Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

Policies of Oppression in the name of “Democracy”

Economy of the Haudenosaunee

Our leaders, in fact, are leaders of categories of large extended families. Those large extended families function as economic units in a Way of Life which has as its base the Domestic Mode of Production. Before the colonists came, we had our own means of production and distribution adequate to meet all the people’s needs. We would have been unable to exist as nations were it not so.

Our basic economic unit is the family. The means of distribution, aside from simple trade, consists of a kind of spiritual tradition manifested in the functions of the religious/civic leaders in a highly complex religious, governmental, and social structure.

The Haudenosaunee have no concept of private property. This concept would be a contradiction to a people who believe that the Earth belongs to the Creator. Property is an idea by which people can be excluded from having access to lands, or other means of producing a livelihood. That idea would destroy our culture, which requires that every individual live in service to the Spiritual Ways and the People. The idea (property) would produce slavery. The acceptance of the idea of property would produce leaders whose functions would favor excluding people from access to property, and they would cease to perform their functions as leaders of our societies and distributors of goods.

Before the colonists came, we had no consciousness about a concept of commodities. Everything, even the things we make, belong to the Creators of Life and are to be returned ceremonially, and in reality, to the owners. Our people live a simple life, one unencumbered by the need of endless material commodities. The fact that their needs are few means that all the peoples’ needs are easily met. It is also true that our means of distribution is an eminently fair process, one in which all of the people share in all the material wealth all of the time.

Our Domestic Mode of Production has a number of definitions which are culturally specific. Our people’s economy requires a community of people and is not intended to define an economy based on the self-sufficient nuclear family. Some modern economists estimate that in most parts of the world, the isolated nuclear family cannot produce enough to survive in a Domestic Mode of Production. In any case, that particular mode of subsistence, by our cultural definition, is not an economy at all.

Ours was a wealthy society. No one suffered from want. All had the right to food, clothing and shelter. All shared in the bounty of the spiritual ceremonies and the Natural world. No one stood in any material relationship of power over anyone else. No one could deny anyone access to the things they needed. All in all, before colonists came, ours was a beautiful rewarding way of life.

The colonists arrived with many institutions and strategies designed to destroy the Way of Life of the People of the Longhouse. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain led a French military expedition that attacked a part of Mohawk people on the lake now named “Lake Champlain.” Champlain arrived in search of wealth and was specifically interested in generating some kind of trade in beaver pelts with the Algonquin people of the area. He demonstrated his firearms to them, letting them see, for the first time, the power of guns.

Continued next week.