We Are Instructed to Love Our Great-Great Grandchildren

By Doug George-Kanentiio

One of the fundamental teachings of Skennenrahowi was that we have a duty to ensure our descendants unto the seventh generation have the things they need to live in peace and freedom on lands which are clean and fertile.

This is a prime directive, a lawful obligation which compels us to think seriously about the effects our collective and individual actions have on the unborn, those who faces are yet in the earth. That phrase is a powerful one for who among us would scar the faces or our grandchildren or deny them water to drink, fields to plant, medicines to cure or trees to gather?

The genius of the Peacemaker was to remove faith as a spiritual component since that emotion is forever beyond our knowing but if we are surrounded by beauty and we walk in beauty, to borrow from the Dine, we may come to have an intimate knowledge about Creation and the answers to our questions as to why we walk the earth and where our spirits go once our physical bodies are returned to the embrace of the earth.

Skennenrahowi understood that there is a compulsion by some humans to treat the earth as a dead entity, to create a heaven and a hell, to force us to look elsewhere for happiness and peace; that there are artificial classes in some societies who invent “religion” so they may exercise control over others and in their own fear physically enrich themselves by forced bondage and the destruction of this planet.

After all, these religious, political and economic elite reason, we might as well enjoy our “heaven” now since eternal damnation surely awaits. It was these classes, the super wealthy and the socially powerful, who were criticized and condemned by Yesuah ben Yosef (Jesus Christ) before they tortured and executed him. This was also the fate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr who was tolerated as a leader of the civil rights movement but once he became involved in the fight to eliminate poverty by the equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation he had to be silenced.

Yeshua died before he could establish a system of government based on equality and natural law. Our Peacemaker was honored in his lifetime since he was able to create a way of governing based upon his teachings now known as the Great Law. There is no more rational way for humans to live on the earth than to learn from these rules and act accordingly.

In our current situation the Law itself needs to be applied directly as to how we must live. It needs to be taught beyond the annual recitation and actually brought into classrooms in all of our communities. It needs to be embraced if we are to physically survive what we know is certain to come about. The Law itself gives us direction, comfort and power. We should formally teach those who would be our leaders the skills necessary to govern.

My late uncle Angus Sohahiio George spoke of a time when the people of Akwesasne were confined to the “reservation” and needed passes issued by the Indian Agent to leave. He said the result was near starvation in a region with a wealth of natural resources and that people lived in small houses since there was a scarcity of wood for heat. This caused many residents to find refuge in the Adirondacks and in the forests of eastern Ontario during the long winters. The Indian Agent knew the people would return for the fish runs in the spring.

Despite these hardships the Mohawk people were able to act in accordance with their principles and with a determination that their children and grandchildren would have a culture, a language and the traditional knowledge to keep them alive. They planted trees, taught us how to heal, what to plant, how to preserve along with a philosophy which gave us the spiritual strength to endure.

We need to apply those teachings, so they don’t become slogans. We need to heal Akwesasne by planting tens of thousands of trees of diverse species. We need to insure our children have the physical conditioning and the environmental skills to enable them to withstand the coming earthquakes, floods and destructive winds. We need to see beyond those issues which are distracting us and we must not make fatal compromises in our duties towards the unborn. This means no enforcement of the fake border, no contracts with hydrofracking pipeline companies, no dope smuggling, no alien laws on our territory.

Our legacy should be one in which we applied our traditional laws and teachings to our everyday lives which is the greatest gift we can give to our children. The seventh generation is not simply a catchy thing to say, it should be the basis of whatever governs our thinking, our governance, our families.