Basic Call to Consciousness

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 case before the League of Nations. He arrived in September of 1923, took lodging in the Hotel des Families, and began to work toward presenting personally to the Council of the league the petition of his people. Though he met with no success, he fought doggedly. Winter came and went and in mid-April, he wrote to his wife and his sons and daughters, “I have no time to go anywhere, only sitting on the chair from morning till night copying and answering letters as they come and copying the documents and I have many things to do.” May came to the city by beautiful Lake Leman, but his thoughts were with his people beside the Grand River and like a good believer in the religion of the Longhouse, he was seeking aid through the prayer of his people to their God. To his brother Ales General, he wrote: “I believe it will be a good thing to have a meeting in one of the Longhouses, but you must (combine) all the good people and the children of the Longhouse, only those that are faithful believers in our religion and no other, and it must be very early in the morning to have this, so that our God may hear you and the children, and ask him to help us in our distress at this moment, and you must use Indian tobacco in our usual way when we ask help to our Great Spirit…and you must have a uniform on…and also ask God you wish the religion will keep up for a great many years to come and the Indian race also,,,”

By June, he had obtained the services of a Swiss lawyer who was preparing a statement of the case of the Six Nations in French. The money the Indians and their friends had raised in North America was almost gone, and some means of replenishing it was necessary.

Again, he wrote brother Alex from Geneva: “And we had a meeting of the Iroquois of the Six Nations of the Grand River Land (really the committee devoted to the interest of the Six Nations) on the 27th of June and the meeting decided to raffle off the two portrait pictures which they made and just think of it, these two pictures of myself with my costume on it brought 6,000 Swiss francs - it means a little over 1,000 dollars of our money…and it gives me very great lift to our fight…very strong committee, all the big people, of high class people. When the meeting takes place everybody looks decent of their suit and dress very well.” If these informal reports written to his beloved family in unfamiliar language seem naive, the campaign Deskaheh and his good friend, George Decker, were waging was not. It was hard-hitting, simple, direct. The embarrassed officials who had to deny this representative of a small nation the right to speak before the League Council committed to the Wilsonian doctrine of autonomy for small nations. These two made the situation more awkward for the British interests by getting into the public prints distributed in Geneva quotations from treaties and documents that Canada had decided to abrogate as “scraps of paper.”

The Cayuga was also attracting much favorable attention as a person. To the Irish woman correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal he seemed a “good-looking, broad-shouldered man, about 40 years of age ( he was actually 54) wearing ordinary dark clothes…and presenting every appearance of a well-to-do- farmer with the one exception of his beautiful moccasins…” She commented on the penetrating searching glance of his dark eyes, his kindly smile disclosing remarkably white teeth, and finished her description with the sentence “His beautifully-shaped but stern mouth, firm chin and heavy jawbones are those of the born fighter, the strong man who knows his strength and believes in it, whilst his shining eyes speak of enthusiasm and idealism.” But in the middle of this enthusiastic and sentimental interview, the chief had persuaded her to quote from the text of a memorial address to the Grand River Indians, dated as late as December 4, 1912, and filed by Great Britan:

“The Documents, Records, and Treaties between the British Governors in former times, and your wise forefathers, of which, in consequence of your request, authentic copies are now transmitted to you, all establish the Freedom and Independency of your nations.”

Continued next week.