Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

One word more so that you will be sure to remember our people. If it had not been for them, you would not be here. If one hundred and sixty winters ago, our warriors had not helped the British at Quebec, Quebec would have fallen to the British. The French would then have driven your English-speaking forefathers out of his land, bag and baggage. Then it would have been a French speaking people here today, not you. That part of your history cannot be blotted out by the stealing of our wampum belts in which that is recorded.

I could tell you much more about our people, and I may some other time, if you would like to have me.

One by one, Deskaheh told of the agreements solemnly made on the sworn good faith of each of the two big governments that had guaranteed the Indian his own land, fair treatment, independence.

Sick, fever-ridden, despairing, Deskaheh raised his voice to speak his last proud message.

The next morning, Deskaheh was in Rochester hospital. Eight weeks later he knew he was dying and asked to be taken back to Clinton Rickard’s home on the Tuscarora Reservation.

While he made ready for his journey along the Milky Way to the Spirit World, his brother, wife and children tried to cross the border at Niagara Falls to be with him and were refused permission to do so.

On June 27, 1925, alone and with his eyes set toward the Six Nations Land he had tried to serve, he died.

White Americans and white Canadians have done little to keep the story of Deskaheh alive. Few have seen the small stone that marks his grave in the burial grounds of the Cayuga Longhouse. Fewer still care to remember his words. They make the white man uncomfortable because they bear so emphatically on contemporary thinking about the native people, on proposed laws in the legislative bodies of the states and the nations that would still, despite their agreements to (in Deskaheh’s words) “protect little peoples and to enforce respect for treaties,” regard Indians as incompetent to be governed for their own good by wiser neighbors.

But the Iroquois remember. And when they speak of Deskaheh, the white men who know his story grow troubled, wondering if they and their governments could by some unlikely chance have dealt unjustly with a great man.

Geneva, 1977: A report on the Hemispheric Movement of Indigenous Peoples

We were in a tall, cavernous room at the United Nations and all around the wall and the doors there were people crowded.

The Indian delegates were all in the center, seated in rows, with long thin tables before them, and they had earphones on. To their right and to their left, sitting on both sides of the room so that they faced each other and looked over the Indian people were the representatives of the various governments.

Segwalise of the Haudenosaunee delegation was about to speak. He was in front facing us. Next to him was Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia, and next to him was Jose Mendoza, Guami from Panama. Both had spoken. This was the last day. It had been up to them to summarize the conditions and aspirations of their Indian peoples in South and Central America, and as we had come to expect throughout that week, they had spoken out directly and eloquently.

Now it was Segwalise’s turn. He did a curious thing. He didn’t speak to the U.N. officials and he didn’t speak directly to the Indian delegates, as everyone had done up to that point. No, he turned instead and faced the representatives of the various governments. He looked toward them, and he began to speak. Suddenly the focus and the tension in the room changed and everyone felt that something real and immediate was about to happen. Segwalise was speaking to the enemy.

All week there had been pressure felt. At first slowly, but then fairly rapidly the word spread that in this conference no one was holding back – finally, thoroughly and uncompromisingly that the Indian peoples of the American continents had not died, were about to die, that they may now be cultures within cultures and Nations within Nations and that their oppression may have been long and arduous – the cruelest, maybe in recorded history – but if some things had been lost, nothing had been given up, nothing. Now they had come, one hundred thirty people, representing Hopis and Lakota, Haudenosaunee and Guaimi, Mesquito and Mapuche, Northern Cheyenne and Ojibway, Aymara, Muskogee and Quichua, Schuar, Apache and Nahuatl, Quiche and Cree, and many, many more, and they had brought a message.

To be continued.