Basic Call to Consciousness

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 concept of separate territories. The law unified the peoples, saying that they were distinct from one another only because they spoke different languages, and that the territories were common to all and that each individual member of any of the nations had full rights of hunting and occupation of all the lands of all the nations of the People of the Longhouse.

In terms of the internal affairs of the People of the Longhouse, the first and most important principle was that under the law of the people of the nations were one people. Since the Haudenosaunee call themselves the People of the Longhouse, the Peacemaker’s admonition was that under the law, the country of all the lands of all the nations of the People of the Longhouse, with the sky as its roof and the earth as its floor.

The peoples were assigned to clans by the Peacemaker, and so strong was to be the feeling of unity and oneness, between them that the members of the clan of one nation were admonished not to marry members of the same clan of another nation, so closely were they now related. The law bound them together as blood relatives.

In one motion, he abolished exclusive national territories and the concept of national minorities. Any member of the Five Nations was to have full rights in the country of any of the Five Nations with only one restriction, that he or she did not have the right to hold high public office, though that right could be conferred upon them by the host nation if they so wished.

The idea that the nations were united as one meant that the nations who were members of the Confederacy had agreed to surrender a part of their sovereignty to the other nations of the Confederacy. The Confederacy Council was to be the forum under which foreign nations and peoples could approach the People of the Longhouse. Any decision concerning the disposition of Seneca Lands must first pass through the Confederacy Council where the other nations, who also have rights in Seneca lands, can participate in the decision-making process.

The Peacemaker envisioned that the principles under which the Five Nations were governed could be extended far beyond the borders of the Haudenosaunee to all the peoples of the world. The law of the Peacemaker provides that any nations or people may find protection under the Great Tree of Peace which symbolized the laws of the Confederacy. He expected that the principles of the Confederacy would be well received by many nations, and to lay the basis of peaceful coexistence. With that in mind, the Constitution of the Five Nations provides that any nation may seek its protection through becoming knowledgeable about the laws and agreeing to follow the principles set forth in it. Many native nations accepted that offer.

The Five Nations agreed among themselves that in the event of an attack, they would organize a military force to repel the invader and to carry on the war in the invader’s country until the war was concluded. The opponent had an absolute right to a cessation of the hostilities at any time by simply calling for a truce. At that point, the process of negotiation went into action. The Constitution of the Five Nations prescribes that, in the event that another people are conquered, the Five Nations shall not impose upon them the Five Nations’ religion, nor collect tribute from them, nor subject them to any form of injustice. The Five Nations would not seize their territory. What was demanded weas that the offending nation of people put away their weapons of war and that they cease military aggression.

Any individual or group of individuals had the right according to the Constitution, to approach the Five Nations, learn the law, and agree to abide by it. When that happened, they were to be offered the protection of the law and the People of the Longhouse.

The vision of the Peacemaker that all the peoples of the world would live in peace under the protection of a law that required that hostilities be outlawed, and disputes offered a settlement process is yet today an exciting prospect. When the idea of a United Nations of the world was proposed toward the end of World War II, researchers were dispatched to find models in history for such an organization. For all practical purposes, the only model they found concerned the Constitution of the Five Nations whose author had envisioned exactly that.

Continued next issue.