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New York City, April 30th, 1789.
To tumultuous
cheers, a few simple words echo across America.
I, George Washington,
do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President.
At Federal Hall, George Washington becomes
the first President of the United States.
And will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend
the Constitution of the United States.
A new Constitution, a new President,
a new nation.
But just hundreds of miles away, other nations lay dying.
The pain of their people comes from the
death grip that crushed them between Great Britain and its American colonies
as patriots fought the revolution that won the United States
its independence.
They are the Haudenosaunee, a name meaning People of the Longhouse,
better known as the Iroquois.
The nations of the Iroquois
Confederacy had been a powerful influential force in colonial America.
Their diplomatic and military skills, their numbers and unity
had given them enormous strength.
Now that unity was undone, their mighty league lay in tatters.
This
revolution was about honor and freedom
and dignity and the rights of man.
And here they were just absolutely pushing us off of our lands and starving us.
George Washington
is called
the father of his country.
The Iroquois had another name for him,
the Haudenosaunee.
The waters of Niagara,
New York State.
We think of this as the east,
but in the early days of the first European colonists,
this was part of the western frontier.
To understand how the west was lost,
you can begin at places in the east, like Niagara.
Hundreds of years before Europeans ever set foot here,
what is now New York was a place of unending, extraordinary beauty.
Mountains, lakes, rivers, streams,
mile after mile of thick forest and wild grass.
But it was not a land of peace.
The Iroquois people who live here are in turmoil,
divided by war, trapped in violent,
vicious blood feuds.
It was a time when our people simply were afraid
to look into the next day for fear of what they would see,
and there wasn't any hope at that point.
Our women were abusing our women.
Our women were abusing our children.
It was a terrible, terrible period in our history.
According to Iroquois tradition,
salvation arrives in the form of a prophet,
and a virgin birth called the Peacemaker.
He travels from native settlement to settlement,
preaching a gospel of world peace.
The Peacemaker brings a message from the Creator.
There will be a new world for the Iroquois,
and the people of the Longhouse will unite
in a league of harmony and security.
He did things like he took up an arrow, one arrow, and he broke it.
And when he broke it, it showed the people how easily
each of their individual nations could be broken.
But he couldn't do it, and he said, that's how we'll be.
If we unify and we're united as this bundle of five arrows is,
then we'll be strong.
The Iroquois heed the Peacemaker's message and unite in a powerful league
to peace.
The five nations of this new Iroquois confederacy are
the Senecas, the Cayugas, the Anadagas, the Oneidas, and the Mohawks.
Before leaving,
the Peacemaker warns the five nations never to return to their former violent ways.
If you chiefs by the council fire
should be continually throwing ashes at one another,
your people will go astray, their heads will roll,
authority will be gone. Your enemies then may see that your minds are scattered,
the league will be at a standstill, and the good news of
peace and power will be unable to proceed.
Committed to
peace,
the Iroquois enter an era of prosperity.
They are able to hunt without fear.
Women who are treated as esteemed equals in Iroquois society can
oversee the growing of sacred corn, beans, and squash.
It is a time when the Iroquois live in harmony with each other
and their land.
What we have with the Haudenosaunee, we call her Etinoja,
our mother, because the land gives life.
Music
But life for the
Haudenosaunee is about to take a dangerous and dramatic turn.
In July 1609, French explorer
Samuel de Champlain and the War Party of Huron and Algonquin Indians
come down from Canada to raid the Mohawks.
It is the Iroquois' first hostile encounter with the Whites from across the ocean.
In the Mohawks, it's recorded that they were wearing
un-slatted armor and that they were in massed formation.
From the journals of Samuel de Champlain.
I marched on until I was within some 30 yards of the enemy
who, as soon as they caught sight of me, halted and gazed at me
and I at them.
I took a move to draw their bows upon us. I took aim with my arquebus
and shot straight at one of the three chiefs.
Well, they watched in horror as the musket balls
just cut right through wooden armor and watched several of the party die.
So, while the French had a brief victory,
they introduced the Mohawks to people who would shoot first and ask questions later.
The French just somehow didn't understand
that making peace and allies of the Iroquois would have been a better idea.
Instead, they made them as enemies. But, of course, this was all over the fur trade.
Beaver pelts, prized in Europe
and elegant beaver hats are what the French are after.
And they rely on their Huron and Algonquin allies to help get them.
In exchange, the Indians receive metal utensils, blankets
and firearms.
The Iroquois know that to stay alive, they too must get guns, make alliances,
in the fur trade. They turn to a rival of the French, the Dutch,
whose settlements are steadily growing nearby.
If they do not get guns from the Dutch, they will be overwhelmed.
The only way they can get guns from the Dutch is to participate in the fur trade
with the Dutch as partners and to begin to expand
into the lands necessary to obtain the beaver pelts
for the fur trade. So it becomes like an arms race.
The French wrestle with the Iroquois and the Dutch
for control of the fur trade. At the same time, Jesuit missionaries
arrive among the people of the five nations, preaching both for God
and country, the country of France.
The Jesuit black robes bring more with them
than of their God. They also bring killers,
influenza and smallpox.
They were confused, they were frightened, they were terrified
by this thing that they didn't understand, and they of course associated the suffering
with the arrival of the people from the East.
The Iroquois defend themselves against what they believe
is Jesuit witchcraft.
Missionaries are seized and forced to endure excruciating
tortures. One of those captured is Fr. Francisco Bressani.
I was all drenched and covered with blood
that streamed from every part of my body, and exposed to a very cold wind
that made it congeal immediately to my skin. But I
consoled myself, seeing that God granted me the favor of suffering
in this world some pain, in place of what I was under obligation on account of
my sins, to pay in the other with torments incomparably
greater.
The violence escalates.
The Iroquois declare war on the French and their Indian allies.
The Hurons, longtime enemies of the Iroquois and devoted friends of the French,
are hammered by the wrath of the Haudenosaunee.
By 1650,
the Hurons are nearly wiped out.
But the Iroquois victory is not without cost.
Sickness and warfare have exhausted them as well.
The forests are depleted of precious beaver.
Life for the Haudenosaunee has forever
changed. The great law of peace has been stained with blood.
But what I think we are looking for is peace at that point in time.
We are looking for an end to these wars that have been taking so much resources,
so much human life, and so much of our time. So what you want to do then is to get on the side
of initiating. You want to get on the side of initiating treaties that form a
peace so that you can begin to get control of your environment again and get control of your
life.
To regain control,
the Iroquois Confederacy looked south along the Hudson River.
In 1664, the Dutch surrendered their American
territory to the British, who rename it New York.
Traditional enemies of the French, the English are quick to recognize
the advantages of an alliance with the Iroquois. Called the
Covenant Chain, this relationship will determine the fate of North America.
I think they came to grips with the knowledge that
they either accommodate this permanent presence, or they fight with it,
and there was no guarantee that they could win this fight. As a matter of fact, I think they realized they couldn't.
As the 17th century comes to a close, the Iroquois
Confederacy is able to negotiate a peace with both France and England.
Successful for decades, it is a
delicate balancing act, but ultimately an impossible one.
1710, three Mohawk ambassadors and a representative of the
Indian people are taken on a fantastic journey, a voyage of diplomacy
across the sea to London.
They are presented to the Royal Court of Queen Anne
as the kings of the five nations.
During their
two-week visit, they are given tours of the British capital.
They even attend a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
So they saw an incredible
city.
They saw the scope of another way of looking at the world,
and I'm certain they came back moved by it.
These people are giants.
The spectacle
of these so-called four kings going to England
I think is a perfect piece of evidence that the
English needed them.
The Iroquois world continues to change.
In 1713, a sixth nation comes into their
Confederacy, the Tuscaroras, joining the Mohawks,
Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas.
But as the size of the league expands even greater is the
colonial population explosion.
White farms and homes are spreading
pell-mell into Indian lands. The Iroquois protest to the British,
but it is difficult for the Royal Government to stifle the land lust of the American settlers.
They were perplexed by them.
My grandmother told me how they viewed the white man coming,
they said, was like a black cloud rolling.
A black cloud rolling over to land.
And it brought death, brought pestilence,
and it brought a great deal of tragedy and grief to our people.
1754, Britain
and France are at war in North America. The French are supported by fighters
from the Delaware and Shawnee nations. The English have their
Iroquois allies. It is a long, bloody fight the British call
the French and Indian War. Many settlers are killed or taken
prisoner. One of them will lead a remarkable life among the
Senecas.
In 1758, 15-year-old Mary Jemison and her family are
captured by a party of French and Shawnees. The others are executed,
but Mary is spared. She is brought to the Senecas and adopted
by two Seneca women to replace a dead brother.
During my adoption, I sat motionless, nearly terrified to death
at the appearance and actions of the company, expecting every moment to feel their vengeance
and suffer death on the spot.
I was, however, happily disappointed when at the close of the ceremony the company retired
and my sisters went about employing every means for my consolation and comfort.
The war that has so shaken Mary Jemison's life has also shaken
the Iroquois' ability to remain neutral. In frustration,
Redhead and Oneida Chief complains.
We don't know what you Christians, French and English together intend.
We are so hemmed in by both that we hardly have a hunting place left.
We are so perplexed between both that we hardly know what to say
or think.
Redhead's complaint is addressed to a man who has enormous influence with the Iroquois Confederacy,
Sir William Johnson. The British Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
Sir William, is a close friend of the Mohawks. He speaks their language
and marries an influential Mohawk woman named Molly Brandt.
Together they have several children.
In councils with the Iroquois at his mansion, Johnson Hall, Sir William urges them
to stand firm with England.
Let not your covenant chain. Let not the French boasting
deceive you. The English are slow to spill blood, but when they begin
they are like an angry wolf and the French will fly before them like deer.
1763. Johnson's prediction comes true.
And Canada becomes part of the British Empire.
But the elimination of the French threat only feeds the settlers hunger
for more and more land, Iroquois land.
The British issue a
proclamation barring white settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains.
This greatly angers the colonials. To appease them, the British
negotiate a treaty with the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix, New York.
In exchange for an Indian-white boundary, the Iroquois agree to seed
vast territory in central New York, Pennsylvania and other lands
to the south. It still doesn't satisfy the American
colonials.
And so they saw these lines established by proclamation and by treaty
as cutting off a real sense of opportunity. A denial of their
liberty. So to deny them access to that land was to deny them
in a sense their liberty. And this would feed into
a growing revolutionary debate, this revolutionary crisis that would
explode in the 1770s.
March 5th, 1770. British redcoats open fire on a
rock-throwing mob, killing five in what Americans are quick to call
the Boston Massacre.
The crisis has been simmering for years, but comes to a head when the
British clamp down on American freedoms and try to eradicate the huge
debts caused by the French and Indian War. They tax American settlers
on everything from printed documents to sugar to tea.
The colonials decry the taxes and other new British laws as
just. The Boston Tea Party, at which the Sons of Liberty dressed
themselves as mohawks, was just one of the many protests during the
American colonies. And it was explained to the Iroquois that it was
a fight between the father and children. The father was the king of England
and the American colonies were the children. And the Iroquois responded,
saying, that's a family quarrel and there's no need for us to be involved
so we'll stay neutral.
But once again, the Iroquois find themselves pulled from both sides in a
furious political tug of war. The British and the American patriots
vie for their allegiance.
Many Oneidas and Tuscaroras have come under the influence of a
powerful pro-patriot missionary named Samuel Kirkland.
They walked miles to hear his anti-British sermons.
He was the one who convinced them
the Americans were going to win this land and this war and they should be on the
winning side and that should be with the Americans.
The British
also have their powerful advocates. Sir William Johnson has died
but his widow's brother, the Mohawk Joseph Brand, has taken his place
as a dynamic defender of the crown.
Charismatic, a born leader, well educated, Brand speaks fluent
English and at least three of the six nations languages. To the British,
his support is crucial.
I think he allied himself with the people who he and everybody else reasonably expected to be the
winners in this war, which was the English.
We pray that war will not come.
The Haudenosaunee are saying, we love you both.
We are friends with the colonies and Britain.
It is a quarrel between you and not us. We don't want your war and our country.
April 19, 1775,
guns open fire on Lexington Green.
The shot heard around the world roars like thunder through the six nations.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
In 1876, America declares its independence.
Whatever joy these words give the American patriots
cannot be shared by the Iroquois. For them, the revolution will mean
only more pain. Their Confederacy is being ripped apart.
What the Confederacy said at the time is
we will remain neutral. We will not fight as the Haudenosaunee
as the Confederacy, nor will we fight as a nation.
But we cannot, being free people, deny the right to fight of anyone who wants to, of our men.
Summer, 1777.
The American war for
independence rages across the northeast,
dividing families and friends.
Reluctantly, the Iroquois have chosen sides.
The Oneidas and Tuscaroras will fight for the Americans.
But Joseph Brand has convinced some of the Mohawk and Seneca men
to fight for their lands and against the Americans.
The Peacemaker's
prophetic warning is coming true.
If you chiefs by the council fire should be continually
throwing ashes at one another, your people will go astray.
Their heads will roll. Authority will be gone.
In the fire of war, the nations are throwing ashes at one another.
They have strayed from the path of peace.
August 6th.
At Ariskeny, in the woods of
upstate New York, an American relief column is
ambushed by British troops, Senecas and
Mohawks.
Fighting
alongside the Americans are 60
Oneidas.
It was on this ground here that Oneidas shot at their relatives, the Senecas and the
Mohawks, and the Mohawks and Senecas did likewise, and blood was spilled,
Oneidas were killed, and Mohawks were killed, and Senecas were killed.
And then all of a sudden you're there in the midst of battle
and you realize you've made these commitments to these nations
that are not even your nation, and you end up fighting against your own brothers.
When we talk about blood,
musket balls, musket ball, you know, about that big,
when one of those things hits your flesh, it opens up a huge hole,
and so it might enter here, and by the time, if it did exit your body,
it would leave a hole like that. So just the nature
of the wounds that people had, an incredible amount of blood.
A man they call Black Snake later on
would talk about how the creek ran red, you know, with blood.
From there,
it deteriorated from a battle involving muskets to one involving
spears and clubs and axes and knives, and it became the most personal,
intimate kind of fight you can imagine, people rushing at each other,
neighbor fighting neighbor, and a battle continued like that
for some hours.
When the fighting at Ariskeny ends, more than 500 lie dead.
Some are Onidas. Many more are Senecas and Mohawks.
Dreams that people had, that efforts that they had made to carry on
the idea of the peacemaker was violated here in the most personal way.
When you begin to murder
and kill other Iroquois people, that means that we've surrendered
the central part of our lives and the central idea of our lives.
The message of the peacemaker was such that we should live in peace
with each other.
And here at Ariskeny, that idea was preached.
Summer, 1778. Joseph Brandt avenges the
slaughter at Ariskeny.
With British support, he leads the Senecas and Mohawks on a bloody campaign
against their Onida cousins and their American allies.
Our Onida people, during the campaigns of the Revolutionary War, suffered greatly.
Our villages were destroyed, our crops and fields and storehouses were destroyed
and burned and we suffered as a result.
And so our people, of course, had very strained times, very hungry times
and very poor times as a result of our loyalty.
And yet, their oral history speaks of how
Chief Shenandoah and other Onidas risked death
to feed General George Washington's starving Continental Army
during that terrible winter at Valley Forge.
Shenandoah and a group of Onidas walked to Valley Forge
with several hundred bushels of corn. Oral tradition goes
that if it weren't for this one saving act, that one deed of kindness
by Shenandoah and his men that brought the bushels of corn to Valley Forge
that we'd probably be living under British rule.
1779. Attacks by Joseph Brand and other
pro-British Iroquois are hampering the flow of food and supplies to the Continental Army.
And exaggerated reports of Indian massacres have the American public
clamoring for action.
George Washington decides to go on the offensive.
Washington concluded that he could end this problem by destroying
Iroquois itself. This was a kind of campaign of destruction that
he didn't carry out in any other part of America.
It seemed to violate fundamental rules of conventional warfare.
Washington takes special aim at the troublesome Seneca's.
The object will be effectually to chastise and intimidate the hostile nations.
To cut off their next year's crops and do them every other mischief
which time and circumstance will permit. The country must not be merely overrun
but destroyed. You will listen to no overture of peace
before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.
August 26, 1779.
More than 5,000 men and officers under the command of New Hampshire General
John Sullivan set out from Tioga, Pennsylvania.
There is virtually no resistance to Sullivan's campaign.
The American soldiers are astounded by the beauty
and bounty of the Seneca homeland.
When they arrive in the Seneca country, they find these beautiful homes.
They find the finest corn fields. They find the finest orchards of peaches and apples.
And what they do is they set fire to everything, anything that can sustain life.
They burn it.
They kill whomever they find in their path and they burn the houses to the ground.
They cut the corn down. They set fire to all the corn.
They destroy anything that is edible.
What Sullivan was doing
and was ordered by Washington was to scorch the earth.
And its essence, its saying to the message being sent to the Haudenosaunee is
your families. We will starve you to death.
Mary Jamison, the adopted white sister of the Senecas,
watches in horror.
A part of our corn they burnt and threw the remainder into the river.
They burnt our houses, killed what cattle and horses they could find,
destroyed our fruit trees,
their soil and timber.
And this is where to me must have been the lowest period
in our history where we were reduced to starvation.
To think of these proud people who had a hundred acre,
two hundred acre corn fields and fifteen hundred fruit trees were now in just a space
of a month or two of Sullivan were destitute.
From the diary of General Sullivan.
The number of towns destroyed by this army amounted to forty besides scattering houses.
The quantity of corn destroyed at a modest computation must amount to a hundred sixty thousand bushels
with a vast quantity of vegetables of every kind.
I flatter myself that the orders of which I was entrusted are fully executed.
Many of the Senecas flee west to safety near Britain's Fort Niagara.
But Sullivan's destruction
hasn't annihilated the Senecas and the other Iroquois.
His flames only have enraged them even more.
They are prepared to fight the Americans forever.
But then comes staggering news.
October 1781 on a battlefield in Yorktown, Virginia.
The British surrender to Washington.
The English persuade their Iroquoian allies to lay down their arms.
The revolution is over they say.
We have lost.
To the Iroquois the world is turned irrevocably upside down.
I think they also must have started to realize that
they were kind of used and that
what meant the most to them they were about to lose and they didn't know
what their future would hold. It's an emptiness and a pain and
it's hard to describe but I'm sure that's how they felt.
Joseph Brant said he felt that he and his people were
between two hells. War was one hell.
Peace would be another.
1783
For the first time in nearly eight years
there is peace in the lands of the Iroquois.
The Treaty of Paris officially ends the
Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the new United States.
In it there is not a single word on the fate of the Iroquois.
No matter which side each of the six nations fought for
it is as if they never existed.
They no longer mattered really in any real terms and they could be
brushed aside and I think that was a cruel lesson that the Iroquois Confederacy
had to learn, is that they had been treated as simply another political tool
and when their usefulness was up they were discarded and thrown aside.
The war a thing of the past, the American push westward
resumes in reckless earnest.
Speculators are selling off land they don't even own.
Many of General Sullivan's men plan moves to the western New York
territory they had ravaged just a few years before.
Essentially all of those who served saw that land
as American land almost as if it was a
birthright. They saw their destiny in the west and they would take
that up either by right of conquest or through coercion and fraud
and that's exactly what happened.
Joseph Brandt and his Mohawk followers are given refuge in
British Canada. Most of the other Iroquois are moved to small
reservations in New York State.
Ironically it is the Oneidas who sided with the victorious Americans
who perhaps fare the worst. New York State takes all
but a tiny part of their homeland.
The Oneidas occupied an area of 6 million acres.
We now reside on 32.
We made great sacrifices
for the Americans and we've ended up with almost virtually nothing.
Chief Shenandoah and his people had put their lives on the
line for George Washington during their legendary visit to Valley
Forge. This was Shenandoah's bitter reward.
There was a speech just before he died where he said
I'm an aged hemlock. The winds of a hundred years have whistled through my
branches. The generation to which I have belonged
have run away and left me.
It's a very sad way to go.
We, the people of the United States,
in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice,
ensure domestic trade.
In my opinion it was a lose-lose situation.
Both powers intended to own the continent
and what the native people thought
of that conquest was really not of much consequence.
As we look back
we can see that the colonial aims to empire
were realized.
Today most Iroquois still believe and follow the non-violent
teachings of the peacemaker. So strong is their faith.
In 1993 a peace delegation came to share
the peacemaker's great law with the United Nations, but some
still do not hear his words. In 1990
a protest over disputed lands adjacent to a Mohawk reserve in Canada
explodes in violence.
A standoff between the Mohawks and the Canadian military lasts
11 tense weeks.
To escape such violence a group of Mohawks is moving back to the lands of their
ancestors. They have bought a former county nursing home with
300 acres of land by the Mohawk River in upstate New York.
In 200 years these Iroquois people are finally
home. Here they will try to make the dream of the peacemaker
a reality.
If we all just took the time to sit and talk with one another and share
our ideas and our beliefs that we'd find that we have more in common
than differences.
I think that we can all maybe someday work
side by side to create that great, great piece that the peacemaker
may have been dreaming of for everybody.
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