Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

Continued from last issue We were in a tall, cavernous room at the United Nations, and this was the last day. Segwalise of the Haudenosaunee Delegation was about to speak. It had been a long week, a...

Continued from last week This was the message of this U.N. conference. And if it was a message that couldn’t be delivered in its totality, it was because it is not a message of words only. It is a...

Continued from last week. North and South – the American contingent. The affluence of the North: the poverty of the South. The “under-development” of the South; the “over-development” of the North...

Continued from last week. He explained the meaning of the Sacred Pipe. This was his mission – to open the ceremony and to carry and offer the Pipe. He was moved, he said, by all the words he had h...

Continued from last week. Phillip Deer sat in a straight-backed chair, with a red blanket folded on his lap. Now it was late at night, and we were in the basement of a building in Geneva and before...

Continued from last week. Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia, stood up. He too was adamant. “We have heard their speeches,” he said. “All their polite words, all their empty words. No. I am here for m...

Continued from last week. Geneva, 1977: A report on the Hemispheric Movement of Indigenous Peoples The Immigration guards and officials at the Geneva airport were perplexed. The twenty-two delegates...

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...

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 mo...

Continued from last week. About three winters ago, the Canadian Government set out to take mortgages on farms of our returned soldiers to secure loans made to them intending to use Canadian courts to...

The Last Speech of Deskaheh (on the evening of March, 10, 1925, suffering from a serious attack of pleurisy and pneumonia, he made his last speech. It was before a radio microphone in Rochester. Once...

Time wore on and though a few Englishmen and Canadians spoke up for the Six Nations Indians, though the representatives of the Netherlands and Albania listened sympathetically and spoke of supporting...

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...

Deskaheh: An Iroquois Patriot Fights for International Recognition The old chief, Clinton Rickard, lived in a little house near the Niagara County town of Sanborn on the reservation of his nation,...

Continued from last week. In a way, the Peacemaker was centuries ahead of his time. He set forth a system of government organization which was a marvelously complex enactment of the concept of...

Continued from last week. Internally, the law was to be the power by which the people were united ideologically and administratively under a dispute settlement process to which all had agreed to...

Continued from last week “Righteousness” refers to something akin to the ideology of the people using their purest and most unselfish minds. It occurs when the people put their minds and emotions in...

Thoughts of Peace: The Great Law Haudenosaunee oral history related that long before the Europeans arrived, Native Peoples of the Northeast Woodlands had reached a crisis. It is said that during this...

Continued from last week At about this time, the State of New York was attempting to negotiate its own treaties with our peoples. The settlers knew that our governing council would never relinquish...

Akwesasne Notes The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois Confederacy, are an ancient people of North America. Our tradition states that our people originate in the northeastern...

Continued from last week. And they say that it’s not long after that, the Creator, that’s where Teharonhiawako, the holder of the skies, his name now changes to Shonkwaia’tison. He’s the one that cr...

Continued from last week. So they say again, after that, not long after that, one day Teharonhiawako was down on the earth. And he’s all by himself now. And his brother Sawiskera is living up in h...

Continued from last week And they also say that they split the day at that time. And what that means is that the daylight hours would be the time that Teharonhiawako, the holder of the skied, would...

Continued from last week And he understood what had happened when he thought back to the winter. And he went back to where his brother’s small dwelling was and he went in and grabbed him out. And h...

Continued from last week And they say as they grew to be young men that in the wintertime they would take turns going out hunting, each one of these boys. One winter it would be Teharonhiawako’s t...