THE MESSAGE OF THE KAYANEREKOWA

Continued from last week.

THE HIAWATHA WAMPUM:

From what we know…the Indians had a tradition of law and the Iroquois are our surviving example of it. The Iroquois possessed a tradition of law, and that tradition of law is what has created them as a people. That part is definitely true, but the Iroquois tradition is not a tradition of law, exactly. The Iroquois tradition is a tradition of responsible thinking. It is not something written in paragraphs and lines because it doesn’t matter whether the letter of the thing is right. The questions that have to be before the people are what is the thinking? Is the thinking right?

… As they were standing on the shore watching theses people come ashore, the Indians carried with them a tradition of meeting and democracy of free speech, of free thinking, of tolerance for each other’s differences of religion, of all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights, of all those things that we say are truly American, were born on this soil generations before Columbus ever set sail.

If the Indians hadn’t been on that shore, if there had been no one living in the woods, do you really believe that all those ideas would have found a birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance over questions of religion, killing people who suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe, burning people who said that the sun wasn’t only one little thing in a whole bunch of stars, killing people who said they did not want to sent their taxes to Rome? Do you think that tradition would have found its way, by itself? I think not.

(The Indian Way is a Thinking Tradition, Sotsistowaneh (John Mohawk), in Indian Roots of American Democracy, Northeast Indian Quarterly, 1988,p. 16)

Our law is a law of the mind. From giving thanks to the clearing of the mind through condolence, to coming to one mind in council, to the realization that the Good Mind pursues and accepts peace, the stream that flows though the entire law is that of the mind.

The law is created and maintained by the Good Mind---a mind that is both “used well” and “used for good”, since the one will inevitably lead to the other.

Because it is a law of the mind, it is a law of ideas and principles, rather than that of words and details.

It is natural that the law of should be preserved in the mind, as well. That is, the human mind is the storage device that was chosen by the Haudenosaunee, just as statute books were chosen by the Europeans. A law that is kept in the minds of the people will cause them to keep the law “in mind” in their lives—while a law that is kept in institutions will gradually find its enforcement by those institutions rather than by the people themselves.

Neither way of law is better than the other. Over three centuries, each has influenced the other deeply. Each has influenced the people deeply.