In the government you call civilized, the happiness of the people is constantly sacrificed to the splendour of the empire. Hence your code of criminal and civil laws have their origin; hence your dungeons and prisons.
I will not enlarge on an idea so singular in civilized life, and perhaps disagreeable to you, and you will observe that among us we have no prisons; we have no pompous parade of courts; we have no written laws, and yet judges are as highly revered among us as they are among you, and their decisions are as much regarded.
Property, to say the least, is as well guarded, and crimes are impartially punished. We have among us no splendid villains above the control of our own laws.
Daring wickedness is here never suffered to triumph over helpless innocence. The estates of widows and orphans are never devoured by enterprising sharpers. In a word, we have no robbery under the colour of the law.
No person among us desires any other reward for performing a brave and worthy action, but the consciousness of having served his nation.
Our wise men are called fathers; they truly sustain that character. They are always accessible, I will not say to the meanest of our people, for we have no mean but such as render themselves so by vices.
The palaces and prisons among you form a most dreadful contrast.
There is a HUGE difference between being a citizen/member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and being a Canadian citizen who happens to have indigenous ancestry. Although these differences are mainly ideological and political nevertheless, they exist.
Canadians who happen to have Indigenous ancestry band council, Christians, unadopted or clanless, do not get to make decisions for members/citizens of the sovereign Haudenosaunee confederacy. Yet, they’re still trying to impose a faulty jurisdiction established by the RCMP in 1924.
This distinction needs to be made very clear.
I bring this up because of the protest yesterday and the people saying, “these are our people,” about the band council and the police force. Let me remind you of something when those people became officers and band councillors; they swore oaths which effectively removed them from the protection of the Kayanere’kowa under wampum 58
WAMPUM #58
ANY CHIEF OR OTHER PERSONS WHO SUBMIT TO THE LAWS OF A FOREIGN PEOPLE ARE ALIENATED AND FORFEIT ALL CLAIMS IN THE IROQUOIS NATIONS
The minute these people take these oaths, they remove themselves from the circle of protection offered by the Kayanere’kowa, and they commit to upholding the interests of the colonizers. They are no longer citizens of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; they are just Canadian citizens who happen to have Indigenous ancestry. There is a considerable difference between these two concepts of political identity.
The sooner our community realizes this, accepts it, and upholds our laws, we will all be better off.
In 1703, tensions grew from ratihnaraken encroachment on territory, and It just so happened to be where the Tuscarora lived and thrived for ages untold. According to David Cusick; The Tuscarora crossed a great vine that unfortunately separated them from their family once the crossing became too dangerous.
The boundaries for where the settlers were to remain had started to move, and they were given years of reminders, but it wasn’t until 1711, and the death of a trespasser named John Lawson brought these tensions boiling over.
The act of war had been deliberated by Clan Mothers, Chiefs and Warriors, and included their relations words. This deliberation went on for nearly a decade before any actions took place in 1711
Even then, it was to only lay waste to any villages of trespassers who had been given ample opportunity to remove themselves from the protected forests and clearings.
The British historians of the era had wildly exaggerated The loss of life, and the wordsmiths claimed that it was the Tuscarora who had killed many innocent people. In fact, it was the Tuscarora who had suffered greatly at the force of a combined North Carolinian and South Carolinian British militia.
Enslaved Tuscarora distribution (Left) Cost of Tuscarora slaves (right)
This war and the eventual rape, torture and enslavement of their people may have impacted the visiting Tuscarora’s decision in the 1780s in New York State during the American revolution when they returned home rather than coming to Canada to fight alongside the British.
In 1803 years after the Tuscarora had reunited with members of their nations who had remained in North Carolina, The Nation set about reminding the USA that despite the efforts to kill them all, They had only missed a few thousand of them. Thus the United States of America rekindled the war on Tuscarora territory.
The few warriors who stayed back with their Seneca cousins in New York would again take up arms, but this time for the United States of America. They would commit a grave act with their services to the United States; The few Tuscarora who remained took up arms against their elder brother nation during the war of 1812.
Tuscarora Reserve in NY state
The 1812 war itself was not in favour or against the Onkwehonwe, and the Oneida bid to remain neutral was observed by the entire confederacy until such time that our peace was broken. While we were never meant to take up arms against each other, The war of 1812 served as a valuable reminder as to why we are not to fight wars for other nations.
Courtesy of T. Locklear Bear Clan, Tuscarora from Drowning Creek, NC
On the other hand, the 1711 North Carolina Tuscarora war has never had peace declared, leaving one to boldly state that they remain the Bad### cousin who survived every attempt to eradicate them and are STILL warriors
The Canadian Government-appointed Councils became fashionable in 1876 under the reign of Alexander Mackenzie’s Prime Ministership. Only nine years after Canada itself was born, according to their legends, The young Dominion of the Commonwealth of Britain made the daring move to usurp control over Onkwehonwe in the Sewatokwat’shera’t.
The 100,000-year-old ways belonging to the Onkwehonwe civilizations were outdated and were very difficult for the new country to adapt to. They presented significant hurdles according to the colonization schedule; the new Canadian state needed a new and shiny tool that would keep the savages separated from their federal system but would stroke the egos of Onkwehonwe.
Target: Women
Onkwehonwe women are the life-givers keepers of the Nations’ land while men protect it and the women as they live their roles. Men are not superior or inferior, for that matter. It’s about balancing respectfully within the world that gave Onkwehonwe Women the power of absolute freedom, first documented by Jesuits in the 1600s despite these types of balancing displays having existed for thousands of years.
The Canadian strategy targeted this balance by removing women’s voices from political matters for over 116 years. This strategy effectively removed the unbroken matrilineal bloodlines for millions of women and even forced them out of their community by having male members siding with the young nation.
Despite being a common practice amongst some onkwehonwe nations, women took men from other nations as partners for as long as we have been here. It was a means to redistribute the gene pool and avoid inbreeding into oblivion properly.
Onkwehonwe women did not get the right to vote equally until 1985, unlike their non-native counterparts, having earned their right in 1916. Still, many Onkwehonwe do not vote in any federally recognized elections to this day.
The VOTE out of the canoe
Excerpt of Letter signed Nov 2nd, 1896, by Governor-General John Campbell Hamilton Gordon Signed with a simple “X” by three Indian Warriors and two Chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy, witnessed by Seth Newhouse.
