A Voice from the Eastern Door
A Voice from the Eastern Door
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Continued from last issue. Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Also in 1924, Canada military invaded our territories on the Grand River and forcibly installed a colonial government there. The episode was repeated by Canada in 1934 on our territories at the Thames River community of Oneida. In 1948 and 1950, Congress passed laws giving civil and criminal jurisdiction to New York State, although Congress was never given such jurisdiction by the Haudenosaunee. In 1958, Congress passed Public Law 88-533, the Kinzua Dam Act, which resulted in the...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. The United States entered into solemn treaties with the Haudenosaunee, and each time has ignored virtually each and every provision of the treaties which guarantee our rights as a separate nation. Only the sections of the treaties which refer to land cessions, sections which were fraudulently obtained, have validity in the eye of the United States courts or governments. The mechanism for the colonization of the Haudenosaunee territory is found, in legal fiction, the United States...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. Their reasoning is patently medieval and racist: “Civilization is that quality possessed by people with civil governments, civil government is Europe’s kind of government; Indians did not have Europe’s kind of government, therefore Indians were not civilized. Uncivilized people live in wild anarchy; therefore, Indians did not have government at all. And therefore, Europeans could not have been doing anything wrong – were in fact performing a noble mission – by bringing governmen...
Legal history of the Haudenosaunee Continued from last week. “It is the market, in one form or another, that pulls out from the compact social relations of self-contained primitive communities some parts of men’s doings and puts people into fields of economic activity that are increasingly independent of the rest of what goes on in local life. The local traditional and moral world and the wider and more impersonal world of the market are in principle destinct, and opposed to each other…” The European “discovery” of North America led to the...
Legal History of the Haudenosaunee, continued from last week. Feudal society in Europe appears to have arisen as the result of a number of conditions which existed following the dissolution of the Roman Empire. It was based in a system by which rulers of warrior castes became strong enough to demand and extract fealty from warriors. There arose, generally, an administrative center, usually a castle, and around these were agricultural people who were usually protected from outside aggression by their “lord”, the sovereign of the manor. It app...
Continued from last week. The Obvious Fact of Our Continuing Existence Legal History of the Haudenosaunee Since the beginning of human time, the Haudenosaunee have occupied the distinct territories that we call our homelands. That occupation has been both organized and continuous. We have long defined the borders of our country, have long maintained the exclusive use-right of the areas within those borders, and have used those territories as the economic and cultural definitions of our nation. The Haudenosaunee are a distinct people, with our...
Continued from last week. It is necessary, at this time, that we begin in a process of critical analysis of the West’s historical processes, to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance w...
Continued from last week. The Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal. The Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an unassimilable element to the civilizations of the West. The forests provided materials for larger ships, the land was fresh and fertile for agriculture surpluses, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for the conquering invaders. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, North America was already a leader in the area of the development...
Continued from last issue The area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the homeland, in ancient times, of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. The Semitic peoples, were among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This development led to the early development of towns, and eventually cities. The manipulation of the waters, another form of spirit life, represented another way in which humans developed a technology which reproduced a function of Nature. Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical...
Continued from last issue Spiritualism The Highest Form of Political Consciousness Haudenosaunee Message to the Western World The Haudenosaunee, or the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, has existed on this land since the beginning of human memory. Our culture is among the most ancient continuously existing cultures in the world. We still remember the original instructions of the Creators of Life on this place we call Etenoha – Mother Earth. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We are Ongwhehonwe – the Real People. In the beginning we...
Continued from last issue The Haudenosaunee raised their children from the cradleboard to be participants in the culture. The ways of the People of the Longhouse have always been powerfully spiritual in nature, and it is true that the government, the economy, everything that is Haudenosaunee has deep spiritual roots. The papers which follow are the position papers which were presented by the Haudenosaunee to the Non-governmental Organizations of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September 1977. The Non-governmental Organizations had...
Continued from last issue. The Haudenosaunee address to the Western World Geneva, Switzerland Autumn 1977 Introduction It was not long ago that the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations, were a powerful people, occupying a vast territory stretching from Vermont to Ohio, and from present-day Quebec to Tennessee. At the period of first contact early during the 17th Century, the Haudenosaunee occupied hundreds of towns and villages throughout the country. “Haudenosaunee” is a word which means “people who build” and is the proper name of the people of the...
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 week of sleeping maybe three, maybe four hours a night, a week of transatlantic flights and hurried breakfasts and the ever-present need to say things right. A week of pressure and energy – constant energy. Because something had happened in this conference, something was helping. People were locking together and one after another they had t...
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 about a real world, and about a real people and – and in Geneva, after 500 years of contact, it was a message about how these people, by no means perfect, but with a sane, healthy vision of existence, guided by concepts of unity and reciprocity, the positive values of non-accumulation of wealth and, most fundamentally, an all-encompassing com...
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. And what does it all represent to Indian people? Another Question: What does colonialism mean? Colonialism is the process by which we are systematically confused. Colonialism-from the word colony: to be controlled from afar. Confusion-an agent of control. The confusion takes many shapes and forms (gimmicks) that overlap creating layers, many, man...
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 heard, by the strength that they represented together, how it all fit, and he knew that it was good. Then he spoke of the Pipe, of the origins of the Lakota, of the power the Pipe had and of the many manifestations he had witnessed of that power – how it had been used at Wounded Knee, and at the many trials, how he had seen, over and over, the min...
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 him, sitting in a circle, were the group of six men who had been selected by all the delegates to be the principal speakers, to make the initial unifying presentation, on that first day of the conference. There were, Oren Lyons, from the Iroquois Confederacy; Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia; Jose Mendoza, Guaimi from Panama; Russell Means, Lakota...
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 my people. I am here to speak out, to tell what we are enduring. I don’t have time to give.” A couple of people who had been working with the NGO committee then tried to explain the situation. It was customary, they said that the hosts and the other observer groups represented would give welcoming addresses. There were about four such groups. T...
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 from the Six Nations (Iroquois) Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee, were lined up, passports in hand, a little tired after a nine-hour overnight flight but now looking serious and alert as one of their passports had been handed across the glass barrier and the blonde guards with caps on were turning it over in their hands. It was a small, brown book,...
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...
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-h...
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 enforce these mortgages in name of Canadian authority within our country. When Ottawa tried that, our people resented it. We knew that would mean the end of our government. Because we did so, the Canadian Government began to enforce all sorts of Dominion and Provincial laws over us and quartered armed men among us to enforce Canadian laws and...
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 more, and more forcefully than ever, he hurled defiance at big nations who disregard the claims of smaller peoples.) Nearly everyone who is listening to me is a pale face, I suppose I am not. My skin is not red but that is what my people are called by others. My skin is brown, light brown, but our cheeks have a little flush and that is why we are...
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 his petition, Deskaheh began to suspect that his cause was lost. News from the homeland was bad. The Canadian Government had announced a “free election,” which would in effect determine whether or not the Six Nations Government of Grand River Land should be dissolved. For this vote, the Canadian Government agent had taken possession of the Six Nat...
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 Canadian Government then ordered barracks built for the housing of their police and Grand River was suddenly an occupied nation. Deskaheh now began to fight back desperately. With the Six Nations Counsel, George P. Decker (a white Rochester lawyer), as his companion, he again used his passport, this time to travel to Geneva to bring his people’s c...
