Basic Call to Consciousness

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-hungry will get our farms away from us by hooks and crooks under your property laws in your courts that we do not understand and do not wish to learn. We would then be homeless and have to drift into your big cities to work for wages, to buy bread, and have to pay rent, as you call it, to live on this earth and to live in little rooms in which we would suffocate. We would then be scattered and lost to each other and lost among so many of you. Our boys and girls would then have to intermarry with you, or not at all. If consumption (tuberculosis) took us off or if we brought no children into the world, or our children mixed with the ocean of your blood, then there would be no Iroquois left. So, boys and girls, if you grow up and claim the right to live together and govern yourselves, and you ought to, and if you do not concede the same right to other peoples, and you will be strong enough to have your own way, you will be tyrants, won’t you? If you do not like that word, use a better one, if you find one, but don’t deceive yourselves by the words you use.

Boys, you respect your fathers because they are members of a free people and have a voice in the government over them and because they helped to make it and made it for themselves and will hand it down to you. If you knew that your fathers had nothing to do with the government they are under, but were mere subjects of other men’s wills, you could not look up to them and they could not look you in the face. They would not be real men then. Neither would we.

The fathers among us have been real men. They cry out now against the injustice of being treated as something else and being called incompetents who must be governed by other people – which means the people who think that way about them.

Boys – think this over. Do it before your minds lose the power to grasp the idea that there are other peoples in this world beside your own and with an equal right to be here. You see that a people as strong as yours is a great danger to other peoples near you. Already your will comes pretty near to being law in this world where no one can whip you. Think then what it will mean if you grow up with a will to be unjust to other peoples is no crime, that whatever your government does to other peoples is no crime, however wicked. I hope the Irish Americans hear that and will think about it – they used to when that shoe pinched their foot. This is the story of the Mohawks, the story of the Oneidas, of the Cayugas – I am a Cayuga, of the Onondagas, the Senecas, and the Tuscaroras. They are the Iroquois. Tell it to those who have not been listening. Maybe I will be stopped from telling it. But if I am prevented from telling it over, as I hope to do, the story will not be lost. I have already told it to thousands of listeners in Europe – it has gone into the records where your children can find it when I may be dead or be in jail in Switzerland – they have free speech in little Switzerland. One can tell the truth over there in public, even if it is uncomfortable for some great people.

This story comes straight from Deskaheh, one of the Chiefs of the Cayugas. I am the speaker of the Council of the Six Nations, the oldest League of Nations now existing. It was founded by Hiawatha. It is a League which is still alive and intends, as best it can, to defend the rights of the Iroquois to live under their own laws in their own little countries now left to them, to worship the Great Spirit in their own way, and to enjoy the rights which are as surely theirs as the white man’s rights are his own.

If you think the Iroquois are being wronged, write letters from Canada to your Ministers of Parliament, and from the United States to your Congressmen and tell them so. They will listen to you for you elect them. If they are against us, ask them to tell you when and how they got the right to govern people who have no part in your government and do not live in your country but live in their own. They can’t tell you that.

Continued next week