Yearly Archives: 2011

An Anar­chist Study of the Rotinonshón:ni Polity

The tra­di­tional soci­ety of the Rotinonshón:ni (Iro­quois), “The Peo­ple of the Long­house,” was a densely set­tled, matri­lin­eal, com­mu­nal, and exten­sively hor­ti­cul­tural soci­ety. The Rotinonshón:ni formed a con­fed­er­acy of five nations. Gen­er­a­tions before his­tor­i­cal con­tact with Euro­peans, these nations united through the Kaianere’kó:wa into the same polity and ended blood feud­ing with­out eco­nomic exploita­tion, strat­i­fi­ca­tion, or the for­ma­tion of a cen­tral­ized state.

Intro­duc­tion How Peace Came to the Rotinonshón:ni “One Bowl”: The Com­mu­nal Econ­omy of the Rotinonshón:ni “We are left to answer for our women” The Beaver Wars, which were Not Only about the Fur Trade Kaianere’kó:wa as Con­sti­tu­tion of a State­less Polity? Anarcho-Indigenism Bib­li­og­ra­phy Glos­sary: Con­cepts,  Nations, Peo­ple, Places End Notes

by Stephen Arthur

“Their Pol­icy in this is very wise, and has noth­ing Bar­barous in it. For, since their preser­va­tion depends upon their union, and since it is hardly pos­si­ble that among peo­ples where license reigns with all impunity — and, above all, among young peo­ple — there should not hap­pen some event capa­ble of caus­ing a rup­ture, and dis­unit­ing their minds, — for these rea­sons, they hold every year a gen­eral assem­bly in Onnon­taé. There all the Deputies from the dif­fer­ent Nations are present, to make their com­plaints and receive the nec­es­sary sat­is­fac­tion in mutual gifts, — by means of which they main­tain a good under­stand­ing with one another.“
François le Mercier, 1668 (1)

Some his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ists claim a densely set­tled, agri­cul­tural pop­u­la­tion will inevitably develop into a hier­ar­chi­cally strat­i­fied soci­ety, with a cen­tral­ized state and an exploita­tive eco­nomic redis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem, in order avoid war­fare while resolv­ing blood feuds among its members.(2) While this is a com­mon occurence, it is not the only way these issues have been resolved. Located along the south­ern banks of Kaniatarí:io (Lake Ontario), the tra­di­tional soci­ety of the Rotinonshón:ni (Iroquois),(3) “The Peo­ple of the Long­house,” was a densely set­tled, matri­lin­eal, com­mu­nal, and exten­sively hor­ti­cul­tural soci­ety. The Rotinonshón:ni formed a con­fed­er­acy ini­tially of five nations: Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), Oneniote’á:ka (One­dia), Ononta’kehá:ka (Onondaga), Kaion’kehá:ka (Cayuga) and Shotinontowane’á:ka (Seneca). Gen­er­a­tions before his­tor­i­cal con­tact with Europeans,(4) these nations united through the Kaianere’kó:wa (“the Great Good Way”) into the same polity(5) and ended blood feud­ing with­out eco­nomic exploita­tion, strat­i­fi­ca­tion, or the for­ma­tion of a cen­tral­ized state.

Jared Dia­mond hypoth­e­sizes that when state­less egal­i­tar­ian hunter-gather soci­eties develop agri­cul­ture and expe­ri­ence pop­u­la­tion growth, blood feuds and new resource man­age­ment prob­lems chal­lenge their abil­ity to main­tain hor­i­zon­tal polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships and eco­nomic com­mu­nal­ism. (6) Accord­ing to Dia­mond, the mate­r­ial tran­si­tion itself leads inevitably to the State, which he refers to as “the klep­toc­racy,” and the most the oppressed can hope for by revolt­ing is for a change in the rate of exploita­tion and oppres­sion by installing a new group of klep­to­crats. In his view, “the klep­toc­racy” is ulti­mately a func­tion of mate­r­ial culture.(7)

Some Marx­ists agree with Diamond’s per­spec­tive. They argue that in the tran­si­tions from hunter-gather com­mu­nism to feu­dal­ism, and from there to cap­i­tal­ism, soci­ety devel­ops the indus­trial pro­duc­tion of the social wealth nec­es­sary for com­mu­nism to become an option again. There is at least one strong counter exam­ple to this vul­gar his­tor­i­cal deter­min­ism and uni­lin­ear cul­tural evo­lu­tion: the for­ma­tion and con­tin­ued sur­vival of the Rotinonshón:ni in the north­east of North America.

While crit­i­cal of Marx­ism, Mur­ray Bookchin acknowl­edges the coöper­a­tive and peace­ful inter­nal nature of hunter-gather soci­eties but also brings up the prob­lems of exter­nal warfare.

“To mem­bers of their own bands, tribes, or clans, pre­his­toric and later for­ag­ing peo­ples were nor­mally coöper­a­tive and peace­ful; but toward mem­bers of other bands, tribes, or clans, they were often war­like, even some­times geno­ci­dal in their efforts to dis­pos­sess them and appro­pri­ate their land.… As to mod­ern for­agers, the con­flicts between Native Amer­i­can tribes are too numer­ous to cite at any great length… the tribes that were to finally make up the Iro­quois Con­fed­er­acy (the Con­fed­er­acy itself was a mat­ter of sur­vival if they were not to all but exter­mi­nate one another), and the unre­lent­ing con­flict between Mohawks and Hurons, which led to the near exter­mi­na­tion and flight of rem­nant Huron com­mu­ni­ties.” (8)

The con­flicts Bookchin men­tions occurred around Kaniatarí:io and Lake Erie in the 17^th cen­tury and are often referred to as the “Beaver Wars,” due to the con­nec­tion with the fur trade between indige­nous and Euro­pean peo­ple. Bookchin’s descrip­tion the con­flict of Kanien’kehá:ka and the Wen­dat (Huron) as “exter­mi­na­tion” or “geno­ci­dal” is inac­cu­rate. Rather than a mat­ter of eth­nic cleans­ing or eco­nomic com­pe­ti­tion, that con­flict is bet­ter under­stood as a civil war of polit­i­cal uni­fi­ca­tion among Iro­quois speak­ers. It is ironic that in Bookchin’s tirade against mod­ern anti-civilizationist mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of the prim­i­tive, he acknowl­edges the for­ma­tion as of Rotinonshón:ni polity that ended the war­fare among the Five Nations, but fails to reflect upon this momen­tous accom­plish­ment or see how much their achieve­ment has par­al­lels with his own polit­i­cal ideas.

How Peace Came to the Rotinonshón:ni

Aiewáhtha Wampum Belt (9)The story of the for­ma­tion of the Rotinonshón:ni has been passed down by oral tra­di­tion, by recit­ing the Kaianere’kó:wa. This recita­tion has been done in at least five sim­i­lar lan­guages and trans­lated and tran­scribed into Eng­lish in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. There are many vari­a­tions, and no defin­i­tive ver­sion. (10)

In a ver­sion of the story com­mon at Ohswé:ken, (11) Tekanawí:ta was born under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances to a Wen­dat mother, along the Bay of Quinte. (12) After a dif­fi­cult child­hood, Tekanawí:ta left his com­mu­nity to bring the mes­sage of peace to the Iro­quois. He trav­eled south across Kaniatarí:io, where he encoun­tered Aiewáhtha prepar­ing a meal. Aiewáhtha, griev­ing for lost loved ones, was plan­ning to a eat a man he had slain in ven­ge­nance. Tekanawí:ta con­ducted a con­do­lence cer­e­mony for Aiewáhtha, so as to end the blood feud­ing. He con­vinced Aiewáhtha to eat only of the flesh of deer, not man. Finally, he per­suaded Aiewáhtha to give up war and to help him bring peace to the Iroquois.

Accord­ing to a women’s oral tra­di­tion, (13) Tekanawí:ta then approached the head clan mother, Tsikónhsase.(14) Tsikónhsase, of the Kakwa:ko (Neu­tral) nation, had pro­vi­sioned war­riors and also admin­is­tered dis­putes. (15) She agreed to sup­port Tekanawí:ta’s efforts for peace if he agreed to cod­ify into the Kaianere’kó:wa sev­eral pow­ers and respon­si­bil­i­ties for women: matri­lin­eal­ity of clans, the clan as the basis of pop­u­lar sov­er­eignty, and the col­lec­tive own­er­ship of agri­cul­tural land by women. Bar­bara Mann, Shotinontowane’á:ka author and pro­fes­sor of Native Amer­i­can Stud­ies, views the under­ly­ing con­flict of the era in terms of the mate­r­ial cul­ture of pro­duc­tion. She describes the con­flict as one between women-led agri­cul­tur­ists and the can­ni­bal­is­tic hunters, led by Tha­totáhrho. Tekanawí:ta’s role was to unite the war­ring fac­tions, estab­lish both farm­ing and hunt­ing as modes of pro­duc­tion, and abol­ish can­ni­bal­ism. (16)

Tekanawí:ta, Aiewáhtha and Tsikónhsase vis­ited a series of Iro­quois com­mu­ni­ties. Hav­ing gone to the Kanien’kehá:ka and gained their sup­port, they vis­ited the Oneniote’á:ka, gain­ing their accep­tance as well. Next they vis­ited the Ononta’kehá:ka, but were rebuffed by Tha­totáhrho. They then gained the sup­port of the Kaion’kehá:ka, and finally vis­ited the west­ern­most nation–the Shotinontowane’á:ka. All of the Shotinontowane’á:ka were con­vinced except their two prin­ci­pal war chiefs; these were brought into agree­ment and des­ig­nated as the rati­hn­ho­hanónhnha, the door­keep­ers, respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing the long house of the Rotinonshón:ni from ene­mies to the west. Hav­ing con­vinced all of the Shotinontowane’á:ka, they returned to the Ononta’kehá:ka, and there was a mighty strug­gle with Thatotáhrho.(17) Tsikónhsase devised a solu­tion, sug­gest­ing to Tekanawí:ta that the coun­cil fire of the Rotinonshón:ni could be with the Ononta’kehá:ka, and that Tha­totáhrho should become its keeper. (18)

Tekanawí:ta had sev­eral other inno­va­tions for the Rotinonshón:ni polity. The fifty men who would make deci­sions through con­sen­sus at the coun­cil fire were named roiá:ner, and they would wear deer horns to rep­re­sent that they had for­saken war and ate only the flesh of deer, not of men. The roiá:ner were to have skins “seven spans thick”: they would be patient, not eas­ily offended. Tekanawí:ta named each of the roiá:ner, and stated that their names would be requick­ened when they died (or were removed from office) and returned to the clan moth­ers, the iotiiá:ner. The iotiiá:ner had the respon­si­bil­ity of select­ing new roiá:ner, though never the son of the pre­vi­ous roiá:ner. The iotiiá:ner would also have the author­ity to recall roiá:ner from office. A pro­vi­sion was made for fur­ther speak­ers to be added to the coun­cil at Ononta’kehá:ka, men who had merit and had sprung up like a Pine Tree–“Ohnkaneto:ten.” The Ohnkaneto:ten would have voices but not votes; their appoint­ment would die with them and not be trans­ferred. Fur­ther, the great good way, the Kaianere’kó:wa, could be amended by “adding to the rafters” of the longhouse.

The weapons of war were buried beneath the tree of peace, so that there would be no fur­ther war among the nations of the Rotinonshón:ni. (19) (The Eng­lish idiom, “bury­ing the hatchet,” orig­i­nates with the Rotinonshón:ni.) The tree’s four white roots of peace stretched to the car­di­nal direc­tions, spread­ing the good tid­ings. There were rules for adop­tion of indi­vid­u­als and whole nations, to fol­low the roots, find shel­ter beneath the tree of peace, and join the Rotinonshón:ni. The con­do­lence cer­e­mony for those who were in grief was described, as well as the use of wampum. The Rotinonshón:ni would be guided by prin­ci­ples of “peace, power and right­eous­ness.” The last issue that Tekanawí:ta resolved was about hunt­ing ter­ri­tory: Tekanawí:ta declared that all Rotinonshón:ni would share the hunt and “eat of one bowl.” (20)

“One Bowl”: The Com­mu­nal Econ­omy of the Rotinonshón:ni

 

Illus­tra­tion by Lewis Henry Mor­gan (21)

“They still pos­sess virtues which might cause shame to most Chris­tians. No hos­pi­tals are needed among them, because there are nei­ther men­di­cants nor pau­pers as long as there are any rich peo­ple among them. Their kind­ness, human­ity, and cour­tesy not only make them lib­eral with what they have, but cause them to pos­sess hardly any­thing except in com­mon. A whole vil­lage must be with­out corn before any indi­vid­ual can be obliged to endure pri­va­tion. They divide the pro­duce of their fish­eries equally with all who come“
Father Simon Le Moyne, 1657 (22)

 

In the 17^th cen­tury, the Rotinonshón:ni lived in set­tled towns of as many as two thou­sand peo­ple, sur­rounded by pal­isades. Pop­u­la­tion den­sity aver­aged two hun­dred peo­ple per acre. These were the dens­est com­mu­ni­ties in the North­east, includ­ing those of Euro­pean set­tlers, until the 19^th cen­tury. (23) The com­mu­nal fields sur­round­ing Rotinonshón:ni vil­lages extended for up to six miles in radius. Even after the Rotinonshón:ni pop­u­la­tion had been greatly reduced by war and dis­ease, they were still very pro­duc­tive farmers.

One indi­ca­tor of quan­tity of Rotinonshón:ni pro­duc­tion is taken from a mil­i­tary cam­paign against them under the orders of U.S. Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton, who the Rotinonshón:ni have named Ranatakárias–“Town Destroyer”. (24) Dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War, in 1779 the Sullivan-Clark mil­i­tary expe­di­tion attacked the vil­lages of all Rotinonshón:ni nations except the Oneniote’á:ka. The alliance of the Oneniote’á:ka with the United States against the rest of the Rotinonshón:ni broke the peace between the Rotinonshón:ni nations that had stretched back to Tekanawí:ta’s foun­da­tion, and resulted in pro­found con­se­quences for all. Accord­ing to Sullivan’s offi­cial report, the U.S. army burned forty towns and their sur­round­ing fields, destroy­ing 160,000 bushels of corn; Anthony F.C. Wal­lace esti­mated “500… dwellings in two dozen set­tle­ments… and nearly 1 mil­lion bushels of corn” were destroyed (25); and Allan Eck­ert esti­mated at least fifty towns and nearly 1,200 houses were burned. The Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion was more an eco­nomic dis­as­ter for the Rotinonshón:ni than a mil­i­tary defeat.

Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer describes the eco­nom­ics of the tra­di­tional Rotinonshón:ni as syn­ony­mous with con­tem­po­rary con­cepts of com­mu­nal­ism or social­ism: “an empha­sis is placed upon the sur­vival and wel­fare of the col­lec­tive as opposed to the suc­cess and com­fort of the indi­vid­ual. Such soci­eties are com­posed of a group who vol­un­tar­ily par­tic­i­pate in a coöper­a­tive liveli­hood that shares the bur­den of labor and as well the fruit of such labor. This con­cept is rein­forced by the Kaianere’kó:wa in its anal­ogy of the bowl from which all Hau­denosaunee would share from.” (26) Hunter Gray has referred to tribal com­mu­nal­ism and the Rotinonshón:ni ethos of tribal (mutual) respon­si­bil­ity as “straw­berry social­ism.” (27)

In 1977, when Rotinonshón:ni del­e­gates addressed the United Nations with their eco­nomic ideas, they argued against per­ma­nent pri­vate prop­erty and exclud­ing oth­ers from the means of pro­duc­tion. They sug­gested that the con­cept of alien­ated prop­erty results in slav­ery. They stated that their rejec­tion of a com­mod­ity econ­omy, their rejec­tion of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion, and their ideas of emi­nently fair dis­tri­b­u­tion would result in all peo­ple shar­ing in mate­r­ial wealth. Their con­cepts of econ­omy and labor would require an entire com­mu­nity of involve­ment, rather than iso­lated nuclear fam­i­lies. All peo­ple, they declared, have a right to food, cloth­ing and shel­ter. No one should have a posi­tion of eco­nomic power over any­one else, and there should be no arti­fi­cial scarcity cre­ated by prop­erty ownership.(28)

Did the Rotinonshón:ni have pri­vate prop­erty his­tor­i­cally? His­to­rian Daniel Richter has argued that the Rotinonshón:ni eco­nom­ics only super­fi­cially resem­bled com­mu­nal­ism. Prop­erty own­er­ship, how­ever, derived from need and use, while aban­doned prop­erty was free for the use by any­one. Fur­ther, that in times of short­age, all was shared com­mu­nally. (29) This is an exam­ple of a usufruct (use rights) sys­tem of own­er­ship, which many anar­chists would approve of, includ­ing Bookchin: “an indi­vid­ual appro­pri­a­tion of goods, a per­sonal claim to tools, land, and other resources … is fairly com­mon in organic [i.e. abo­rig­i­nal] soci­eties… co-operative work and the shar­ing of resources on a scale that could be called com­mu­nis­tic is also fairly com­mon… But pri­mary to both of these seem­ingly con­trast­ing rela­tion­ships is the prac­tice of usufruct.” (30)

It bears men­tion­ing that wampum, beads made of shell and strung together, was used as cur­rency among cash-poor Euro­pean set­tlers in the North­east. Wampum, in addi­tion to European-manufactured goods, was exchanged for beaver pelts with the Rotinonshón:ni. Among the Rotinonshón:ni, how­ever, it was not used as cur­rency. A hall­mark of their diplo­macy and gift exchange, wampum func­tioned almost exclu­sively as a polit­i­cal and social aid, used in the con­do­lence cer­e­monies, in the requick­en­ing of newly selected lead­ers, and as a mnemonic device for agree­ments and treaties. (31)

While the Rotinonshón:ni mode of pro­duc­tion was col­lec­tive, it was divided by gen­der. Men engaged in clear­ing the for­est, hunt­ing, fish­ing, diplo­macy, trade and war­fare. Women focused on exten­sive hor­ti­cul­ture, child­care and vil­lage life (32). Col­lec­tive effort and com­mu­nal own­er­ship of the land did not, how­ever, pre­clude indi­vid­u­als from work­ing sep­a­rately. To this extent, the com­mu­nism of the Rotinonshón:ni can be regarded as voluntary.

“Women worked in fam­ily unites in fields cleared by their clan broth­ers. So long as each did her share of the labor, she also shared in the com­mu­nal har­vest. Indi­vid­ual women might also keep pri­vate plots, but they shared in the com­mu­nal har­vest only if they also did their parts in the fields of the ohwachira. An ad hoc mutual aid soci­ety was some­times formed by these women so that they could bring col­lec­tive effort even to fields not super­vised by clan matrons“(33)

“We are left to answer for our women”

“Hear and lis­ten to what we, women, shall speak, as well as the Sachems; for we are the own­ers of this land, AND IT IS OURS! It is we that plant it for our and their use. Hear us, there­fore, for we speak things that con­cern us and our chil­dren; and you must not think hard of us while our men shall say more to you, for we have told them“
Seneca women

“We are left to answer for our women, who are to con­clude what ought to be done by both Sachems and war­riors. So hear what is their con­clu­sion. The busi­ness you come on is trou­ble­some, and we have been a long time con­sid­er­ing it; and now the elders of our women have said that our Sachems and war­riors must help you, for the good of them, and their chil­dren“
Sagoy­awatha “Red Jacket”, 1791(34)

Anar­chist anthro­pol­o­gist Harold Bar­clay has pointed out that “Egal­i­tar­ian does not… mean that there is any equal­ity between sexes and between dif­fer­ent age groups” and that “true sex­ual equal­ity is a rarity.”(35) By con­trast, the Rotinonshón:ni are often held up as an exam­ple of a matri­archy, though I dis­agree with the seman­tics of that term. While the Rotinonshón:ni are both matri­lin­eal and matrilo­cal, and the women do have a role in con­sen­sual pol­i­tics and in select­ing and remov­ing men from lead­er­ship posi­tions; women do not wield power over men the way men wield power over women in a patri­ar­chal soci­ety. Anthro­po­log­i­cal archae­ol­o­gist Dean Snow, explains this very well: “Iro­quois women were not matri­archs, or Ama­zons, or drudges. They were Iro­quois women, who lived in a non­hier­ar­chi­cal soci­ety in which their role as food pro­duc­ers was prop­erly appre­ci­ated and in which the ele­va­tion of some aspects of kin­ship to polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance gave them influ­ence that they might not oth­er­wise have had.” (36)

Another anar­chist anthro­pol­o­gist, David Grae­ber, described the over­lap­ping coun­cils by gender:

“Long­houses were gov­erned by coun­cils made up entirely of women, who, since they con­trolled its food sup­plies, could evict any in-married male at will. Vil­lages were gov­erned by both male and female coun­cils. Coun­cils on the national and league level were made up of both male and female office-holders. It’s true that the higher one went in the struc­ture, the less rel­a­tive impor­tance the female coun­cils had–on the long­house level, there wasn’t any male orga­ni­za­tion at all, while on the league level, the female coun­cil merely had veto power over male decisions–but it’s also true that deci­sions on the lower level were of much more imme­di­ate rel­e­vance to daily life. In terms of every­day affairs, Iro­quois soci­ety often seems to have been about as close as there is to a doc­u­mented case of a matri­archy.” (37)

Another indi­ca­tion of dif­fer­ences between the Rotinonshón:ni and Euro­pean set­tler soci­ety comes from that same Sul­li­van expe­di­tion in 1779 that destroyed so many Rotinonshón:ni towns. While prepar­ing to attack and destroy the towns, Gen­eral James Clin­ton even remarked that the Rotinonshón:ni men never raped women, and that some mea­sures needed to be taken to pre­vent Amer­i­can sol­diers from rap­ing. (38) Among the Rotinonshón:ni, vio­lence against women, includ­ing spousal abuse, was harshly pun­ished by a woman’s kin. (39) A man who abused a woman could not be selected as a roiá:ner. (40)

Divorce was easy and com­mon, so much so that Jesuit mis­sion­ary Father Jacques Bruyas, while regard­ing divorce as the great­est sin among the Rotinonshón:ni, explained that “There is as great ease in break­ing mar­riages as in mak­ing them — the hus­band leav­ing his wife, and the wife her hus­band, at plea­sure.” (41) Since the hus­bands lived with their wives’ kahwá:tsire (matri­lin­eal clan), in divorce for­mer hus­bands had to leave the home. While the major­ity of the prop­erty as it was held in com­mon through the matri­lin­eal clan, per­sonal pos­ses­sions were always kept dis­tinct between a hus­band and wife. (42) Chil­dren remained with the mother after divorce, (43) a con­trast to the pater­nal own­er­ship of chil­dren which was the stan­dard in the continent’s Euro­pean set­tler soci­ety until it was replaced by mater­nal pref­er­ence in cus­tody in the 1920s. Kanati­iosh (Bar­bara Gray) has argued that “west­ern law emerges with a struc­ture based on hier­ar­chy, which I believe is attrib­uted, to their treat­ment of women as sec­ondary cit­i­zens. Whereas, Hau­denosaunee law emerges with a demo­c­ra­tic struc­ture based on equal­ity and good­will for all.” (44)

Fam­ily plan­ning was essen­tial to women, who had the respon­si­bil­ity for farm­ing, and often chose to limit the num­ber of chil­dren for whom they were respon­si­ble at any one time. There were many abor­ti­fa­cients and fer­til­ity med­i­cines known to Rotinonshón:ni herbal­ists. (45) Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies, and later in the early 19^th cen­tury the Shotinontowane’á:ka prophet Ganioda’yo, who cod­i­fied Karihwí:io or Gai­wiio (“the good mes­sage”), preached against divorce and abor­tion, while empha­siz­ing the rela­tion­ship of hus­band and wife over that of mother and daugh­ter. (46) Wal­lace, a psy­cho­log­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gist and his­to­rian, regarded the reforms of the Karihwí:io as “the sen­tence of doom upon the tra­di­tional quasi-matriarchal sys­tem.” (47) Kahen­tinetha Horn, the edi­tor of Mohawk Nation News, has asserted that the polity’s “struc­ture has been mod­i­fied to accom­mo­date the Gai’wiio. For exam­ple, instead of the Clan Moth­ers appoint­ing the Chiefs accord­ing to the Old Way, in the Gai’wiio the Chiefs select the Clan Moth­ers.” (48)

Over time, indi­vid­ual house­holds of nuclear fam­i­lies replaced the tra­di­tional long­houses as res­i­dences. The sit­u­a­tion had so changed by 1850, when Lewis Henry Mor­gan pub­lished his clas­si­cal ethno­graph­i­cal study The League of the Ho-de’-no-sau-née, or Iro­quois, he observed that women, and only women, were pun­ished for adul­tery by pub­lic whip­ping. (49) In 1924, an elected band coun­cil, rather than the tra­di­tional polity, gov­erned Ohswé:ken; women were ini­tially deprived of suf­frage. (50) At Onondaga, Tonawanda and Tus­carora, the iakoiá:ner never lost their rights to select roiá:ner. (51)

Drawn by Joseph Kep­pler, “Puck”, 1914 (52)

At the same time Rotinonshón:ni rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties were under attack, female Euro­pean set­tlers were gain­ing some of those very rights. The con­tra­dic­tion is made even more glar­ing in the exam­i­na­tion of Amer­i­can fem­i­nism by Women’s Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Sally Roesch Wanger, who found that the gen­der rela­tions among the Rotinonshón:ni were an inspi­ra­tion to suf­frag­ists in the United States like Matilda Joslyn Gage, Eliz­a­beth Cady Stan­ton, and Lucre­tia Mott. (53) While Gage had been to court for attempt­ing to vote in U.S. elec­tions, she pointed out that her adop­tion as Karonhienhá:wi into the Wolf kahwá:tsire granted her a voice in select­ing roiá:ner–giving her more polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion by adop­tion into the Kanien’kehá:ka nation than she had in the U.S. (54)

This dif­fer­ence in regards to suf­frage was some­thing well known to Rotinonshón:ni. Gawasco Waneh (Arthur Parker) wrote in 1909: “Does the mod­ern Amer­i­can woman [who] is a peti­tioner before man, plead­ing for her polit­i­cal rights, ever stop to con­sider that the red woman that lived in New York state five hun­dred years ago, had far more polit­i­cal rights and enjoyed a much wider lib­erty than the twen­ti­eth cen­tury woman of civ­i­liza­tion?” (55)

Mod­ern fem­i­nists might regard the tra­di­tional divi­sion of roles accord­ing to gen­der as less than egal­i­tar­ian. Some con­tem­po­rary Rotinonshón:ni would agree, and argue that tra­di­tional gen­der role divi­sion is obso­lete, while also point­ing out that some of that divi­sion had its ori­gin in colo­nial gen­der roles imposed by Euro­pean cul­tural impe­ri­al­ism. One exam­ple is the con­cern raised by Taia­iake Alfred:

“We can­not hold on to a con­cept of the war­rior that is gen­dered in the way it once was and that is located in an obso­lete view of men’s and women’s roles. The bat­tles we are fight­ing are no longer pri­mar­ily phys­i­cal; thus, any idea of the indige­nous war­rior framed solely in mas­cu­line terms is out­dated and must be rethought and recast from the solely mas­cu­line view of the old tra­di­tional ways to a new con­cept of the war­rior that is freed from colo­nial gen­der con­struc­tions and artic­u­lated instead with ref­er­ence to what really counts in our strug­gles: the qual­i­ties and actions of a per­son, man or woman, in bat­tle.” (56)

The Beaver Wars, which were Not Only about the Fur Trade

“I take thee by the arm to lead thee away. Thou know­est, thou huron, that for­merly we com­prised but one Cabin and one coun­try. I know not by what acci­dent we became sep­a­rated. It is time to unite again. I have twice before come to seek thee,—Once at Mon­tréal, speak­ing to the French In thy absence; the 2^nd time, at Que­bec. It is for the third time that I now come.”
1656 (57)

Bookchin rarely exam­ines the Rotinonshón:ni polity, and the few times he addresses it in print, he is dis­mis­sive. In the course of his dis­missals he often repeats the com­mon aca­d­e­mic myth that the con­flicts of the 17^th cen­tury, mis­named “the Beaver Wars,” were fought over eco­nomic con­trol of the fur trade. While it is true that the pri­mary Euro­pean inter­est in the con­flict was to secure access to large quan­ti­ties of low-cost beaver fur (in exchange for goods pro­duced solely for indige­nous con­sump­tion), there were other, poten­tially more impor­tant, rea­sons for the Rotinonshón:ni involve­ment in those conflicts.

“War­fare was endemic among our pre­his­toric ances­tors and in later native com­mu­ni­ties, notwith­stand­ing the high, almost cul­tic sta­tus enjoyed by osten­si­bly peace­ful “eco­log­i­cal abo­rig­ines” among white middle-class Euro-Americans today. When for­ag­ing groups over­hunted the game in their accus­tomed ter­ri­tory, as often hap­pened, they were usu­ally more than will­ing to invade the area of a neigh­bor­ing group and claim its resources for their own. Com­monly, after the rise of war­rior sodal­i­ties, war­fare acquired cul­tural as well as eco­nomic attrib­utes, so vic­tors no longer merely defeated their real or cho­sen “ene­mies” but vir­tu­ally exter­mi­nated them, as wit­ness the near-genocidal destruc­tion of the Huron Indi­ans by their lin­guis­ti­cally and cul­tur­ally related Iro­quois cousins.“
Bookchin (58)

As pointed out ear­lier, the Rotinonshón:ni were not pri­mar­ily a for­ag­ing soci­ety. The major­ity of their food came from hor­ti­cul­ture, so they faced no need to relo­cate into ter­ri­tory held by oth­ers due to over­hunt­ing. In the early years of Euro­pean col­o­niza­tion, dis­ease greatly reduced indige­nous pop­u­la­tions before the set­tlers arrived in large num­bers. Dur­ing the Beaver Wars, there was actu­ally much more avail­able land per capita, due to this pop­u­la­tion reduc­tion, than there had been before the arrival of the Euro­peans. While war­fare did take on cul­tural and eco­nomic attrib­utes, under­stand­ing the Beaver Wars only in terms of the fur trade and the role of war­fare in cul­ture is far too sim­plis­tic. Bookchin is right about the lin­guis­tic and cul­tural sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Wen­dat and Rotinonshón:ni, and that itself is the key to under­stand­ing the deter­mi­na­tion with which the Rotinonshón:ni pros­e­cuted their wars with the Wen­dat, Kakwa:ko, Eriel­ho­nan (Erie), Tionon­tati (Petun), Wen­rohronon (Wenro), and Susque­han­nock nations.

Bookchin men­tions the rise of “cul­tural attrib­utes” of war­fare. One such attribute prac­ticed by the north­ern Iroquois-speaking peo­ples, not only the Rotinonshón:ni, was the mourn­ing war. When peo­ple died in the Iro­quois com­mu­ni­ties, the griev­ing rel­a­tives expected the dead to be sym­bol­i­cally replaced as soon as pos­si­ble. Quite unlike the Euro­pean set­tlers’ notion total war, a mourn­ing war was ulti­mately rit­u­al­is­tic, and was not aimed at the erad­i­ca­tion of an enemy or seizure of their ter­ri­tory. Rather, the goal was to take cap­tives, who would replace the dead. Losses among war­riors involved in the mourn­ing wars could also be called on to be replaced. Large-scale casu­al­ties were rare, and when they did occur, they were con­sid­ered great tragedies. Since dis­ease was regarded as a hos­tile attack by unknown agents, those who died from sick­ness had to be replaced by mourn­ing war. This process of replac­ing the dead by assign­ing their names and respon­si­bil­i­ties to oth­ers is referred to as requickening.

Mourn­ing war had at one time often involved can­ni­bal­ism and tor­ture, but these prac­tices had com­pletely died out of Rotinonshón:ni soci­ety by the 18^th cen­tury. Cen­tral to the Rotinonshón:ni polity was the cer­e­mony of con­do­lence. Tekanawí:ta gave this cer­e­mony to Aiewáhtha, to help with his grief so that peace would be pos­si­ble between them and Tha­totáhrho. Con­do­lence would allow for blood feuds to end, and for peo­ple within a nation to be requick­ened, with the use of wampum, into new titles to replace the dead. Con­do­lence has been seen as a replace­ment for the mourn­ing wars. Some crit­ics argue the Rotinonshón:ni polity sim­ply caused the nations of the con­fed­er­a­tion to redi­rect their blood fueds outward.

Map by Rebecca Wilson
The war­fare among Iroquois-speaking nations had begun long before Euro­pean con­tact added fuel to the fire, with its con­tri­bu­tions of epi­demic dis­ease, firearms, and other metal weapons. The Rotinonshón:ni emerged out of a period of war, but it is note­wor­thy that not all Iroquois-speaking nations of the Great Lakes joined the great peace. Despite being close rel­a­tives to the Five Nations, the Susque­han­nocks did not join the Rotinonshón:ni. In the late 1500s, they moved their vil­lages south to the river that still bears their name. (59) Lin­guis­tic sim­i­lar­i­ties between Susque­han­nocks and Cayuga sug­gest that some Susque­han­nock were adopted into the Cayuga nation, while most of them headed south. (60)

Dar­ren Bona­parte cites an old oral tra­di­tion about the Kani­atarowanénhne (later known as the St. Lawrence river): “[T]here was once a great con­fed­er­acy that had vil­lages on the St. Lawrence River. After a shoot­ing star destroyed one of their vil­lages on the St. Lawrence, the con­fed­er­acy broke down, leav­ing two or three smaller con­fed­era­cies in their wake who even­tu­ally became hos­tile to each other. The Huron Con­fed­er­acy, north of Lake Ontario, and the Iro­quois Con­fed­er­acy were two of those; a third would be the peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists refer to as the “St. Lawrence Iro­quoians.” (61)

When Jacques Cartier first explored the Kani­atarowanénhne in 1535, he encoun­tered Iroquois-speaking com­mu­ni­ties all along the river between major set­tle­ments of Stada­cona (near Que­bec City) and Hochelaga (Mon­tréal). When Samuel de Cham­plain came to the river in 1603, those Iroquois-speaking com­mu­ni­ties were gone. By the early 17^th cen­tury, “[t]he Jef­fer­son County Iro­quoians had dis­ap­peared, prob­a­bly absorbed by the Iro­quois. The St. Lawrence Iro­quoians had been incor­po­rated into the Huron con­fed­er­acy, as had peo­ple from other clus­ters around mod­ern Toronto, the Trent River val­ley, and else­where just north of Lake Ontario,” (62) although some may have also joined the Kanien’kehá:ka. (63)

The first pub­lished account of con­tact between Euro­peans and the Rotinonshón:ni is Champlain’s. In 1609, he and his Algo­nquian allies encoun­tered a group of Kanien’kehá:ka near Crown Point. Cham­plain intro­duced the Rotinonshón:ni to the use of firearms by killing fifty of them includ­ing three Kanien’kehá:ka roiá:ner, one of whom car­ried the name Aiewáhtha.(64) This was a huge defeat by the stan­dards of the mourn­ing wars. The French con­tin­ued to ally them­selves with the Algo­nquian and the Wen­dat, and the Rotinonshón:ni began trad­ing with the Dutch by 1614. In 1615, Cham­plain led Wen­dat and Andastes in an attack on the Rotinonshón:ni at an Ononta’kehá:ka vil­lage, killing many, includ­ing another roiá:ner. In the cen­tral nation of the Great Long­house, the Ononta’kehá:ka vil­lage was the coun­cil fire and sym­bolic heart of the Rotinonshón:ni. (65) Firearms and forged blades were now part of war­fare between Iroquois-speaking peo­ples. (66) From the per­spec­tive of the Rotinonshón:ni, access to guns and metal became a pri­or­ity, dri­ving their trade with the Dutch, who were will­ing to trade these for beaver pelts. It became nec­es­sary to secure a sta­ble sup­ply of pelts, and to deprive their ene­mies of the same.

In 1634, a plague of small­pox hit the Rotinonshón:ni, halv­ing their pop­u­la­tion (67) and forc­ing relo­ca­tions for the entire five nations as they fled dis­eased vil­lages. While already engaged in wars with mul­ti­ple indige­nous nations and the French, and with changes to their econ­omy and mate­r­ial tech­nol­ogy, it must have seemed an apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario. The Wen­dat and other nations were sim­i­larly affected by epi­demic dis­eases. There were unprece­dented calamites for Rotinonshón:ni and Wen­dat soci­eties, and the cul­tural tra­di­tion of mourn­ing war called for replace­ment of all the dead through warfare.

Natoway com­bines a num­ber of oral tra­di­tions, his­tor­i­cal, and arche­o­log­i­cal research with his nar­ra­tive of “The Great Epic.” In it, he relates that dif­fer­ences in wealth devel­oped among the Wen­dat, based on the Jesuit pol­icy of only trad­ing with those Wen­dat who con­verted to Chris­tan­ity. Jesuits and Chris­tan­ity were also blamed for the dis­ease within the com­mu­nity, and some tra­di­tional Wen­dat vol­un­tar­ily joined with the Kanien’kehá:ka and Shotinontowane’á:ka to attack Wen­dat con­verts to Chris­tian­ity, even going so far as to lead them in bat­tle. (68) Grae­ber notes the changes in eco­nomic struc­ture of the Wen­dat, but not the Rotinonshón:ni: “Delage argues that among the Huron, new regimes of prop­erty and the pos­si­bil­ity of per­sonal accu­mu­la­tion, really emerged only among con­verts to Chris­tian­ity; among the Five Nations, they do not seem to have emerged at all.” (69)

Snow has claimed that dur­ing the final Rotinonshón:ni cam­paign against the Wen­dat in 1648, more than a thou­sand Wen­dat fled their vil­lages, and seven hun­dred were taken pris­oner or killed. In the fol­low­ing fall, the Kanien’kehá:ka-Shotinontowane’á:ka army num­bered over a thou­sand men, includ­ing adopted Wen­dat who had been “fully inte­grated” into Rotinonshón:ni soci­ety. By 1651, another group of five hun­dred Wen­dat were brought into the Shotinontowane’á:ka nation, but were given autonomous con­trol of their vil­lage. (70)

The Beaver Wars con­tin­ued. The Eriel­ho­nan, with Kakwa:ko and Wen­dat refugees among them, were dis­persed west­ward or absorbed into the Shotinontowane’á:ka, Ononta’kehá:ka, and other Rotinonshón:ni nations. (71) By 1657, the Rotinonshón:ni had defeated their Iroquois-speaking ene­mies to the north and west. Kanien’kehá:ka and Shotinontowane’á:ka went to Que­bec to con­vince Wen­dat refugees to return with them. Accord­ing to Snow: “A vil­lage of per­haps 570 Hurons was built near the three Mohawk vil­lages that existed there at the time… [A] decade later Jesuit mis­sion­ar­ies would note that two-thirds of the Mohawk vil­lage of Caugh­nawaga was made up of Huron and Algo­nquian cap­tives and adoptees.” (72) Tionon­tati and Wen­rohronon were also attacked, dis­persed, and absorbed by the Rotinonshón:ni.

The post-dispersal his­tory of the five nations of the Wen­dat, as described by John Steck­ley, holds that the Ataronchron­non (Bog) dis­ap­peared, the Ata­hon­taen­rat (Deer) joined the Shotinontowane’á:ka in an inde­pen­dent com­mu­nity, Aren­daeron­non (Rock) joined the Ononta’kehá:ka, and the Atin­ni­awen­ten (Bear) joined the Kanien’kehá:ka. The Atingeen­non­ni­a­hak (Cord) remained as the sole Wen­dat nation. (73)

In his mil­i­tary his­tory of the Rotinonshón:ni, Daniel P. Barr com­pares accounts of the con­flict and deter­mines that:

“Between 1631–1663, the Iro­quois attacked the Hurons at least 73 times. More than 500 Huron peo­ple are recorded as hav­ing been killed dur­ing these raids, with an aston­ish­ing 2,000–one-fifth of their post epi­demic population–captured and deported to Iro­quoia. These num­bers are likely low-end esti­mates…. [T]he num­ber of cap­tives taken by the Iro­quois dur­ing the Beaver Wars was on aver­age two to three times greater than the num­ber of ene­mies they killed. Both sce­nar­ios illus­trate that the acqui­si­tion of enemy cap­tives to replace Iro­quois pop­u­la­tion losses was the pri­mary fac­tor in the Beaver Wars, which were not a series of con­flicts designed to impose Iro­quois con­trol over the fur trade, but rather an Iro­quois fight for sur­vival, one vast, pro­longed mourn­ing war.” (74)

The descen­dents of cap­tured Wen­dat adoptees were fully inte­grated into Rotinonshón:ni soci­ety and treated as equals. One notable exam­ple is Joseph Brant, Thaientané:ken, who was descended from Wen­dat cap­tives adopted by the Kanien’kehá:ka both on his father and mother’s side. (75) Thaientané:ken went on to become a Ohnkaneto:ten, and led war par­ties against the United States dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. His efforts helped estab­lish the com­mu­nity at Ohswé:ken, the Six Nations reserve along the Grand River. The town of Brant­ford is named for him, as is the Tyen­d­i­naga Mohawk Com­mu­nity at the Bay of Quinte. It should be noted again that var­i­ous ver­sions of the Kaianere’kó:wa hold that Tekanawí:ta orig­i­nated from the Wen­dat nation, that the iakoiá:ner Tsikónhsase came from the Kakwa:ko nation, and even that Aiewáhtha was from the Ononta’kehaka nation, was adopted by the Kanien’kehá:ka, and became a roiá:ner there. From the per­spec­tive of many Iro­quois speak­ers, they were the same peo­ple; mem­ber­ship among the war­ring nations could be quite fluid.

War­fare with the Susque­han­nock con­tin­ued. Over time, more of them were adopted into the Rotinonshón:ni, often into the Oneniote’á:ka nation. The last Susque­han­nocks were not adopted, but were mas­sa­cred by Eng­lish set­tlers from Mary­land. “By spring of 1669, a per­ma­nent vil­lage of Indian Chris­tians had grown up around Raffeix’s Saint Fran­cois Xavier des Pres mis­sion. The first set­tlers were a diverse group of ‘free Iro­quois’ and Erie, Huron and Susque­han­nock adoptees of the Onei­das.” (76) They were later joined by many Kanien’kehá:ka, and even­tu­ally this com­mu­nity moved to Kahnawà:ke.

The Wendat-Kanien’kehá:ka Peace Belt (77)In 1713, most of the Iroquois-speaking Tehatiskaró:ros (Tus­carora) nation, which had been war­ring with North Car­olina set­tlers, relo­cated to live among the Rotinonshón:ni. By 1722–1723, they were incor­po­rated as the Sixth Nation of the Rotinonshón:ni, liv­ing autonomously from the oth­ers. They were not invited to have roiá:ner in the coun­cil, but would be rep­re­sented by the Oneniote’á:ka and Kaion’kehá:ka. (78)

While there may have been eco­nom­i­cal and cul­tural moti­va­tions for Rotinonshón:ni par­tic­i­pa­tion and pros­e­cu­tion of the Beaver Wars, the result was far from geno­cide of their opponents–rather, it was the polit­i­cal uni­fi­ca­tion of most north­ern Iroquois-speaking peo­ples under the Kaianere’kó:wa. It bears empha­siz­ing that, accord­ing to Wal­lace, “[a]doption was so fre­quent dur­ing the bloody cen­turies of the beaver wars and the colo­nial wars that some Iro­quois vil­lages were pre­pon­der­antly com­posed of for­mally adopted war cap­tives.” (79) Adop­tion was as much a form of polit­i­cal uni­fi­ca­tion of other Iroquois-speaking peo­ples, who already shared cul­tural traits, as it was cul­tural assim­i­la­tion. Autonomous vil­lages were com­mon. The Beaver Wars might best be seen as bloody civil war among Iroquois-speaking peo­ple in the con­text of a larger series of dev­as­tat­ing tragedies, not a geno­ci­dal con­flict based on resource acqui­si­tion. Increas­ingly, the Beaver Wars are being referred to as the Iro­quois Wars–which seems far more appro­pri­ate since the major­ity of the par­tic­i­pants were Iroquois-speakers. Fur­ther con­text is pro­vided by con­sid­er­ing that the Beaver Wars were con­tem­po­rary with the Thirty Years’ War on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent, and with the Eng­lish Civil War. All three were fought with sim­i­lar weapons. In his “Great Epic,” Natoway depicts the Beaver Wars as a usurpa­tion of author­ity by the ohnkane­toten and war cap­tains, lead­ing the long­house of the Rotinonshón:ni to frac­ture, and finally to crum­ble dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. (80)

On August 27, 1999, the four sur­viv­ing nations of Wen­dat came together in a “tree of broth­er­hood” under the unity pro­posed by the Peace­maker of “peace, power, and right­eous­ness” with lead­ers who have skins “seven span thick”. It seems that the mes­sage of the Kaianere’kó:wa was finally received by all of the Wendat.

Kaianere’kó:wa as Con­sti­tu­tion of a State­less Polity?

Some have been tempted to sub­mit a par­tic­u­lar trans­la­tion and tran­scrip­tion of the Kaianere’kó:wa to a political-science con­sti­tu­tional analy­sis. Depend­ing on the ver­sion of the Kaianere’kó:wa, an ana­lyst might come to the con­clu­sions that Don­ald S. Lutz has: that the Rotinonshón:ni was not a par­tic­i­pa­tory demo­c­ra­tic con­fed­er­acy of equal nations, but rather a hered­i­tary oli­garchy in which the Kanien’kehá:ka enjoyed a priv­i­leged posi­tion in mak­ing pro­pos­als to the coun­cil. (81) Lutz only con­sults the ver­sions of the Kaianere’kó:wa pub­lished by Gawasco Waneh (Arthur Parker). In fact, his analy­sis focuses only on a sin­gle ver­sion writ­ten by Day­o­dekane (Seth New­house), and ignores a dif­fer­ent ver­sion approved by the roiá:ner at Ohswé:ken, which was included in Gawasco Waneh’s vol­ume. Accord­ing to Snow, “The New­house ver­sion tells us as much, if not more about polit­i­cal con­di­tions on the Grand River at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury than it does about the ori­gins of the League” (82). The Grand Coun­cil of the Hau­denosaunee believe that no one ver­sion is pre­ferred and that “many tra­di­tional lead­ers feel that none of the writ­ten ver­sions have all of the known oral his­tory included.” (83)

Atsen­haien­ton (Ken­neth Deer) objects to the Kaianere’kó:wa even being called “the Great Law” and those that would treat it as such: “it’s not a law: it’s guide­lines to help peo­ple get to har­mony and coex­is­tence… They look at the Great Law and inter­pret it the way a con­sti­tu­tional lawyer would. That’s not the way it was intended to be treated.” (84) Even if the Kaianere’kó:wa should not be given a strict legal­ist read­ing, among its prin­ci­ples is a metaphor for amend­ment: “adding to the rafters” of the long house. This includes meet­ings among the tra­di­tional Rotinonshón:ni involv­ing not only the roiá:ner but all the peo­ple, as a check on their power. (85)

The influ­ence of Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of the Rotinonshón:ni on Marx and Engels’ con­cept of a state­less com­mu­nist soci­ety is well known. In The Ori­gin of the Fam­ily, Pri­vate Prop­erty and the State, Engels sum­ma­rized Morgan’s descrip­tion of the Rotinonshón:ni society:

“No sol­diers, no gen­darmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, pre­fects, or judges, no pris­ons, no law­suits — and every­thing takes its orderly course. All quar­rels and dis­putes are set­tled by the whole of the com­mu­nity affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among them­selves; only as an extreme and excep­tional mea­sure is blood revenge threatened-and our cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is noth­ing but blood revenge in a civ­i­lized form, with all the advan­tages and draw­backs of civ­i­liza­tion. Although there were many more mat­ters to be set­tled in com­mon than today — the house­hold is main­tained by a num­ber of fam­i­lies in com­mon, and is com­mu­nis­tic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gar­dens are allot­ted pro­vi­sion­ally to the house­holds — yet there is no need for even a trace of our com­pli­cated admin­is­tra­tive appa­ra­tus with all its ram­i­fi­ca­tions. The deci­sions are taken by those con­cerned, and in most cases every­thing has been already set­tled by the cus­tom of cen­turies. There can­not be any poor or needy — the com­mu­nal house­hold and the gens know their respon­si­bil­i­ties towards the old, the sick, and those dis­abled in war. All are equal and free — the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the sub­ju­ga­tion of other tribes.” (86)

While Engels is right to com­mend the com­mu­nal econ­omy, sex­ual equal­ity, and hor­i­zon­tal polit­i­cal struc­ture of the Rotinonshón:ni, he erred in claim­ing that there were no ranks of social pres­tige with polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties. The anthro­po­log­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of “egal­i­tar­ian” is nar­row. There are some “rank soci­eties in which posi­tions of val­ued sta­tus are some­how lim­ited so that not all those of suf­fi­cient tal­ent to occupy such sta­tuses actu­ally achieve them. Such a soci­ety may or may not be strat­i­fied. That is, a soci­ety may sharply limit its posi­tions of pres­tige with­out affect­ing the access of its entire mem­ber­ship to the basic resources upon which life depends” (87) While the num­bers of roiá:ner and iakoiá:ner were lim­ited by the Kaianere’kó:wa to cer­tain kahwá:tsire, posi­tions of ohnkane­toten were open to all men on the basis of merit and selec­tion by the roiá:ner coun­cil. As has already been explained, Rotinonshón:ni soci­ety had a com­mu­nal work and con­sump­tion ethic (the com­mu­nal econ­omy of the “one bowl”), so although ranks of pres­tige did exist, they did not serve in a posi­tion of accu­mu­lat­ing or redis­trib­ut­ing wealth.

Grae­ber, who as an anar­chist is quite sus­pi­cious of all hier­ar­chy, says of the tra­di­tional Rotinonshón:ni, “for all the com­plex fed­er­a­tive struc­ture, soci­ety was in most respects highly egal­i­tar­ian. Office-holders, male and female, were elected from among a pool of pos­si­ble heirs; the offices them­selves, at least the male polit­i­cal ones, were con­sid­ered as much a respon­si­bil­ity as a reward as they involved no real mate­r­ial rewards and cer­tainly granted the holder no coer­cive power.” (88)

While it is often argued that the roiá:ner were tra­di­tion­ally selected from cer­tain matri­lin­eal lines, and that not all kahwá:tsire were able to select can­di­dates, this var­ied over time and loca­tion. Teiowí:sonte describes mod­ern debates around hered­ity: “To some, hered­ity is the very essence of Hau­denosaunee gov­er­nance and an inte­gral fac­tor in lead­er­ship selec­tion… To oth­ers, this con­cept rep­re­sents the infil­tra­tion of Euro­pean cor­rup­tion into Haun­denosaunee lead­er­ship selec­tion and the for­ti­fi­ca­tion of a class sys­tem invad­ing our tra­di­tional con­cept of democ­racy with notions of roy­alty. Like­wise, advo­cates against the hered­ity con­cept believe it to be a non-traditional con­ven­tion that is a fairly recent devel­op­ment result­ing from col­o­niza­tion.” (89) Snow claims that “Each nation devised its own inter­nal mech­a­nism for select­ing and orga­niz­ing its League Chiefs”(90); and that ohnkane­toten were cre­ated to specif­i­cally deal with the issue of empow­er­ing men who did not come from the dis­tinct matri­lin­eal lines eli­gi­ble for becom­ing roiá:ner. (91) He argues fur­ther that at times, the ranks may have rep­re­sented a polit­i­cal class dis­tinct from the com­mon Rotinonshón:ni, and a class of slaves made up of cap­tives who had not been adopted (92)–a sit­u­a­tion which would have been most pro­nounced dur­ing the Beaver Wars.

Grae­ber notes this as well. “It was around this period one reads accounts of a soci­ety effec­tively divided into classes, with adopted pris­on­ers doing the bulk of the menial labor and with mem­bers of their adopted fam­i­lies hav­ing the right to kill them for the slight­est infranc­tions or imper­ti­nence… [T]his excep­tion­ally bru­tal period did not last long: the chil­dren of these cap­tives were con­sid­ered full mem­bers of their adop­tive clans.” (93) As we have seen from the life of Thaientané:ken, the descen­dents of adoptees had the same polit­i­cal rights of com­mon Rotinonshón:ni and could be selected as ohnkane­toten. It is seem­ingly with­out con­tra­dic­tion that Snow also describes how lit­tle author­ity came with rank: “Although men appointed by each ohwachira prob­a­bly met as a vil­lage coun­cil, they had lit­tle author­ity beyond the force of their per­son­al­i­ties. This in turn meant that face-to-face per­sua­sion was the rule.” (94) Kanati­iosh empha­sizes that “being a chief or a clan mother is just as impor­tant as being a per­son with­out a title, for all peo­ple are held respon­si­ble for pre­serv­ing and pro­tect­ing the Great Law of Peace.” (95)

Cir­cle Wampum (96)
Bona­parte, who him­self served as a for­mer elected chief of the Mohawk Coun­cil of Akwesasne,(97) does not even think that roiá:ner should be called “chiefs”: “a lot of our peo­ple don’t like using the term “chief” instead of “roy­aner,” because chief is such a generic term. You’ve got fire chiefs, police chiefs, chief of staff, etc. Those are posi­tions where the peo­ple who have them are empow­ered to make deci­sions for a group, whereas our “roy­an­ers” are facil­i­ta­tors for hav­ing the group itself come to the deci­sion, and who then act upon that deci­sion.” (98) Indeed, the focus on decision-making among the Rotinonshón:ni was always to reach con­sen­sus. Snow has argued that the Rotinonshón:ni “empha­sized con­sen­sus rather than exec­u­tive author­ity, una­nim­ity rather than major­ity rule, and equal­ity rather than hier­ar­chy” (99) Taia­iake goes so far as to write that “hold­ing non-consensual power over oth­ers is con­trary to tra­di­tion. What­ever the pur­pose behind the use of arbi­trary author­ity, the power rela­tion­ship is wrong”. (100) Richter describes a state of uni­ver­sal suf­frage, claim­ing that vot­ing in the coun­cil was open to all who had reached the age of maturity.(101)

Those famil­iar with the insti­tu­tion of consensus-based spoke­coun­cils, used recently in the protests against cor­po­rate neolib­er­al­ism (“anti-globalization”), will notice many sim­i­lar­i­ties with Kahen­tinetha Horn’s descrip­tion of con­sen­sual decision-making among the Kanien’kehá:ka:

“[N]o one can impose their will nor make deci­sions for another, all must under­stand the view­point and agree of their own free will. The goal is not total agree­ment, but total under­stand­ing. If there is no agree­ment, then the con­sen­sus is to retain the sta­tus quo. If there is under­stand­ing by all then they go ahead with the deci­sion… In enter­ing the con­sen­sual decision-making process, what­ever ideas are put into the process, the needs and atti­tudes of each is con­sid­ered and com­ple­ments the deci­sion. Also, the indi­vid­ual has a duty to be directly involved, and to bring their ideas into the dis­cus­sion within their clan. The final deci­sion will be fully sat­is­fac­tory to some, sat­is­fac­tory to oth­ers and rel­a­tively sat­is­fac­tory to the remain­der, and will reflect ele­ments from every group. This is a slow care­ful process requir­ing the reach­ing of a full under­stand­ing by each indi­vid­ual and not a deci­sion made by a ‘leader.’ The per­son who explains the deci­sion is a spokesman.” (102)

The Kaianere’kó:wa lacks the monop­oly of force and the author­ity of coer­cive con­trol that define sta­tist poli­ties. It is a mutual agree­ment of non-aggression among its par­tic­i­pants, aimed pri­mar­ily on main­tain­ing peace­ful rela­tions among them, rather than a guid­ing doc­u­ment for the rule of elites over the rest of soci­ety. Richter has stated that “the coer­cive exer­cise of author­ity was vir­tu­ally unknown” among the Rotinonshón:ni,(103) and that their “polit­i­cal val­ues were essen­tially non­com­pet­i­tive.” (104) Grae­ber believes that “the entire polit­i­cal appa­ra­tus was seen by its cre­ators pri­mar­ily as a way of resolv­ing mur­der­ous dis­putes. The League was less a gov­ern­ment, or even alliance, than a series of treaties estab­lish­ing amity and pro­vid­ing the insti­tu­tional means for pre­vent­ing feuds and main­tain­ing har­mony among the five nations that made it up. For all their rep­u­ta­tion as preda­tory war­riors, the Iro­quois them­selves saw the essence of polit­i­cal action to lie in mak­ing peace.” (105)

Jus­tice among the tra­di­tional Rotinonshón:ni was the respon­si­bil­ity of every­one, par­tic­u­larly one’s matri­lin­eal kin. The focus was on con­dol­ing kahwá:tsire for their loss and on reg­u­lat­ing social behav­ior through pop­u­lar opin­ion, rather than through jus­tice admin­is­tered by a spe­cial­ized class. While some see the offer­ing of wampum to the fam­ily of a mur­der vic­tim to as a repa­ra­tional pay­ment, com­pa­ra­ble to the North­ern Euro­pean weregild, Mor­gan claimed that “the present of white wampum was not in the nature of a com­pen­sa­tion of the life of the deceased, but of a regret­ful con­fes­sion of the crime, with a peti­tion for for­give­ness. It was a peace-offering, the accep­tance of which was pressed by mutual friends, and under such influ­ences that the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion was usu­ally effect, except, per­haps, in aggra­vated cases of pre­med­i­tated mur­der.” (106)

Wallace’s inter­pre­ta­tion echoes Engel’s analy­sis of Rotinonshón:ni jus­tice: “Behav­ior was gov­erned not by pub­lished laws enforced by police, courts, and jails, but by oral tra­di­tion sup­ported by a sense of duty, a fear of gos­sip, and a dread of retal­ia­tory witch­craft. Theft, van­dal­ism, armed rob­bery, were almost unknown. Pub­lic opin­ion, gen­tly exer­cised, was suf­fi­cient to deter most per­sons from prop­erty crimes, for pub­lic opin­ion went straight to the heart of the mat­ter: the weak­ness of the crim­i­nal.” (107) And Kanati­iosh argues that Euro­pean set­tler “hier­ar­chy breeds com­pe­ti­tion, and com­pe­ti­tion breeds anger, resent­ment, hatred, and can lead to revenge, which only con­tin­ues the vicious cycle of vio­lence. West­ern soci­ety is depen­dent on impris­on­ment, fines and other pun­ish­ments, which are sup­posed to keep social order.” She con­trasts that sys­tem of coer­cive pun­ish­ment with the legal prin­ci­ples of the Kaianere’kó:wa, which cre­ated a “shared com­mu­nity where peo­ple have mutual respect for the entire group rather then inter­ested only in one’s self. Per­haps a lit­tle spir­i­tu­al­ity, shame, guilt, and respect of self and com­mu­nity would be the best ele­ments to include in a recipe for a true sys­tem of jus­tice.” (108)

Richter repeat­edly describes the tra­di­tional polity of the Rotinonshón:ni as a “non­state soci­ety” (109) and “a sys­tem depen­dent upon vol­un­tary com­pli­ance”. (110) His insis­tence on the dif­fer­ence between the Rotinonshón:ni and the colo­nial states it was con­tem­po­rary with is worth emphasizing:

“Mak­ing and pre­serv­ing peace, then was the pur­pose of the League, and accord­ingly the Grand Coun­cil appar­ently did not under­take the kinds of polit­i­cal func­tions of deci­sion mak­ing and diplo­macy char­ac­ter­is­tic of state-organized gov­ern­ments. In the early sev­en­teenth cen­tury, the League pos­sessed few state like char­ac­ter­is­tics: the Five nations had lit­tle in the way of com­mon for­eign pol­icy, no effec­tive means of devis­ing uni­fied strate­gies, and no cen­tral gov­ern­ment in the sense that term is usu­ally under­stood by Amer­i­cans. Indeed, on var­i­ous issues the ten or so autonomous towns of Iro­quoia were often at odds with one another as they were in con­sen­sus. The League was not designed to rem­edy the deficit–nor, appar­ently, did the Iro­quois peo­ple even per­ceive that there was any kind of deficit…“
Daniel Richter, Ordeal of the Long­house (111)

While the exact def­i­n­i­tion of a “state” is elu­sive, none can deny that states wield a legal monop­oly of vio­lence, and that the state there­fore takes a coer­cive role in regards to its cit­i­zens. In respect to the degree of a given polity’s coer­cive con­trol over its con­stituent mem­bers, we can imag­ine a spec­trum with the total­i­tar­ian state on one end and a state­less soci­ety, an anar­chy, on the other. Soci­eties that are more ranked and strat­i­fied are more sta­tist. Along this spec­trum, the Rotinonshón:ni polity falls toward the pole of state­less­ness, hav­ing extremely lim­ited rank­ing, and lack­ing in both coer­cive author­ity and eco­nomic stratification.

The anar­chist his­to­rian George Wood­cock believed that the Rotinonshón:ni’s polity amounted to a state­less con­fed­er­a­tion: “a com­mon coun­cil of sachems, in whose selec­tion the women, whose influ­ence derived from their con­trol of agri­cul­ture, played a great role; but this coun­cil did not inter­fere in the inter­nal affairs of the tribes, so that it remained the coör­di­nat­ing body of a true con­fed­er­a­tion rather than the gov­ern­ment of the state.” (112) Colo­nial his­to­rian Fran­cis Jen­nings rec­og­nizes that it was “a league of friend­ship and mutual assis­tance, but … a league of con­sul­ta­tion and con­tract rather than a gov­ern­ment of leg­isla­tive com­mand”. (113) Mem­ber nations “never gave up their power of indi­vid­ual deci­sion. Often they strug­gled for dom­i­nance within the league, and some­times (though rarely) they came to blows with each other. These phe­nom­ena were also to be observed among colo­nial towns and vil­lages, but whereas the Iro­quois tribes main­tained local inde­pen­dence through­out their exis­tence, the colonies grad­u­ally came under more and more effec­tive cen­tral con­trols.” (114) All Rotinonshón:ni nations are equal, regard­less of their num­ber of clans, size of ter­ri­tory or num­bers of pop­u­la­tion. (115) Bookchin, who so often sug­gested New Eng­land town-meeting democ­racy as a basic build­ing block of lib­er­tar­ian munic­i­pal­ist con­fed­er­a­tion, would have done well to have taken the advice of Mitchel Cohen, and exam­ine the Rotinonshón:ni polity as an exam­ple of the very sort of ideal of that he was advocating:

“Town meet­ings, accord­ing to Bookchin, are the Amer­i­can equiv­a­lent of the Greek polis — and why does he not seek to emu­late the Iro­quois tribal coun­cil instead or any of a hun­dred non-European forms? Linked together, local com­mu­ni­ties form the poten­tial, accord­ing to Bookchin, for a “fed­er­ated munic­i­pal­ism.” All other forms, par­tic­u­larly those cre­ated by native peo­ples, are seen as infe­rior. Amer­i­can Indian com­mu­ni­ties are dimin­ished, in Bookchin’s frame­work, because of their lack of ratio­nal munic­i­pal debate. The frame­work of the col­o­nizer informs Bookchin’s ideas despite him­self, dis­em­pow­er­ing rad­i­cal ecol­ogy move­ments and under­min­ing their potential.”(116)

Anarcho-Indigenism

While Bookchin might have not rec­og­nized sim­i­lar­i­ties between his own anti-authoritarian pol­i­tics and the tra­di­tional Rotinonshón:ni polity, some Rotinonshón:ni have also brushed off such com­par­isons. In an essay attempt­ing to dis­suade Rotinonshón:ni from par­tic­i­pat­ing as allies in the protests against the Free Trade Area of Amer­i­cas (FTAA) meet­ings held in April 2001 in Québec City, Teiowí:sonte argued that the “plat­form and aspi­ra­tions among some of these groups, par­tic­u­larly the Anar­chists, are to elim­i­nate any struc­tured author­ity. Anar­chism is a Greek word mean­ing with­out gov­ern­ment. Their beliefs are con­tra­dic­tory to that of the Kaianere’kó:wa and actu­ally threaten the exis­tence of Hau­denosaunee gov­ern­ments if these groups ever attain their ulti­mate goal.” (117)

At least one of Teiowí:sonte’s com­rades in the Wasáse Move­ment, Taia­iake, might dis­agree with Teiowí:sonte’s inter­pre­ta­tion of anar­chism. Oth­ers, like Ward Churchill, have seen com­mon­al­i­ties between Indi­genism and Anar­chism. (118) Taia­iake, com­ing from a tra­di­tion­al­ist Kanien’kehá:ka per­spec­tive but also an aca­d­e­mic career in polit­i­cal sci­ence, his­tory and indige­nous gov­er­nance, argues explic­itly for an “anarcho-indigenism.”(119) Far from see­ing anar­chism as a hin­drance to the reestab­lish­ment of the Kaianere’kó:wa as the polity of mod­ern Rotinonshón:ni, Taia­iake sees anar­chism as the kind of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, “fun­da­men­tally anti-institutional, rad­i­cally demo­c­ra­tic, and com­mit­ted to tak­ing action for change,”(120) that is needed to com­bine with the indige­nous vision of a good soci­ety. Not only do the com­mon­al­i­ties exist in terms of phi­los­o­phy, but they are increas­ingly being seen on the lev­els of strat­egy and praxis:

“There are philo­soph­i­cal con­nec­tions between indige­nous and some strains of anar­chist thought on the spirit of free­dom and the ideals of a good soci­ety. Par­al­lel crit­i­cal ideas and visions of post-imperial futures have been noted by a few thinkers, but some­thing that may be called anarcho-indigenism has yet to develop into a coher­ent phi­los­o­phy. There are also impor­tant strate­gic com­mon­al­i­ties between indige­nous and anar­chist ways of see­ing and being in the world… a rejec­tion of alliances with legal­ized sys­tems of oppres­sion, non-participation in the insti­tu­tions that struc­ture the colo­nial rela­tion­ship, and a belief in bring­ing about change through direct action, phys­i­cal resis­tance, and con­fronta­tions with state power. It is on this last point that con­nec­tions have already been made between Onkwe­honwe groups and non-indigenous activist groups in the anti-globalization move­ment.” (121)

In defin­ing uni­ver­sal indige­nous prin­ci­ples, Taiaiake’s posi­tion is not only anti-statist but also explic­itly anti-hierarchical: “Tra­di­tional indige­nous nation­hood stands in sharp con­trast to the dom­i­nant under­stand­ing of ‘the state’: there is no absolute author­ity, no coer­cive enforce­ment of deci­sions, no hier­ar­chy, and no sep­a­rate rul­ing entity.” (122) He goes so far as to call con­tin­ued coöper­a­tion with the state as “morally unac­cept­able.” (123)

Per­haps anar­chism and the strug­gle of other social move­ments have had effects upon indi­genism as well. While Taia­iake is a pas­sion­ate pro­po­nent of a return to tra­di­tional polity, he acknowl­edges that “it’s not going to look the same as before. Our ideas about injus­tice might even pos­sess and lead us to fight our own peo­ple and the injus­tice they are bring­ing on through the instru­ment of their form of gov­ern­ment.” (124)

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between anar­chism and indi­genism are being increas­ingly noticed, as anar­chists find them­selves in sol­i­dar­ity with indige­nous strug­gles from Oax­aca to Ohswé:ken. Some have gone so far as to argue that indi­genism is the ances­tor of anarchism(126)–a claim that seems all that more plau­si­ble when anar­chists study the tra­di­tional polity of the Rotinonshón:ni. Teiowí:sonte has called the tra­di­tional polity of the Rotinonshón:ni the “orig­i­nal social­ist par­adise,” partly because of its influ­ence on Marx’s socialism.(127) Fem­i­nists in the U.S. have acknowl­edged the influ­ence of Rotinonshón:ni on their vision of equal­ity. The tra­di­tional polity of the Rotinonshón:ni has demon­strated that cul­tural evo­lu­tion is not uni­lin­ear. There is an alter­ative to a strat­i­fied, hier­ar­chi­cal, patri­archi­cal soci­ety and an exploitive economy–but we must build it now, and not wait idly for some far-off future when mate­r­ial cul­ture has com­pleted its devel­op­ment. There is an alter­na­tive to klep­toc­racy. It is pos­si­ble today!

“The Ever­grow­ing Tree” belt (125)

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

• Akwe­sasne Notes, “Basic Call to Con­scious­ness: The Hau­denosaunee Address to the West­ern World” Geneva, Autumn 1977
• Taia­iake Ger­ald Alfred, Peace, Power, Right­eous­ness: An Indige­nous Man­i­festo (Don Mills: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999)
• Taia­iake Ger­ald Alfred, Wasáse: Indige­nous Path­ways of Action and Free­dom (Peter­bor­ough, ON: Broad­view Press, 2005)
• Harold Bar­clay, Peo­ple With­out Gov­ern­ment: An Anthro­pol­ogy of Anar­chy (Lon­don: Kahn & Aver­ill, 1990)
• Daniel P. Barr, Uncon­quered: The Iro­quois League at War in Colo­nial Amer­ica (West­port, CT: Praeger Pub­lish­ers, 2006)
• Mur­ray Bookchin, The Ecol­ogy of Free­dom (Lon­don: AK Press, 1982)
• Mur­ray Bookchin, Social Anar­chism or Lifestyle Anar­chism (Lon­don: AK Press, 1997)
• Mur­ray Bookchin, Nation­al­ism and the “National Ques­tion” (Democ­racy and Nature: Vol. 2, No. 2, Issue 5, 1994)
• Dar­ren Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion: The Liv­ing His­tory of the Iro­quois (Ahk­wesáh­sne: The Wampum Chron­i­cles, 2006)
• Dar­ren Bona­parte, “Kani­atarowa­nen­neh: River of the Iro­quois” (Wampum Chronicles)
• Mitchel Cohen, “Lis­ten, Bookchin!” (A Red Bal­lon Col­lec­tive Pam­phlet, 1999)
• Ward Churchill, “Indi­genism, Anar­chism, and the State: An Inter­view with Ward Churchill” (“Uping the Anti”, #1)
• Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, “The Hered­i­tary Ques­tion” (Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Creations)
• Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, “The new Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War” (Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Creations)
• Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, “The Tra­di­tion­al­ist Doc­trine” (Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Creations)
• Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, “Barred from the ‘social­ist’ par­adise” (New Social­ist, #58, September/October 2006)
• Jared Dia­mond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: W.W. Nor­ton & Com­pany, Inc., 1999)
• Fred­er­ick Engels, Ori­gins of the Fam­ily: The Iro­quois Gens, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol­ume Three (1884)
• David Grae­ber, Towards an Anthro­po­log­i­cal The­ory of Value: False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York, NY: PALGRAVE, 2001)
• Kanati­iosh Bar­bara Gray, “The Impor­tance of Nar­ra­tives in Under­stand­ing: The Pas­sions & Law”
• Hunter Gray, “Straw­ber­ries, the Iro­quois, and My Straw­berry Socialism”
• Don­ald A. Grinde, Jr and Bruce E. Johansen, Exem­plar of Lib­erty: Native Amer­ica and the Evo­lu­tion of Democ­racy(1990)
• Kahen­tinetha Horn, “Tra­di­tional Cul­ture and Com­mu­nity Com­pe­ti­tion: an Analy­sis of the On-Going Strug­gle between the Great Law and the Code of Hand­some Lake in Kah­nawake” (Mohawk Nation News)
• Fran­cis Jen­nings, The Ambigu­ous Iro­quois Empire: The Covenant Chain Con­fed­er­a­tion of Indian Tribes With Eng­lish Colonies (New York: W.W. Nor­ton & Com­pany, Inc., 1984)
• Don­ald S. Lutz, “The Iro­quois Con­fed­er­a­tion Con­sti­tu­tion: an analy­sis.” (Pub­lius Vol­ume: 28 Issue: 2, 1998)
• Bar­bara A. Mann, “The Lynx in Time: Hau­denosaunee Women’s Tra­di­tions and His­tory” (Amer­i­can Indian Quar­terly, Sum­mer 98, Vol. 21 Issue 3)
• Lewis Henry Mor­gan, The League of the Ho-de’-no-sau-née, or Iro­quois, 1850
• Arthur C. Parker, The Con­sti­tu­tion of the Five Nations or the Iro­quois Book of the Great Law, (Albany: Uni­ver­sity of the State of New York, 1916)
• Natoway Brian Rice, “The Great Epic” (“Wampum Chronicles”)
• Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Long­house: The Peo­ples of the Iro­quois League in the Era of Euro­pean Col­o­niza­tion (Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina Press, 1992)
• Dean R. Snow, The Iro­quois, (Malden, MA: Black­well Pub­lish­ing, 1994)
• John Steck­ley, “Wen­dat Dialects and the Devel­op­ment of the Huron Alliance” (Hum­ber College)
• Reuben Gold Thwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Rela­tions and Allied Doc­u­ments: Trav­els and Explo­rations of the Jesuit Mis­sion­ar­ies in New France 1610–1791
• Anthony F.C. Wal­lace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vin­tage Books, 1972)
• Sally Roesch Wag­ner, Sis­ters in Spirit: Hau­denosaunee (Iro­quois) Influ­ence on Early Amer­i­can Fem­i­nists(Sum­mer­town, TN: Native Voices, 2001)
• George Wood­cock, “Anar­chy, Free­dom, Native Peo­ple & The Envi­ron­ment” (Aurora Online)

Glos­sary

Terms are mostly in stan­dard Kanien’kehá:ka

• Eriel­ho­nan / Rhi­ier­rhonon (Erie) : Iroquois-speaking nation, Peo­ple of the Long Tail, Peo­ple of the Cat, south of Lake Erie
• Iakoiá:ner / Oianer / Oyaner / Oyan­der / Yakoy­aner : Clan Moth­ers, Title Holder, “they know the path”, “good path maker”, “good”, “noble” Iotiiá:ner / Otiyaner is the plural form.
• Kahwá:tsire / Ohwachira : Matri­lin­eal Clan
• Kaianere’kó:wa / Gayanashagowa / Gai Ene­shah Go’ Nah : “The Great Good Way”, “The Great Law”, “The Great Law of Peace”, “The Good Tid­ings of Peace and Power (and Right­eous­ness)”, “The Great Bind­ing Law”, “The Con­sti­tu­tion of the Five (Six) Nations”
• Kaion’kehá:ka / Kaiokwenhá:ka‘ / Kaionkwe’haka / Kaokwa haka / Kayonkwe’haka (Cayuga) : “Peo­ple of the great swamp”. Iroquois-speaking nation, the third nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni. West of the Ononta’kehá:ka nation, and east of the Shotinontowane’á:ka nation. A younger brother nation.
• Kanien’kehá:ka / Kenienke haka / Kanyen’kehaka (Mohawk) : “Peo­ple of the flint”. Iroquois-speaking nation, first nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni. The keep­ers of the East­ern Door. An older brother nation.
• Kakwa:ko (Neu­tral) : Iroquois-speaking nation near the Niagara
• Karihwí:io / Gai­wiio : “the good mes­sage”, The Code of Hand­some Lake
• Ohnkaneto:ten / Ohnkane­toten / Ehkane­hdo­deh / Enkane­do­den : “Pine Tree” chief/sachem, selected by coun­cil of roiá:ner, serve for life, have voice but not vote in coun­cil of roiá:ner con­sen­sus decision-making, may be stripped of their title by coun­cil of roiá:ner (the coun­cil will no longer hear them).
• Oneniote’á:ka / Onenyote’haka (Oneida, Onneiouts) : “Peo­ple of the stand­ing stone”. Iroquois-speaking nation, sec­ond nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni. West of Kanien’kehá:ka nation, east of Ononta’kehá:ka nation. Allied to the United States dur­ing the U.S. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. A younger brother nation.
• Onkwehón:we / Onkwe­honwe : the orig­i­nal peo­ple, indigenous
• Ononta’kehá:ka / Oneota haka(Onondaga): “Peo­ple of the hills”. Iroquois-speaking nation, the fifth nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni. Keep­ers of the cen­tral coun­cil fire. West of the Oneniote’á:ka nation, east of the Kaion’kehá:ka nation. An older brother nation.
• Roiá:ner / Roy­aner / Roianer / Hoy­ane : “He makes a good path for peo­ple to fol­low”, “good”, “noble”, clan chiefs/sachem, selected by the iakoiá:ner, usu­ally from men within the kahwá:tsire, sub­ject to removal from office by deci­sion of iakoiá:ner. Rotiiá:ner / Rotiyaner / Roti­ianer is the plural form. Their badge of office is a deer antler head­ress, sym­bol­iz­ing that they will only eat the flesh of deer and make war no more. To par­tic­i­pate in war­fare, a roiá:ner would have to give up their posi­tion as roiá:ner.
• Rati­hn­ho­hanónhnha / Ron­in­ho­hhot : the door keep­ers, the Shotinotowane’haka charged with guard­ing the west­ern door of the Rotinonshón:ni longhouse.
• Rotinonshón:ni / Roti­noshoni / Roti­non­sonni / Roti­non­sionni / Hau­denosaunee / Hotin­nochiendi / Ganon­sy­oni (Iro­quois) : “Peo­ple of the long house”, “the peo­ple of the com­pleted long­house”, “the lodge extended length­wise”, the Five / Six Nations of the Iro­quois, the league of the Iro­quois, the Iro­quois confederacy.
• Shotinontowane’á:ka / Shotinontowane’haka / Sonon­towa haka (Seneca) : “Peo­ple of the great moun­tain”. Iroquois-speaking nation. Fourth nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni. The door keep­ers, the west­ern most nation of the Rotinonshón:ni. An older brother nation.
• Susque­han­nock / Con­estoga : Iroquois-speaking nation, south of the Rotinonshón:ni
• Tehatiskaró:ros / Taskaroraha:ka / Taskaro­ra­haka (Tus­carora) : “Peo­ple of the shirt”. Iroquois-speaking nation who migrated north after pres­sure from North Car­lonia set­tlers. The sixth nation to join the Rotinonshón:ni as a dis­tinct, autonomous nation–but did not have roiá:ner in Rotinonshón:ni coun­cil. Oneniote’á:ka roiá:ner would speak for them in coun­cil, and Taskaro­ra­haka were regarded as the younger broth­ers to the Oneniote’á:ka.
• Tionon­tati (Petun) : Iroquois-speaking nation, “Tobacco”, Khionon­tateronon, Conkhan­deer­rhonon, Quieunontati

Wen­dat

 / Wyn­dat / Wyan­dot / Wyan­datt (Huron) : Iroquois-speaking nation “Huron“ was the French name for the Wen­dat because of their farm­ing. Lit­er­ally, “Huron“ means “peas­ant“; Guyan­dot, Guyan­dotte, Ouen­dat, and Wyan­dotte. Included : Aren­dahronon (rock peo­ple); Attig­nawan­tan (Attig­naouen­tan, Attig­nous­ntan) (bear peo­ple); Attigneenong­na­hac (Attiguenongha) (cord peo­ple); and Tahon­taen­rat (Scanon­aerat, Sca­hen­toar­rhonon) (deer people).
• Wen­rohronon / Ahouen­rochrhonon (Wenro): Iroquois-speaking nation, “the peo­ple of the place of float­ing scum”, Ahouen­rochrhonon and Ouenrionon.

Peo­ple

• Aiewáhtha / Ayen­watha / Ayon­wen­tah / Ayawatha / Ayon­watha / Hiawatha / Hayan­watah : Kanien’kehá:ka roiá:ner, pos­si­bly Ononta’kehá:ka adopted as Kanien’kehá:ka. Title is requickened.
• Atsen­haien­ton Ken­neth Deer : “The fire still burns”. Kanien’kehá:ka of the Bear kahwá:tsire, resid­ing in Kahnawà:ke, pub­lisher and edi­tor of “The East­ern Door”, Chairman/Rapporteur of the UN Work­shop on Indige­nous Media in New York in Decem­ber of 2000, mem­ber of the Board of Direc­tors for the Que­bec Com­mu­nity News­pa­pers Asso­ci­a­tion from 1999–2001, and co-chairman of the National Indian Edu­ca­tion Coun­cil in Canada.
• Bar­bara Alice Mann, Ph.D : Shotinontowane’á:ka author, pro­fes­sor of Native Amer­i­can Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Toledo
• Day­o­dekane / Seth New­house : Kanien’kehá:ka and Ononta’kehá:ka author of Ohswé:ken. He tran­scribed the Kaianere’kó:wa in 1885, but was not cred­ited when Gawasco Waneh pub­lished it.
• Ganioda’yo / Ganeodiyo / Gun­yundiyo : “Hand­some Lake”, Shotinontowane’á:ka roiá:ner who brought the Karihwí:io. Title is requickened.
• Gawasco Waneh / Gawaso Wan­neh / Arthur Caswell Parker : “Talk­ing Leaves”, Shotinontowane’á:ka arche­ol­o­gist, his­to­rian, pub­lished Kaianere’kó:wa in English.
• Hunter Gray (Hunter­bear) John R Salter, Jr. : Ahk­wesáh­sne Kanien’kehá:ka, Mi’kmaq, St. Fran­cis Abenaki, labor orga­nizer and civil rights activist, for­mer depart­men­tal chair of Indian Stud­ies at Uni­ver­sity of North Dakota, mem­ber of Sol­i­dar­ity, Social­ist Party USA, Demo­c­ra­tic Social­ists of Amer­ica, Com­mit­tees of Cor­re­spon­dence for Democ­racy and Social­ism and the United Auto Work­ers Local 1981 (National Writ­ers Union).
• Kahen­tinetha Horn : Kanien’kehá:ka jour­nal­ist and activist from Kahnawà:ke, edi­tor of Mohawk Nation News (MNN). She is also a pro­fes­sor of Indige­nous Women’s His­tory at Con­cor­dia University.
• Kanati­iosh Bar­bara Gray, JD: Kanien’kehá:ka/Ononta’kehá:ka and Deer kahwá:tsire from Ahk­wesáh­sne, author and Ph.D. can­di­date for Native Amer­i­can Jus­tice Stud­ies, Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity Law School, Edi­tor of the Hau­denosaunee Envi­ron­men­tal Task Force (HETF) Newsletter
• Karonhienhá:wi / Karonien­hawi / Matilda Joslyn Gage : “Sky Car­rier”, a suf­frag­ist of Euro­pean ances­tery adopted into the Wolf kahwá:tsire of the Kanien’kehá:ka.
• Natoway Brian Rice, Ph.D : Kanien’kehá:ka author, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of abo­rig­i­nal Edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Winnipeg
• Ranatakárias / Ranataki­ias / Hanadagywu / Cauno­tau­car­ius /Conotocarious / Hanadahguyus : “Town Destroyer”, title given to George Wash­ing­ton when Pres­i­dent of the United States because of his order­ing the Sullivan-Clark mil­i­tary expe­di­tion against the Rotinonshón:ni. The title has been passed on to sub­squent U.S. pres­i­dents since.
• Sakoia­ten­tha Dar­ren Bona­parte : Kanien’kehá:ka author from Ahk­wesáh­sne, wampumchronicles.com, mem­ber of Wasáse Movement
• Segoye­watha / Sagoy­awatha : Shotinontowane’á:ka and Ohnkaneto:ten, famous ora­tor, “He Keeps Them Awake”,“Red Jacket”, Ote­tiani, “always ready”
• Taia­iake Ger­ald Alfred, Ph.D : Kanien’kehá:ka author from Kahnawà:ke, adjunct pro­fes­sor of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Direc­tor of Indige­nous Gov­er­nance Pro­grams and the Indige­nous Peo­ples Research Chair at the Uni­ver­sity of Vic­to­ria, mem­ber of Wasáse Movement
• Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer : Kanien’kehá:ka jour­nal­ist and illus­tra­tor from Kahnawà:ke, mem­ber of Wasáse Movement
• Tekanawí:ta / Dekanah­wideh / Degi­nawada / Deganaw­ida : “Two Cur­rents Com­ing Down”, pos­si­bly Kanien’kehá:ka, pos­si­bly Wen­dat adopted by Kanien’kehá:ka. The title is not requick­ened. “The Peace­maker” is an Eng­lish sobriquet.
• Thaientané:ken / Tyientané:ken / Thayen­da­negea / Tyen­d­i­naga / Joseph Brant : Kanien’kehá:ka and Ohnkaneto:ten, lead many Rotinonshón:ni against the United States. His efforts would help estab­lish the com­mu­nity at Ohswé:ken, the Six Nation’s reserve along the Grand River, and the town of Brant­ford is named for him, as is the Tyen­d­i­naga Mohawk Com­mu­nity at the Bay of Quinte.
• Tha­totáhrho / Tato­taho / Atotárho / Ato­tarho / Tododaho / Tadadaho / Ado­darho / Adoda:r’ho : Ononta’kehá:ka roiá:ner, keeper of the coun­cil fire. Title is requick­ened. The cur­rent Tha­totáhrho is Sid Hill.
• Tsikónhsase / Tsokansase / Jigon­saseh / Jikohn­saseh / Djikonsa’se : “the mother of nations”, “the peace queen”, “round face” pos­si­bly of the Kakwa:ko on east side of the Nia­gara, pro­vi­sioned war­riors and also admin­is­tered dis­putes. Title is requickened.

Places

• Ahk­wesáh­sne : “Where the par­tridge drums”, St. Regis
• Hochelaga (Mon­tréal): also called Tiohtiá:ke / Tso­ti­ahke in Kanien’kehá:ka “where the peo­ple split apart.”
• Kahnawà:ke / Kah­nawake / Caugh­nawaga : “On the rapids”, a Kanien’kehá:ka com­mu­nity near Montréal.
• Kanehsatà:ke : “On the crusty sands”, a Kanienkeha com­mu­nity near Oka and Montréal.
• Kaniatarí:io : “Beau­ti­ful lake”, Lake Ontario
• Kani­atarowanénhne / Kani­atarowa­nen­neh : “Big water­way” in Kanien’kehá:ka. Also called the St. Lawrence River.
• Kenhtè:ke (Tyen­d­i­naga) : “Place of the bay”, a Kanien’kehá:ka Com­mu­nity at the Bay of Quinte, birth­place of Tekanawí:ta.
• Ohswé:ken / Ohsweken : the Six Nations reserve along the Grand River, the Haldimand Tract
• Onnon­taé / Ononta:ke (Onondaga) : “On the Hill”, Ononta’kehá:ka town, near Syra­cuse, where the cen­tral coun­cil fire of the Rotinonshón:ni is kept.
• Stada­cona : also called Tetiatenontarì:kon in Kanien’kehá:ka, near Que­bec City
• Tonawanda : West of Alabama, New York
• Tus­co­rara : Near Nia­gara Falls

Niá:wen : Thanks. Niá:wen to Kaiò for help­ing with this glossary.

End Notes

1. Thwaites, The Jesuit Rela­tions and Allied Doc­u­ments: Trav­els and Explo­rations of the Jesuit Mis­sion­ar­ies in New France 1610–1791, Vol. 51
2. Dia­mond, Guns, Germs and Steel, 268–269
3. For this arti­cle, “Iro­quois” will be used to refer to those who speak a north­ern Iro­quois lan­guage, while “Rotinonshón:ni” (Hau­denosaunee) will be used for the spe­cific polity, also known as the Peo­ple of the Long­house and the League (Con­fed­er­acy) of Five (Six) Nations. Terms used through­out the arti­cle are mostly in stan­dard Kanien’kehá:ka
4. Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 47
5. Also referred to as Gayanashagowa, “The Great Law,” “The Great Law of Peace”, “The Good Tid­ings of Peace and Power (and Right­eous­ness),” “The Great Bind­ing Law,” “The Con­sti­tu­tion of the Five (Six) Nations“
6. Dia­mond, 286–287
7. Ibid, 276
8. Bookchin, Social Anar­chism or Lifestyle Anar­chism
9. Sym­bol­izes the con­fed­er­a­tion of the Rotinonshón:ni. Each square is a seper­ate nation, with the white pine in the cen­ter rep­re­sent­ing Ononta’kehá:ka as the cen­tral fire keep­ers.
10. Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 7
11. Ohswé:ken is also known as the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River, the Haldimand Tract. The ver­sion men­tioned here is Seth Newhouse’s. Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 85
12. Bay of Quinte is also home of the Tyen­d­i­naga (a ref­er­ence to Thayen­danega) Kanien’kehá:ka com­mu­nity estab­lished in 1784. There is a memo­r­ial at the Com­mu­nity Cen­tre to “The Peacemaker”–an Eng­lish sobri­quet of Tekanawí:ta. The ver­sion men­tioned here is the Ohswé:ken Rotiiá:ner ver­sion. Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 81
13. Bar­bara Mann, “The Lynx in Time: Hau­denosaunee Women’s Tra­di­tions and His­tory“
14. Parker lists her as Djikonsa’se, “the mother of nations”,
“the peace queen” and states that she was of the Kakwa:ko (Neu­tral) nation on the east side of the Nia­gara. Parker, The Con­sti­tu­tion of the Five Nations or the Iro­quois Book of the Great Law, 71
15. Also translit­er­ated as Tsokansase, Natoway Brian Rice, “The Great Epic: The Peace­maker Brings the Mes­sage of Peace to the Kenienke haka“
16. Mann
17. This ver­sion is from Thaientané:ken (Joseph Brant). Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 54–55.
18. This has been related in the oral tra­di­tion as recited by Jake Thomas and ref­er­enced by Kanati­iosh Bar­bara Gray, “The Impor­tance of Nar­ra­tives in Under­stand­ing: The Pas­sions & Law“
19. Kahen­tinetha Horn, “Tra­di­tional Cul­ture and Com­mu­nity Com­pe­ti­tion“
20. New­house and Ohswé:ken rotiiá:ner ver­sions, Parker; as well as Rice’s ver­sion.
21. Lewis Henry Mor­gan, The League of the Ho-de’-no-sau-née, or Iro­quois, 308
22. Jesuit Rela­tions, Vol. 43
23. Richter, 17
24. Wal­lace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca,143
25. Ibid., 194
26. Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, “The Tra­di­tion­al­ist Doc­trine“
27. Hunter Gray, “Straw­ber­ries, the Iro­quois, and My Straw­berry Social­ism“
28. Richter, Ordeal of the Long­house, 25
29. Ibid., 23
30. Bookchin, The Ecol­ogy of Free­dom, 50
31. Grae­ber, Towards an Anthro­po­log­i­cal The­ory of Value
32. Akwe­sasne Notes, “Basic Call to Con­scious­ness”
33. Kahwá:tsire / Ohwachira means matri­lin­eal clan. Snow, The Iro­quois, 69
34. Sally Roesch Wag­ner, Sis­ters in Spirit: Hau­denosaunee (Iro­quois) Influ­ence on Early Amer­i­can Fem­i­nists, 91–92
35. Bar­clay, Peo­ple With­out a Gov­ern­ment, 121
36. Snow, 65
37. Grae­ber, 122
38. Wag­ner, 68
39. Ibid, 66
40. Ibid, 47
41. Jesuit Rela­tions, Vol LI, CXXII
42. Wag­ner, 73
43. Ibid., 69
44. Kanati­iosh
45. Snow, 71–72
46. Wal­lace, 283–28
47. Ibid, 28
48. Kahen­tinetha
49. Mor­gan, 331
50. Snow, 217
51. Ibid, 198
52. “On May 16, 1914, only six years before the first national elec­tion in which women had the vote, Puck printed a line draw­ing of a group of Indian women observ­ing Susan B. Anthony, Anne Howard Shaw and Eliz­a­beth Cady Stan­ton lead­ing a parade of women. A verse under the print read:

“Sav­agery to Civ­i­liza­tion“
“We, the women of the Iro­quois
Own the Land, the Lodge, the Chil­dren
Ours is the right to adop­tion, life or death;
Ours is the right to raise up and depose chiefs;
Ours is the right to rep­re­sen­ta­tion in all coun­cils;
Ours is the right to make and abro­gate treaties;
Ours is the super­vi­sion over domes­tic and for­eign poli­cies;
Ours is the trustee­ship of tribal prop­erty;
Our lives are val­ued again as high as man’s. “
Don­ald A. Grinde, Jr and Bruce E. Johansen, Exem­plar of Lib­erty: Native Amer­ica and the Evo­lu­tion of Democ­racy
53. Wag­ner, 28
54. Ibid, 32
55. Ibid, 93
56. Taia­iake, Wasáse: Indige­nous Path­ways of Action and Free­dom, 84
57. Jesuit Rela­tions: 42:253
58. Bookchin, Nation­al­ism and the “National Ques­tion“
59. Snow, 67
60. Ibid, 87
61. Bona­parte, “Kani­atarowa­nen­neh: River of the Iro­quois“
62. Snow, 88
63. Bona­parte, “Kani­atarowa­nen­neh: River of the Iro­quois“
64. Natoway Brian Rice, “The Great Epic, Com­ing of the Light Skinned Beings.“
65. Natoway, “The Great Epic, Com­ing of the Light Skinned Beings.“
66. Snow, 79–80
67. Ibid, 100
68. Natoway, “The Great Epic, The Revival of the War Chiefs“
69. Grae­ber, 146
70. Snow, 115
71.Ibid, 117
72. Ibid, 118
73. John Steck­ley, “Wen­dat Dialects and the Devel­op­ment of the Huron Alliance,” Hum­ber Col­lege
74. Daniel P. Barr, Uncon­quered: The Iro­quois League at War in Colo­nial Amer­ica, 47, 40–41
75. Bona­parte, Cre­ation and Con­fed­er­a­tion, 96
76. Richter, 119–120
77. This wampum belt was given to the Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke by the Wen­dat of Lorette (Wen­dake), circa 1677.
78. Kahen­tinetha
79. Wal­lace, 29
80. Natoway, “The Great Epic: Sawiskera Gains Con­trol“
81. Don­ald S. Lutz, “The Iro­quois Con­fed­er­a­tion Con­sti­tu­tion: an analy­sis.“
82. Snow, 183
83. Hau­denosaunee: Great Law of Peace
84. Taia­iake, Peace, Power and Right­eous­ness, 102
85. Ibid, Peace, Power and Right­eous­ness, 103
86. Fred­er­ick Engels, Orgin of the Fam­ily, Pri­vate Prop­erty and the State
87. Fried quoted by Bar­clay, 41.
88. Grae­ber, 122
89. Teiowí:sonte “The Hered­ity Ques­tion“
90. Snow, 62
91. Ibid, 65
92. Ibid, 130
93. Grae­ber, 124
94. Snow, 89
95. Kanati­iosh
96. Sym­bol­izes the unity and equal­ity of the fifty roiá:ner. The one longer strand rep­re­sents the peo­ple or keeper of all records of the league. Image from Wampum Chron­i­cles.
link
link
97. The MCA is a band coun­cil, not an orga­ni­za­tion of the tra­di­tional polity of the Rotinonshón:ni; thus it has chiefs not roiá:ner.
98. Bona­parte, per­sonal cor­re­spon­dence; a sen­ti­ment also con­firmed by Kahen­tinetha Horn in her inter­view with Kak­wirakeron.
99. Snow, 142
100. Taia­iake, Peace, Power an Right­eous­ness, 28
101. Richter, 43
102. Kahen­tinetha
103. Richter, 45
104. Ibid, 45
105. Grae­ber, 125
106. Mor­gan, 333
107. Wal­lace, 25
108. Kanati­iosh
109. Richter, 44
110. Ibid, 46
111. Ibid, 40
112. George Wood­cock, “Anar­chy, Free­dom, Native Peo­ple & The Envi­ron­ment“
113. Jen­nings, The Ambigu­ous Iro­quois Empire , 7
114. Ibid.
115. Kahen­tinetha
116. Mitchel Cohen, “Lis­ten, Bookchin!“
117. Teiowí:sonte, “The new Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War“
118. Churchill, “Indi­genism, Anar­chism, and the State: An Inter­view with Ward Churchill”, “Uping the Anti”, #1
119. Taia­iake, Wasáse: Indige­nous Path­ways of Action and Free­dom, 45
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid.
122. Taia­iake, Peace, Power and Right­eous­ness, 56
123. Taia­iake, Wasáse: Indige­nous Path­ways of Action and Free­dom, 36
124. Ibid, 92
125. This belt sym­bol­izes adop­tion: any one or any nation out­side of the Rotinonshón:ni wishes to abide by the Kaianere’kó:wa may fol­low one of the great roots to the tree. If their minds are clean and they promise to obey the wishes of the roiá:ner coun­cil, they are wel­come to take shel­ter beneath the tree of peace. link
126. Churchill
127. Teiowí:sonte, “Barred from the ‘social­ist’ paradise”

 

Tekeni Teio­hate, The Two Row Wampum 

“You say that you are our Father and I am your son. We say, We will not be like Father and Son, but like Broth­ers. This wampum belt con­firms our words. These two rows will sym­bol­ize two paths or two ves­sels, trav­el­ing down the same river together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the onkwehón:we, their laws, their cus­toms and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white peo­ple and their laws, their cus­toms and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our boat. Nei­ther of us will make com­pul­sory laws or inter­fere in the inter­nal affairs of the other. Nei­ther of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.”

“As long as the Sun shines upon this Earth, that is how long OUR Agree­ment will stand; Sec­ond, as long as the Water still flows; and Third, as long as the Grass Grows Green at a cer­tain time of the year. Now we have Sym­bol­ized this Agree­ment and it shall be bind­ing for­ever as long as Mother Earth is still in motion.“
Rotinonshón:ni-Dutch treaty, 1613