Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

By pretending that the Haudenosaunee government no longer exists, both the U.S. and Britain illegally took Haudenosaunee territories by simply saying the territories belong to them. To this day, Canada, the former colony of England, has never made a treaty for the lands in the St. Lawrence River Valley. But the truth continues to remain and plagued officials yet today. The Haudenosaunee territories are not and have never been part of the U. S. or Canada. The citizens of the Haudenosaunee are a separate people, distinct from either Canada or the United States. Because of this, the Haudenosaunee refuses to recognize a border drawn by a foreign people through our lands.

The policy of the dispossession of North American Native peoples, first by the European kingdoms, and later by the settler regimes, began with the first contact. Dispossession took a number of approaches: the so-called “just warfare” was a strategy by which Native Nations were deemed to have offended the Crown and their elimination by fire and sword was justified. That was followed by the Treaty Period in which Native nations were “induced” to sell their lands and move westward. The Treaty Period was in full swing at the beginning of the 19th Century. By 1815, the governor of New York was agitating for the removal of all Native people from the state for “their own good.”

While the infamous Trail of Tears was removing Native peoples from the Southeast to Oklahoma, New York State was lobbying for a treaty in 1838 which was intended to remove the Haudenosaunee, who were on lands that the state wanted, away to an area of Kansas. The principal victims were to be the Senecas.

Like the Termination Policy a century later, the Removal Policy was eventually abandoned due in part to the bad press received during the Cherokee Removal in 1832. During the process of the Cherokee removal. Thousands of Cherokee men, women, children and elders were subjected to conditions which caused them to die of exposure, starvation and neglect.

In 1871, the U.S. Congress passed an Act which included a clause that treaties would no longer be made with “Indian Nations.” It was at this time that official United States policy toward Native people began to shift to a new strategy. Reports to Congress began to urge the Native people be assimilated into U.S. society as quickly as possible. The policy of fire and sword simply began to become less popular among an increasingly significant percentage of the United States population. The principal hindrance to the assimilation of the Native people, according to its most vocal adherents, was the Indian land base. The Native land base was held in common, and this was perceived as an uncivilized and un-American practice. The assimilationists urged that, if every Indian family owned its own farmstead, they could more readily acquire “civilized” traits. Thus, the Dawes Act of 1886 ordered the Native nations stripped of their land base, resulting in the transfer of millions of acres to Europeans hands..

There was consistent pressure in the New York Legislature to “civilize” the Haudenosaunee. To accomplish this, all vestiges of Haudenosaunee nationality needed to be destroyed. This is the 19th Century origin of the policy to “educate” the Indian to be culturally European. It was thought that when the Indian was successfully Europeanized, he would no longer be distinct and separate, and that there would no longer be an indigenous people with their own customs and economy. At that point, the Indian could be simply declared to have assimilated into the United States or Canadian society. The net effect would dispense with the entire concept of Native nations, and that would extinguish the claims of those nations to their lands. The report of the Whipple Committee to the New York Legislature in 1888 was clear: “Exterminate the Tribe.”

In 1924, the Canadian government “abolished” Haudenosaunee government at the Grand River territory. The Oneida and Akwesasne territories were invaded and occupied by Canadian troops in order to establish neo-colonial “elective systems” in the name of democracy. Also in 1924, the United States government passed legislation declaring all American Indians to be United States citizens. The 1924 Citizenship Act was an attempt to deny the existence of Native nations, and the rights of these Native nations to their lands. The denial of the existence of Native nations is a way of legitimizing the colonists’ claims to the lands.

Continued next week.