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Subject: A Basic Call to Consciousness II
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Date: 6 Sep 89 10:46:05 GMT
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/* --------  Written 12:30pm 9/4/89 by David Yarrow(jdmann)    ------- */
/* --------          A BASIC CALL TO CONSCIOUSNESS             ------- */
            The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World
                    Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn, 1977
     
                            Position Paper #1
        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 Six Nations Confederacy (Iroquois), 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 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 all living things are spiritual
beings.  Spirit 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.  Creation is a true,
material phenomenon, and Creation manifests itself to us through reality.
The spiritual universe, then, is manifest to Man as Creation, the Creation
which support life.  We believe that man is real, a part of 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 a 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 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.  Hunters and gatherers who roamed the area probably
acquired animals from the agricultural people, and adopted an enonomy,
based on 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 function which had for all time been the
function of the spirits of the animals.  Sometime after this history
records the first appearance of 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.
Semitic people were among the first in the world to develop irrigation
technology.  This 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 hierarchal social organization
crystallized.  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 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 civilization.  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 Semetic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly
termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.
   Christianity was an absolutely essential element in 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 forest, waters, hills and the land; Christianity attacked those
beliefs, and effectively de-spiritualized the European world.  Christian
peoples, who possessed superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were
able to militarily subjugate the tribal peoples of Europe.
   Availability of iron led to development of tools which could cut down
the forest, the source of charcoal to make more tools.  Newly cleared land
was then turned by the newly developed iorn 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 developement 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
Indo-European technologies.  European civilization has a history of rising
and falling as it technologies reach their material and cultural limits.
The finite Natural world has always provided a kind of built-in
contradiction to Western expansion.
   Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled
zeal.  Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an
unassimilable elements to the civilizations of the West.  Forests provided
materials for larger ships, the land was fresh and fertile for agricultural
surpluses, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for 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.
   Hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared for the purpose of
providing farmlands.  Those forests were destroyed to creat charcoal for
the forges of the iron smelters and blacksmiths.  By the 1890's, 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, Native people subjected to genocide.  Vast herds of
herbivores were reduced to mere handfuls, buffalo nearly became extinct.
Western technology and the people who employed it have been the most
amazingly destructive force 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, 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 know 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
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 these destructive processes.
   The other position papers of the Hau de no sau nee outline our analysis
of economic and legal oppression.  But our essential message to the world
is a basic call to consciousness.  The destruction of 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 area also destroying the Native people.  And that
process is Western Civilization.
   We know that there area 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.
   Processes of colonialism and imperialism which 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 peoples, 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 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.
   People 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 Natural World.  What is needed is the liberation
of all 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.
   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.
 =============================================================
    COMMENTARY: The Hau de no sau nee, of the Six Nations Confederacy, are
the last suriving sovereign native North American nations; they are
commonly referred to by the Huron-French name "Iroquois League."
   This position paper was presented to a UN Commission of Discrimination
Against Native Peoples.  It's message is just as true and even more timely
today than at its first presentation exactly 12 years ago.
   This message has an added, deepened irony today as Russian, Balkan,
Polish, Chinese, and many other peoples struggle to establish genuine
liberty and democracy.  This is because the Hau de no sau nee were provided
inspiration and advice for the European settlers to rebel against colonial
rule and establish the United States of America, the first modern European
political democracy.  The original root of liberty can be traced to the
Onondaga Lake shore where the Peacemaker founded the Hau de no sau nee and
buried the hatchet beneath the Tree of Peace.
   Today, two centuries later, the USA refuses to recognize the sovereignty
of the Hau de no sau nee, or honor their passports, and tries to impose its
own brand of popular election on the Hau de no sau nee tradition of the
selection of elders under the guidance of clanmothers.
   And it was Henry Lewis Morgan's study of the Hau de no sau nee which
inspired Frederick Engels and Karl Marx to expound their communist theory
of economic democracy.
 -*+*- David Yarrow, the turtle, for SOLSTICE magazine.
 ***** SOLSTICE: Perspectives on Health and Environment is a bimonthly
printed at 200 E Main St Suite H, Charlottesville, VA 22901 804-979-4427
     
     


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