given to the reality that the creation is intended for the benefit of all equally – even the birds and animals, the t...
Thoughts of Peace: The Great Law Haudenosaunee oral history related that long before the Europeans arrived, Native Peoples of the Northeast Woodlands had reached a crisis. It is said that during this time a man or woman might be killed or injured for any slight offense by his or her enemies, and that blood feuds between the clans and villages ravaged the people until no one was safe. It was during this time that a male child was born to a woman of the Wyandot people living on the north side of Lake Ontario near the Bay of Quinte. It would...
Continued from last week At about this time, the State of New York was attempting to negotiate its own treaties with our peoples. The settlers knew that our governing council would never relinquish lands, or allow their settlements. In response, New York began the practice of negotiating with any native person who might grant them the concessions, especially the land concessions, they wished. Dozens of state treaties were signed by people who were under the influence of alcohol at the time and who often represented no one. A number of treaties...
Akwesasne Notes The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois Confederacy, are an ancient people of North America. Our tradition states that our people originate in the northeastern woodlands of North America. There are no stories within that tradition concerning migration across frozen lands to the area we occupy. We have been and continue to be the original inhabitants of these lands. Our existence in these lands has not been one of absolute peace and tranquility. We have had to develop the civilization we enjoy. There was a time...
Continued from last week. And they say that it’s not long after that, the Creator, that’s where Teharonhiawako, the holder of the skies, his name now changes to Shonkwaia’tison. He’s the one that created everything. So we now call him Shonkwaia’tison. It’s not long after this point when he instructs the four races of their duties in this natural world that they are placed in. They’re to take care of this, because he said, he was going to leave this land. Shonkwaia’tison was going to leave and go back to the Sky World. And he’s the only o...
Continued from last week. So they say again, after that, not long after that, one day Teharonhiawako was down on the earth. And he’s all by himself now. And his brother Sawiskera is living up in his “cabin in the sky” (I guess we can call it). Teharonhiawako is on the earth and he’s made two dolls. And they say that he used some of the Mother Earth. And that’s again one of the terms that I forgot to mention before when that young woman had died, the two boys’ mother, that the Grandmother told them that if they ever missed their mother, all...
Continued from last week And they also say that they split the day at that time. And what that means is that the daylight hours would be the time that Teharonhiawako, the holder of the skied, would carry on all of the business and duties that he had to do would happen during the daylight hours. And Sawiskera’s time of business would be after darkness, all of the night-time hours. And they say that it was made that way because for Sawiskera it would be at night and he couldn’t see very well at night and he couldn’t get in as much trouble at ni...
Continued from last week And he understood what had happened when he thought back to the winter. And he went back to where his brother’s small dwelling was and he went in and grabbed him out. And he called him outside and they began to argue very much. And they started to push each other and they started hitting each other. And they got into a big fight. And it was really serious this time. They say that they were hitting very hard and they started to throw rocks and pick up things and swing things at each other. And Teharonhiawako accused h...
