


47/50: Hau de no sau nee (1/4)
Name: Aesop #482 @9702
Date: Fri Apr 09 17:18:14 1993
From: Someplace Else (Alaska) [907-338-1612]

>From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)

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 _A_Basic_Call_to_Consciousness_ : The Hau de no sau nee Address
 to the Western World (Geneva, Switzerland Autumn 1977)

copyright 1978 by Akwesasne Notes, Mohawk Nation, Via Rooseveltown, NY



INTRODUCTION:

It was not long ago that the Hau de no sau nee, or Six Nations, were a 
powerful people, occupying a vast territory stretching from Vermont to 
Ohio, and from present day Quebec to Tennessee. At the period of first 
contact early during the 17th century, the Hau de no see occupied hundreds 
of towns and villages throughout the country.

"Hau de no sau nee" is a word which means "people who build," and is the 
proper name of the people of the Longhouse. The early history, history 
before the Indo-Europeans came, explains that there was a time when the 
peoples of the North American forest experienced war and strife. It was 
during such a time that there came into this land one who carried words of 
peace. That one would come to be called the Peacemaker.

The Peacemaker came to the people with a message that human beings should 
cease abusing one another. He stated that humans are capable of reason, 
that through that power of reason all men desire peace, and that it is 
necessary that the people organize to ensure that peace will be possible 
among the people who walk about on the earth. That was the original word 
about laws -- laws were originally made to prevent the abuse of humans by 
other humans.

The Peacemaker travelled among the people, going from nation to nation, 
seeking those who would take up this way of peace, offering with it a way 
of reason and power. He journeyed first among the Ganiekenhaga -- the 
People of the Flint Stone -- (Mohawks) where he sought to speak to the 
most dangerous of these people, offering them his message.

He travelled for a long time among the Mohawks; the People of Standing 
Stone (the Oneidas) the People of the Hills (Onondagas), the People of the 
Swamp (Cayugas), and the People of the Great Hills (Senecas). Eventually, 
those five nations were the initial ones to take up the offer of peace. 
The nations gathered together in council, and there they set down the 
principles of what is called the Gayanashakgowah, or the Great Law of 
Peace.

It is impossible to overstate the power of thought that emerges from that 
document. Today, it is almost impossible for us to recreate the scene of 
its birth. But centuries ago, a natural world people gathered together at 
the head of a lake in the center of North America's then virgin forest, 
and there, they counseled. The principles that emerged are unequaled in 
any political document which has yet emerged in the event -- they evolved 
a law which recognized that vertical hierarchy creates conflicts, and they 
dedicated the superbly complex organization of their society to function 
to prevent the rise internally of hierarchy.

Secondly, they looked into their own histories to discover the things 
which cause conflict among people. They saw, for example, that peoples 
sometimes struggle over hunting territories, and  they did a curious 
thing. They abolished the significance of such territories, and guaranteed 
the safety of anyone entering the country of the Hau de no sau nee. And 
they established universal laws about the treatment and taking of game, 
because the taking of game sometimes caused conflicts. In the country of 
the Hau de no sau nee, all people were free, all had a right to protection 
under what the Peacemaker called the Great Tree of Peace.

The basic principles of peace went further than the simple absence of 
conflict. An ordered society which has the capability of protecting people 
against abuse and which is, at the same time, dedicated to a containment 
of hierarchy, is a complex society. The People of the Longhouse sought to 
carry the principles of peace far from the council fires, into every 
dwelling in the country of the Hau de no sau nee. Thus does the Great Law 
establish more than a code of conduct -- it is also the beginning point 
for the modern clans. It embodies the foundations of all the customs of 
holding meetings, of exchanging messages on wampums, and of assigning 
titles to leaders.

The Hau de no sau nee raised their children from the cradleboard to be 
participants in the culture. The ways of the People of the Longhouse have 
always been powerfully spiritual in nature, and it is true that the 
government, the economy, everything that is Hau de no sau nee has deep 
spiritual roots.

The papers which follow are position papers which were presented by the 
Hau de no sau nee to the Non-governmental Organizations of the United 
Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September, 1977. The Non-governmental 
Organizations had called for papers which describe the conditions of 
oppression suffered by Native people under three subject headings, with 
supportive oral statements to be given to the commissions. The Hau de no 
sau nee, the traditional Six nations council at Onondaga, sent forth three 
papers which constitute an abbreviated analysis of Western history, and 
which call for a consciousness of the Sacred Web of Life in the Universe.

It is a call which can be expected to be both ignored and misunderstood 
for some period of time. But the position papers themselves are absolutely 
unique -- they constitute a political statement, presented to a 
representative world body, pointing to the destruction of the Natural 
World and the Natural World peoples as the clearest indicator that human 
beings are in trouble on this planet. It is a call to a basic 
consciousness which has ancient roots and ultra-modern, even futuristic,
manifestations.

It is a statement which points to the fact that humans are abusing one 
another, they they are abusing the planet they live on, that they are even 
abusing themselves. It is a message, certainly the first ever delivered to 
a world body, which identifies the process of that abuse as Western 
Civilization -- as a whole way of life -- and which acknowledges the 
immense complexity which that statement implies.

What is presented here is nothing less than audacious than a cosmogony of 
the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and 
independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, 
in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.

Scholars and casual readers alike should question the significance, in the 
age of the Neutron bomb, Watergate, and nuclear energy plant 
proliferation, of a statement by a North American Indian people. But there 
is probably some argument to be made for the appropriateness of such a 
statement at this time. Most of the world's professed traditions are 
fairly recent in origin. Mohammedanism is perhaps 1500 years old, 
Christianity claims a 2000-year history, Judaism is perhaps 2000 years 
older than Christianity.

But the Native people can probably lay claim to a tradition which reaches 
back to at least the end of the Pleistocene, and which, in all 
probability, goes back much further than that.

There is some evidence that humanoid creatures have been present on the 
earth for at least two million years, and that humans who looked very much 
like us were in evidence in the Northern Hemisphere at least as long as 
the second interglacial period. People who are familiar with the Hau de no 
sau nee beliefs will recognize that modern scientific evidence shows that 
the Native customs of today are not markedly different from those 
practiced by ancient peoples at least 70000 years ago. Indeed, if an 
Iroquois traditionalist were to seek a career in the study of Pleistocene 
Man, he may find that he already knows more about the most ancient belief 
systems than do the modern scholars.

Be that as it may, the Hau de no sau nee position is derived from a 
philosophy which sees The People with historical roots which extend back 
tens of thousands of years. It is a geological kind of perspective, which 
sees modern man as an infant, occupying a very short space of time in an 
incredibly long spectrum. It is the perspective of the oldest elder 
looking into the affairs of a young child and seeing that he is committing 
incredibly destructive folly. It is, in short, the statement of a people 
who are ageless but who trace their history as a people to the very 
beginning of time. And they are speaking, in this instance, to a world 
which dates its existence from a little over 500 years ago, and perhaps, 
in many cases, much more recently than that.

And it is, to our knowledge, the very first statement to be issued by a 
Native nation. What follows are not the research products of 
psychologists, historians, or anthropologists. The papers which follow are 
the first authentic analyses of the modern world ever committed to writing 
by an official body of Native people.

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THE OBVIOUS FACT OF OUR CONTINUING EXISTENCE

Legal History of the Hau de no sau nee:

Since the beginning of human time, the Hau de no sau nee have occupied the 
distinct territories that we call our homelands. That occupation has been 
both organized and continuous. We have long defined the borders of our 
country, have long maintained the exclusive use-right of the areas within 
those borders, and have used those territories as the economic and 
cultural definitions of our nation.

The Hau de no sau nee are a distinct people, with our own laws and 
customs, territories, political organization and economy. In short, the 
Hau de no sau nee, or Six Nations, fits in every way every definition of 
nationhood.

Ours is one of the most complex social/political structures still 
functioning in the world. The Hau de no sau nee council is also one of the 
most ancient continuously functioning governments anywhere on this planet. 
Our society is one of the most complex anywhere. From our social and 
political institutions has come inspiration for some of the most vital 
institutions and political philosophies of the modern world.

The Hau de no sau nee is governed by a constitution known among Europeans 
as the Constitution of the Six Nations and to the Hau de no sau nee as the 
Gayanashakgowah, or the Great Law of Peace. It is the oldest functioning 
document in the world which has contained a recognition of the freedoms 
the Western democracies recently claim as their own: the freedom of 
speech, freedom of religion, and the rights of women to participate in 
government. The concept of separation of powers in government and of 
checks and balances of power within governments are traceable to our 
constitution. They are ideas learned by the colonists as the result of 
contact with North American Native people, specifically the Hau de no sau 
nee.

The philosophies of the Socialist World, too, are to some extent traceable 
to European contact with the Hau de no sau nee. Lewis Henry Morgan noted 
the economic structure of the Hau de no sau nee, which he termed both 
primitive and communistic. Karl Marx used Morgan's observations for the 
development of a model for classless, post-capitalist society. The modern 
world has been greatly influenced by the fact of our existence.

It may seem strange, at this time, that we are here, asserting the obvious 
fact of our continuing existence. For countless centuries, the fact of our 
existence was unquestioned, and for all honest human beings, it remains 
unquestioned today. We have existed since time immemorial. We have always 
conducted our own affairs from our territories, under our own laws and 
customs. We have never, under those laws and customs, willingly or fairly 
surrendered either our territories or our freedoms. Never, in the history 
of the Hau de no sau nee, have the People or the government sworn 
allegiance to a European sovereign. In that simple fact lies the roots of 
our oppression as a people, and the purpose of our journey here, before 
the world community.

The problems incurred in the recent "legal history" of the Hau de no sau 
nee began long before European contact with Native people. It began, at 
least, with the rise of a system called feudalism in Europe, for the only 
law which the colonizing countries of Europe ever recognized was feudal 
law, a fact which they have obscured from their own people as well as from 
Native people for many centuries. That fact, however, remains the 
essential reality of the legal relationships which exist between Native 
peoples and Indo-European societies.

Feudal society in Europe appears to have arisen as the result of a number 
of conditions which existed following the dissolution of the Roman Empire. 
It was based on a system by which rulers of warrior castes became strong 
enough to demand and extract fealty from warriors. There arose, generally, 
an administrative center, usually a castle, and around these where 
agricultural people who were usually protected from outside aggression by 
their "lord," the sovereign of the manor. It appears likely that new 
technologies arose which created economies which made the feudal society 
both possible and perhaps even inevitable in Europe.

The feudal lord often held dictatorial power over his "subjects," 
especially the peasants. Military protection was necessary because of the 
continuous state of "feuding," among the various lords. The "peaceful 
people," or peasants, were caught in the middle. The land, and everything 
on it, including the animals, plants, and people, was under the domination 
or dominion of the feudal "lord." This lord demanded loyalty and a part of 
the peasant's crops as well as some of his/her labor. Feudalism could be 
far more brutal and humiliating than is outlined in many histories. Some 
feudal lords exercised what was called "the right of the first night," a 
custom which referred to the right of a lord to the peasant's bride.

Prior to the rise of feudalism, it is fair to state that most of the 
agricultural people of Europe were local tribesmen of various kinds. 
Feudalism imposed the concept of sovereign, dictatorial rules whose rule 
was imposed by military might, and gave rise to the true European 
peasantry.

The crystallization of centralized executive power serves to separate 
civilized societies from primitive societies. It is immaterial whether 
such controls are located in a feudal castle or in the executive offices 
of the capitals of nation states. The appearance of the hierarchical state 
marks the transition of food cultivators in general to the more specific 
definition contained in the concepts of peasantry. When the cultivator 
becomes dependent upon and integrated in a society in which he is subject 
to demands of people who are defined by a class other than his own, he 
becomes appropriately termed a peasant.

The state of a medieval European peasant was not a pleasant one. Peasants 
have no rights, save those granted by their lord. They cannot own the land 
as a people. Only the Sovereign owns or possesses sovereignty. Peasants 
were often treated as chattel. They were bought, sold, and inherited with 
the land. They were a people who had been dispossessed of their freedom. 
At some points in history, the tribal peoples of Europe became peasants 
through a combination of forces, the most direct being military pressure.

A peasant is not a member of a true community of people. His society is 
incomplete without the town or city. It is trade with the town or city, an 
economic relationship, which defines the early stages of peasantry. As 
trade becomes more necessary, for whatever reasons, the tribesman becomes 
increasingly less of a tribesman and more of a peasant. The process is 
neither immediate nor is it necessarily absolute, but to the degree that a 
tribesman becomes dependent, he becomes less of a tribesman.

To a great extent, the process by which people lost their freedom in 
Europe was economic in nature. The medieval castles were military forts 
and functioned as kinds of storehouses, but they also developed into trade 
centers and eventually towns. In the early stages of feudalism, the 
agricultural worker "traded" his freedom for security from military 
aggression. But increasingly, over the centuries, a primary function of 
the medieval town became that of the marketplace.

"It is the market, in one form or another, that pulls out from the compact 
social relations of self-contained primitive communities some parts of 
men's doings and puts people into fields of economic activity that are 
increasingly independent of the rest of what goes on in local life. The 
local traditional and moral world and the wider and more impersonal world 
of the market are in principle distinct, and opposed to each other ...."
(Robert Redfield _Peasant_Society_and_Culture_,p.45-6)

The European "discovery" of North America led to the transposition of 
European medieval law and customs to the Americas. To be sure, Spanish 
medieval law differed in some respects from that of France, and both 
differed in some respects from that of England, but an understanding of 
Medieval Europe is essential to an analysis of European -- Hau de no sau 
nee legal history and also to any analysis of the process of colonialism. 
Medieval Europe is the period of the rise of growing centralization and 
consolidation of power by the ruling kingships (kings) over vast 
territories which is specific to the North American experience. It is also 
the period of the rise and growth of European cities as centers of trade 
and sources of political power. The European laws of nations, as they were 
applied to the Americas, were medieval laws.

"Europeans used a great variety of means to attain mastery, of which armed 
combat was only one. Five principles were available to a European 
sovereignty for laying claim to legitimate jurisdiction over an American 
territory and its people: Papal donation, first discovery, sustained 
possession, voluntary self-subjugation by the natives, and armed conquest 
successfully maintained. The colony was the means of translating a formal 
claim to the effective actuality of government, and it was "colonial" in 
both senses of that ambiguous word. The huddled villages of Europeans were 
colonies in the sense of being offshoots or reproductions of their parent 
societies, and these villages exerted power over larger native populations 
in the sense more clearly implied by the word colonialism." ( Francis 
Jennings,  The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of 
Conquest, p.105)

The European invaders, from the first, attempted to claim Indians as their 
subjects. Where the Indian people resisted, as in the case of the Hau de 
no sau nee, the Europeans rationalized that resistance to be an incapacity 
for civilization. The incapacity for civilization rationale became the 
basis for the phenomenon in the West which is known today as racism.

The Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas and immediately claimed 
the territories for their sovereigns. They then attempted, especially in 
the case of France and Spain, to make peasants of the Indians. The 
English, who had already experimented with the enclosure system and who 
thus colonized North America with landless peasants which were driven by a 
desperation rooted in their own history, at first simply drove the Indians 
off the land by force.

The European legal systems had, and apparently have developed, no 
machinery to recognize the rights of peoples, other than dictators or 
sovereigns, to land. When the Europeans came to North America, they 
attempted to simply make vassals of the Native leaders. When that failed, 
they resorted to other means. The essential thrust of European powers has 
been an attempt to convert "...the Indian person from membership in an 
unassimalable caste to membership in a social class integrated into Euro- 
American institutions." (Ibid.)

The dispossession of the Native people was accomplished by the Europeans 
in the bloodiest and most brutal chapter of human history. They were acts 
committed, seemingly, by a people without conscience or standards of 
behavior. To this day, the United States and Canada deny the existence of 
the lawful governments of the Hau de no sau nee and other Native nations, 
a continuation of the policy of genocide which has marked the process 
known as colonialism. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the 
contrary, both governments and the governments of Latin America deny the 
commission of genocide, either physical or cultural.

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; Indian's 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." ( Jennings, p. 127) 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. Then 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 multi-national 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 multi-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 community. The purpose 
in doing so is to integrate 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 has created two categories of 
Native peoples: Federally recognized and non-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 
separate and not a Native people 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, and not to the Native peoples. 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 Hau de no sau nee 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 
deChamplain 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 Hau de no sau nee through conquest. 
England often used every means possible, including coercion, threats and 
military force, to extend her sovereignty over us. Each time we resisted.

The United States entered into solemn treaties with the Hau de no sau nee, 
and each time has ignored virtually each and every provision of the 
treaties which guarantee our rights as a separate nation. Only the 
sections of the treaties which refer to land cessions, sections which 
often were fraudulently obtained, have validity in the eyes of the United 
States courts or governments.

The mechanism for the colonization of the Hau de no sau nee territory is 
found, in legal fiction, in the United States Constitution. That document 
purports to give Congress power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations 
and among the several States, and with Indian tribes." Contrary to every 
principle of international law, Congress has expanded that section to an 
assertion of "plenary" power, a doctrine which asserts authority over our 
territories. This assertion has been repeatedly urged upon our people, 
although we have never agreed to that relationship, and we have never been 
conquered in warfare. The Hau de no sau nee are vassals to no people -- we 
are a free nation, and we have never surrendered our rights as a free 
people.

From the beginning of its existence, the United States has conducted a 
reign of terror in the Hau de no sau nee territory. Colonial agents 
entered our country between 1784 and 1842 and returned to Washington with 
treaties for cessions of land fraudulently obtained with persons not 
authorized to make land transfers. The Hau de no sau nee council, which is 
the only legitimate body authorized to conduct land transactions, never 
signed any agreements surrendering the territories.

The Unites States occupied the lands under threats of war, although there 
were not acts which justified war measures. When the Hau de no sau nee 
gathered evidence to prove that the treaties were fraudulent and therefore 
illegal under any interpretation of law, the Unites States courts 
countered by inventing the Political Question Doctrine. This doctrine 
basically asserts that Congress cannot commit fraud and that the courts 
cannot question Congress' political judgment, although United States 
courts find congressional acts in other areas of law to be 
unconstitutional regularly.

Because the Hau de no sau nee refused to sell the land, the Unites States 
simply refused to recognize our government. Instead, they recognized those 
colonized individuals who would agree to sell the land and whose loyalties 
lie with Washington. In 1848, the United States simply recognized an 
"elective system" on the Seneca Nation lands, creating a colonial 
government on the largest of our remaining territories in what is called 
by the colonizers "New York State."

There followed a long list of moves by the United States to exterminate 
the Hau de no sau nee. There were treaties which entirely dispossessed, 
for all practical purposes, the Cayuga and Oneida nations in their 
ancestral lands. There were treaties, such as the Treaty of 1797, which 
recognized the sale by individuals of the territory of the Kenienkehaka, 
an area of nine million acres of land exchanged for the sum of one 
thousand dollars. There were attempts from 1821 to 1842 to remove the Hau 
de no sau nee from the territories called by the colonists "New York" to 
other areas now called Wisconsin and Kansas. These efforts resulted in the 
displacement of some of our people to those areas. In 1851, there was an 
attempt to evict the Seneca people from their lands at Tonawanda.

In 1886, there was an attempt to divide the Hau de no sau nee lands into 
sevaralty under the Dawes Act, an attempt which was not entirely 
successful. In 1924, the United States passed a Citizenship Act which 
attempted to give United States citizenship to all Native people. The Hau 
de no sau nee strongly rejected the concept that we could ever be United 
States citizens. We are Hau de no sau nee citizens. But the feudal laws of 
the colonizers have been relentless.

Also in 1924, Canada militarily invaded our territories on the Grand River 
and forcibly installed a colonial government there. The episode was 
repeated by Canada in 1934 on our territories at the Thames River 
community of Oneida.

In 1948 and 1950, Congress passed laws giving civil and criminal 
jurisdiction to New York State, although Congress was never given such 
jurisdiction by the Hau de no sau nee. In 1958, Congress passed Public Law 
88-533, the Kinzua Dam Act, which resulted in the flooding of almost all 
of the inhabitable lands of the Seneca at Alleghany, and virtually 
destroyed the Native communities and culture there. That act also provided 
for the termination of the Seneca Nation, a process which would have ended 
even the colonial government there, and which would have moved the denial 
of our existence a little closer to reality.

In addition to these legal kinds of colonization, the Hau de no sau nee 
have been subjected to every other kind of colonization imaginable. 
Churches, school systems, and every form of Western penetration have made 
political, economic, and cultural peasants of some of our populations. The 
continuing denial of our political existence has been accomplished by an 
almost overwhelming psychological, economic and spiritual attack by the 
colonial institutions of the West.

For over 300 years, our people have been under a virtual state of siege. 
During this entire time we have never once given up our struggle. Our 
strategies have, of necessity, changed. But the will and determination to 
continue on remains the same. Throughout these years, European historians 
have recorded the position of the Hau de no sau nee.

During the 1920s, one of our leaders, a man named Deskaheh, came to this 
city to seek help for his people. At that time, the international body 
which existed did not truly represent the world community. Many cultures 
and nations were not recognized. Now, fifty years later, we have returned, 
and our message remains the same.

Our elders have watched the rebirth of this international institution. In 
1949, a delegation of the Hau de no sau nee attended the foundation 
ceremony for the United Nations building in New York City. In 1974, our 
people journeyed to Sweden to take part in an international conference on 
the Environment and Ecology. All through these times we have taken notice 
of the changes which have occurred within this institution.

Now we find ourselves in Geneva, Switzerland, once again. For those of us 
present, and the many at home, we have assumed the duty of carrying on our 
peoples' struggle. Invested in the names we carry today are the lives of 
thousands of generations of both the past and the future. On their behalf, 
also, we ask that the Non-Governmental Organizations join us in our 
struggle to obtain our full rights and protection under the rules of 
international law and the World Community.

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SPIRITUALISM: THE HIGHEST FORM OF POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The Hau de no sau nee message to the Western World:

The Hau de no sau nee, or the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, has 
existed on this land since the beginning of human memory. Our culture is 
among the most ancient continuously existing cultures in the world. We 
still remember the earliest doings of human beings. We remember the 
original instructions of the Creators of Life on this place we call 
Etenoha -- Mother Earth. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We 
are the Ongwhehonwhe -- the Real People.

In the beginning, we were told that the human beings who walk about on the 
Earth have been provided with all the things necessary for life. We were 
instructed to carry a love for one another, and to show a great respect 
for all the beings of this Earth. We are shown that our life exists with 
the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the 
Vegetable Life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In 
our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.

Ours is a Way of Life. We believe that all living things are spiritual 
beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A 
blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter -- grass matter. The 
spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of 
grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.

All things of the world are real, material things. The Creation is a true, 
material phenomenon, and the Creation manifests itself to us through 
reality. The spiritual universe, then, is manifest to Man as the Creation, 
the Creation which supports life. We believe that man is real, a part of 
the Creation, and that his duty is to support Life in conjunction with the 
other beings. That is why we call ourselves Ongwhehonwhe -- Real People.

The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are 
to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the 
spirits which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving 
to the many supporters of our own lives -- the corn, beans, squash, the 
winds, the sun. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for 
these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this 
planet will come to an end.

Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have great love for our 
country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of 
thousands of our generations. Each of us were created in those lands, and 
it is our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will 
spring the future generations of the Ongwhehonwhe. We walk about with a 
great respect, for the Earth is a very sacred place.

We are not a people who demand, or ask anything of the Creators of Life, 
but instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of 
Life are still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all 
living things. To this day, the territories we still hold are filled with 
trees, animals, and the other gifts of the Creation. In these places we 
still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth.

We have seen that not all people of the Earth show the same kind of 
respect for this world and its beings. The Indo-European people who have 
colonized our lands have shown very little respect for the things that 
create and support Life. We believe that these people ceased their respect 
for the world a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people 
of the world believed in the same Way of Life, that of harmony with the 
universe. All lived according to the Natural Ways.

Around ten thousand years ago, peoples who spoke Indo-European languages 
lived in the area which today we know as the Steppes of Russia. At that 
time, they were a Natural World people who lived off the land. They had 
developed agriculture, and it is said that they had begun the practice of 
animal domestication. It is not known that they were the first people in 
the world to practice animal domestication. The hunters and gatherers who 
roamed the area probably acquired animals from the agricultural people, 
and adopted an economy, based on the herding and breeding of animals.

Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the 
relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the 
true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on 
nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of 
herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the 
functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, 
history records the first appearance of the social organization known as 
"patriarchy."

The area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the homeland, in 
ancient times, of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. 
The Semitic people were among the first in the world to develop irrigation 
technology. This development led to the early development of towns, and 
eventually cities. The manipulation of the waters, another form of spirit 
life, represented another way in which humans developed a technology which 
reproduced a function of Nature.

Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical social organization 
crystallized. The ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly 
because of the very nature of cities. Cities are obviously population 
concentrations. Most importantly though, they are places which must import 
the material needs of this concentration from the countryside. This means 
that the Natural World must be subjugated, extracted from, and exploited 
in the interest of the city. To give order to this process, the Semitic 
world developed early codes of law. They also developed the idea of 
monotheism to serve as a spiritual model for their material and political 
organization.

Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between 
the Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several 
millenia, the two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millenia 
B.C., some Indo-Europeans, most specifically the Greeks, had adopted the 
practice of building cities, thus becoming involved in the process which 
they named "Civilization."

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilizations. The 
Semitic peoples invented kilns which enabled the creation of pottery for 
trade, and storage of surpluses. These early kilns eventually evolved into 
ovens which could generate enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, 
tin and bronze. The Indo-Europeans developed a way of smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final 
meshing occurs. Rome is also the true birthplace of  Christianity. The 
process that has become the culture of the West is historically and 
linguistically a Semitic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly 
termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in the early development 
of this kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God. It was a 
religion which imposed itself exclusively of all other beliefs. The local 
people of the European forests were a people who believed in the spirits 
of the forests, waters, hills and the land; Christianity attacked those 
beliefs, and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. The 
Christian peoples, who possessed superior weaponry and a need for 
expansion, were able to militarily subjugate the tribal peoples of Europe.

The availability of iron led to the development of tools which could cut 
down the forest, the source of charcoal to make more tools. The newly 
cleared land was then turned by the newly developed iron plow, which was, 
for the first time, pulled by horses. With that technology many fewer 
people would work much more land, and many other people were effectively 
displaced to become soldiers and landless peasants. The rise of that 
technology ushered in the Feudal Age and made possible, eventually, the 
rise of new cities and growing trade. It also spelled the beginning of the 
end of the European forest, although that process took a long time to 
complete.

The eventual rise of cities and the concurrent rise of the European state 
created the thrust of expansion and search for markets which led men, such 
as Columbus, to set sail across the Atlantic. The development of sailing 
vessels and navigation technologies made the European "discovery" of the 
Americas inevitable.

The Americas provided Europeans a vast new area for expansion and material 
exploitation. Initially, the Americas provided new materials and even 
finished materials for the developing world economy which was based on the 
Indo-European technologies. European civilization has a history of rising 
and falling as its technologies reach their material and cultural limits. 
The finite Natural world has always provided a kind of built-in 
contradiction to Western expansion.

The Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with 
unparalleled zeal. The Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because 
they were an unassimilable element to the civilizations of the West. The 
forests provided materials for larger ships, and some areas provided 
sources of slave labor for the conquering invaders. By the time of the 
Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century, North America was 
already a leader in the area of the development of extractive technology.

The hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared for the purpose of 
providing farmlands. Those forests were destroyed to create charcoal for 
the forges of the iron smelters and blacksmiths. By the 1890s, the West 
had turned to coal, a fossil fuel, to provide the energy necessary for the 
many new forms of machinery which had been developed. During the first 
half of the Twentieth Century, oil had replaced coal as a source of 
energy.

The Western culture has been horribly exploitative and destructive of the 
Natural World. Over 140 species of birds and animals were utterly 
destroyed since the European arrival in the Americas, largely because they 
were unusable in the eyes of the invaders. The forests were leveled, the 
waters polluted, the Native people subjected to genocide. The vast herds 
of herbivores were reduced to mere handfuls, the buffalo nearly became 
extinct. Western technology and the people who have employed it have been 
the most amazingly destructive forces in all of human history. No natural 
disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages counted as many 
victims.

But like the hardwood forests, the fossil fuels are also finite resources. 
As the second half of the Twentieth Century has progressed, the people of 
the West have begun looking to other forms of energy to motivate their 
technology. Their eyes have settled on atomic energy, a form of energy 
production which has by-products which are the most poisonous substances 
ever known to Man.

Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the 
species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path 
on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the 
reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas 
of more efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet 
is the clearest of signals that our species is in trouble. It is a signal 
which most Westerners have chosen to ignore.

The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are 
disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing. Our 
ancient teaching warned us that if Man interfered with the Natural Laws, 
these things would come to be. When the last of the Natural Way of Life is 
gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with it. And our Way of 
Life is fast disappearing, a victim of the destructive processes.

The other position papers of the Hau de no sau nee have outlined our 
analysis of economic and legal oppression. But our essential message to 
the world is a basic call to consciousness. The destruction of the Native 
cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is 
destroying life on this planet. The technologies and social systems which 
have destroyed the animal and plant life are also destroying the Native 
people. And that process is Western Civilization.

We know that there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the 
intent of our message. But experience has taught us that there are few who 
are willing to seek out a method for moving toward any real change. But, 
if there is to be a future for all beings on this planet, we must begin to 
seek the avenues of change.

The processes of colonialism and imperialism which have affected the Hau 
de no sau nee are but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world. 
The system of reservations employed against our people is a microcosm of 
the system of exploitation used against the whole world. Since the time of 
Marco Polo, the West has been refining a process that mystified the 
peoples of the Earth.

The majority of the world does not find its roots in Western culture or 
traditions. The majority of the world finds its roots in the Natural 
World, and it is the Natural World, and the traditions of the Natural 
World, which must prevail if we are to develop truly free and egalitarian 
societies.

It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical 
analysis of the West's historical processes, to seek out the actual nature 
of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are 
forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those 
processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It 
is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and 
exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, 
and ignorance which has rendered their people insensitive to the true 
nature of their lives.

We must all consciously and continuously challenge every model, every 
program, and every process that the West tries to force upon us. Paulo 
Friere wrote, in his book, the _Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed_, that it is the 
nature of the oppressed to imitate the oppressor, and by such actions try 
to gain relief from the oppressive condition. We must learn to resist that 
response to oppression.

The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow 
concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something 
which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is 
needed is the liberation of all the things that support Life -- the air, 
the waters, the trees -- all the things which support the sacred web of 
Life.

We feel that the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can continue to 
contribute to the survival potential of the human species. The majority of 
our peoples still live in accordance with the traditions which find their 
roots in the Mother Earth. But the Native peoples have need of a forum in 
which our voice can be heard. And we need alliances with the other peoples 
of the world to assist in our struggle to regain and maintain our 
ancestral lands and to protect the Way of Life we follow.

We know that this is a very difficult task. Many nation states may feel 
threatened by the position that the protection and liberation of Natural 
World peoples and cultures represents, a progressive direction which must 
be integrated into the political strategies of people who seek to uphold 
the dignity of Man. But that position is growing in strength, and it 
represents a necessary strategy in the evolution of progressive thought.

The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the 
processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable 
future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of 
political consciousness. And we, the native peoples of the Western 
Hemisphere, are among the world's surviving proprietors of that kind of 
consciousness. We are here to impart that message.

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