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 government and civilization to the poor savages.” Today, as in medieval times, the Indo-European government follows a might makes right policy. Colonialism is a process often misunderstood and misinterpreted. It is a policy which has long survived the medieval period in which it was born. Many Western institutions are in fact colonial institutions of Western culture. The churches, for example, operate in virtually the same manner as did the feudal lords. First, they identify a people whose loyalty they wish to secure in an expansionist effort. They charter a group to conduct a “mission.” If that group is successful, they become, in effect, the spiritual sovereigns or dictators of those whose loyalty they command. That process in organized Christianity may actually be more ancient than the process of political colonialism described here.

Modern multinational corporations operate in much the same way. They identify a market or an area which has the resources they want. They then obtain a charter, or some form of sanction from a Western Government, and they send what amounts to a colonizing force into the area. If they successfully penetrate the area, that area becomes a sort of economic colony of the muti-national. The greatest resistance to that form of penetration has been mounted by local nationalists.

In North America, educational institutions operate under the same colonial process. Schools are chartered by a sovereign (such as the state, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs) to penetrate the Native people into society as workers and consumers, the Industrial Society’s version of peasants. The sovereign recognizes, and practically allows no other form of socializing institution for the young. As in the days of the medieval castle, the sovereign demands absolute fealty. Under this peculiar legal system, the Western sovereign denies the existence of those whose allegiance he cannot obtain. Some become, by this rationale, illegitimate.

This concept of illegitimacy is then interpreted into official government policy. In the United States, the colonizer had created two categories of Native peoples: Federally recognized and un-Federally recognized. In more recent years, the government has taken to a policy of non-recognition of an entity entitled “Urban Indians.” In Canada there exist four legal definitions of Native people. They are divided into Status, Non-Status, Metis and Enfranchised. Both countries carry on the policy of consistently referring to “Indians and Eskimos,” as though Eskimos were not a Native person of the Western Hemisphere.

The United States and Canada practice blatant colonialism in the areas affecting political institutions of the Native peoples. In 1924, Canada’s new Indian Act established the legal sanction for the imposition of neo-colonial “elective system” governments within the Native peoples’ territories. In the United States, the same goal was accomplished with passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Both pieces of legislation provided compulsive chartered political colonies among Native people. These “elective systems” owe their existence and fealty to the United States and Canada, not to the Native People. They are, by definition, colonies which create classes of political peasants. They are governments only to the degree an external social caste allows them to be governments. They are, in most places in Native peoples’ territories, the only forms of government recognized by the colonizers.

The Haudenosaunee have also been subjected to the many forms of colonialism of the Western Governments. Our first contact with a Western people came in 1609 when a French military expedition under Samuel de Champlain murdered some Mohawk people along the lake which now bears his name. Later, when the Dutch came, the first treaty (or agreement) which we made with a European power was the Two Row Treaty in which we clarified our position – that we are a distinct, free and sovereign people. The Dutch accepted that agreement.

But the European nations have never honored the agreement. Many times, France attempted to dominate the Haudenosaunee through conquest. England often used every means possible, including coercion, threats and military force, to extend her sovereignty over us. Each time we resisted.

Continued next week.