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Many years ago, Wizi, with all the politeness that Lakota culture expects of young people in interacting with their elders, presented me with a letter. It was a formal request to serve as an intern. With the letter was a tobacco offering.

Humans have some flaws that need to be disciplined. I had my own flaws and they were protesting: It’s a lot of trouble! There’s funds to be raised and time to be committed towards developing the learning activity and the supervision! Then I looked at the tobacco offering in my hand and Wolakota started drifting like a warm, wispy fog through my being. Tobacco offerings are offered in humility and with honor. It can be refused, but I personally don’t know of such an instance. You just don’t.

So, I reached out and took his hand and thanked him for the honor. After all, he was the grandson of my father’s close relative for whom he had great respect. My Euro-nicity chimed in, “He’s a Yale student!” (I have a smidgeon of Irish blood that I could lose in a nosebleed.)

And so commenced my own education about the younger generation and the possibilities of acculturation. 

The funding was in place, but keeping a Yale student raised by a Lakota grandmother on a learning curve would be a challenge. His first assignment, I think he did in his sleep. No sooner had I asked for a complete listing of all the tribes in this country when I received back that list. Hmm, what next? I raised the bar a bit. There was a treaty gathering coming up. Get on the agenda and give a presentation of traditional values expected in leadership. For any young person, that was a formidable task! To get on the agenda to address Lakota-speaking elders would require extraordinary diplomacy. To research and to present leadership values to those who already know would have to be exceptionally creative.

The treaty gathering came and I saw Wizi fidgeting, but it was hardly noticeable. “I ask my wise elders to forgive a young man for speaking in their presence. These are things we need to remind ourselves about”, he began.  Most people just ramble off the standard four virtues of bravery, compassion, wisdom, and fortitude. He went further into disciplines that, in this time and in the American culture, are not expected anymore of leadership. He spoke of marital fidelity and being humble in a confident way.

I glanced at the audience around me. Their full attention was on Wizi. When he finished with, “I thank you for listening to a young man trying to be what you are”. The applause lingered on and on as people walked up to him and shook his hand. A leader in the making, I thought, not one of today’s politicians, but one who understands the traditional process of leadership!

As I was preparing to travel to Geneva, Switzerland, Wizi called, polite as usual, “Can I come? I saved my money and I can pay for my own expenses. I’ll be helpful.” So off we went to the United Nations.

I was there to make a appeal on behalf of the buffalo that were being slaughtered in Yellowstone and also to ask the World Health Organization to pay attention to the health risks were being imposed on indigenous peoples by confined animal feeding operations (Rosebud Hog Farm specifically). Since the line-up of speakers is long and time is short, getting to speak twice is unlikely. So, Wizi signed up and earnestly began the task of drafting an abbreviated 6-minute intervention. You have to make your case in the allotted time on complicated issues! His draft passed through the hands of lawyers and other seasoned delegates and marked up in red. He redrafted and redrafted with patience and persistence. Finally Wizi delivered a very moving speech on behalf of the buffalo that are sacred to his people. Once again, people were on their feet and the applause lingered on. His speech exceeded the time limit, but Madame Diaz didn’t even notice! She gaveled me thirty seconds short earlier that day!

When he was considering the position with Tom Daschle’s office, he didn’t ponder the decision on his own. He gathered his parents, his grandmother and a few others and asked for their opinions. He was always careful in his decision-making. The question wasn’t: Would this be good for ME? The deciding factor was always: Through me, how would this be good for my people? 

And now, he will be at the elbow of the President, helping to bring dignity back to the American people, dignity back to people of all colors. The night that Obama won the election, I danced with my great-granddaughter in my living room, finally feeling like an American. When Wizi’s appointment was announced, I raised my face to the sun and did my Lakota woman thing: wicaglata.

I have much hope now. I have hope that the tribes for whom the buffalo is the core of their culture can sit in an honorable way with the government agencies and negotiate sensible ways to respect the role of a sacred, keystone species. Sacred species are indicators of the health of the planet. We’ve always known that, but we were invisible and silent, until now. 

Obama has acknowledged that the U.S. needs to build an honorable relationship; a consultation process with the Native Americans. We take his word on that.

Wizi, my nephew is a Lakota and he will continue to honor his heritage as he takes on another challenge. We will be inspired to compose and sing songs for our young leaders.

 

The Rights of the Land

The Onondaga Nation of central New York proposes a radical new vision of property rights

BY ROBIN KIMMERER

BEFORE FIRST LIGHT we board a bus and at last light we return, just as the October hills of central New York shade to burgundy and the lights come on in dairy barns for evening chores. Teachers, students, clan mothers, chiefs, journalists, scientists, activists, and neighbors like me—I see all our faces reflected in the bus windows. For the Onondaga, this trip to federal court in Albany to defend their right to care for their land has been a long time coming, a journey of generations.

The highway rises out of the enfolding hills to a ridge, where the land suddenly spreads out below. I see forests, farms, orchards, and, in the distance, the lights of downtown Syracuse. Plumes from smokestacks catch the rosy light above Onondaga Lake, a pewter oval reflecting the sky.

The first part of this tale is familiar, which makes it no less shameful. The ancestral territory of the Onondaga stretches from the Pennsylvania border north to Canada. Historically, it was a mosaic of rich woodlands, expansive cornfields, lakes, and rivers. Rights to these lands were guaranteed by treaties between two sovereign nations, Onondaga and the United States. But over the years, illegal takings of land by the state of New York diminished the aboriginal Onondaga territories from 2.6 million acres to a tiny reservation of just 7,300 acres.

The Nation’s current territory does not even include the heart of their ancestral home, Onondaga Lake, one of Native America’s most sacred sites. In the seminal Onondaga story of the Peacemaker, a figure appeared across the water of Onondaga Lake during a time of war, a beautiful youth in a white stone canoe. The stone canoe signifies the weight of the message with which he was entrusted, the Great Law of Peace. Most people of the warring nations turned him away; few would listen. But as the Peacemaker grew to old age, one by one the leaders finally heard the message of peace and set aside their war clubs. On the shore of Onondaga Lake, the Peacemaker gathered together all fifty of the reconciled chiefs. To signify the peace, they cast their weapons into a great hole, on top of which the Peacemaker planted an enormous white pine.

The five bundled needles of the white pine represent the union of five tribes: the Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk. Its roots, spread out to the four directions, represent the invitation to all to live by the Great Law, which sets forth a vision of right relationships between people and the Earth. Thus was born what the European settlers understood as the Great League of the Iroquois, what the people themselves call the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the oldest continuous democracy on Earth.

Chief Irving Powless Jr., an Onondaga elder, likes to remind listeners that walking beside the Peacemaker was Hiawatha—not Longfellow’s invention, but the real one. It was Hiawatha, standing by this very lake, who bound together the five arrows. One arrow alone, he said, can be broken, but the bundle of five is too strong. The structure of the Iroquois Confederacy became the model for the colonist’s new union, and the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows in its talons. It was beneath that very seal that the Onondaga pled their case in federal court.

Chief Powless also likes to say that when the colonists adapted Haudenosaunee ideas for their government, they took only the parts that they liked. “If it were up to us, we wouldn’t have written the Bill of Rights without a Bill of Responsibilities,“ he told me.

Despite its status as the birthplace of American democracy, there is no monument on the shores of Onondaga Lake. Today, the soil where the Peacemaker walked is a Superfund site. In fact, it’s not soil at all, but a slippery white mass of industrial waste, thirty feet deep, left over from soda ash production by Allied Chemical. More than 144 million tons of mercury-laden waste were spewed onto the lake bottom. The water is a stew of sewage and assorted toxic wastes. If you walk on the waste beds, you can see rusting barrels, oozing leachate. The sacred and the Superfund share this shore.

ON A FIELD TRIP to the lake with school kids from the Onondaga Nation, Audrey Shenandoah shares her memories, recalling the lake as a place “where the willows touch the water”—a beautiful place, a place for fishing, for gathering plants, for family picnics, for ceremonies. Audrey is a clan mother, writer, and teacher. As an advisor to the United Nations, she has been a voice on behalf of indigenous peoples and the environment all over the world. The teaching of “think not of yourself, but of the seventh generation” is not an abstraction for her. “We were told to hold tight to our way of life,“ she says, “to honor our ancient teachings, not just for ourselves but for everyone.“ Just as water and birds and fish were given certain responsibilities in the world, so too were the people. They are called upon to give thanks and to take care of all the other gifts.

For these school kids, the day begins and ends not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, known also as the “words that come before all else.“ This river of words calls out to every element of the living world. Water, trees, fish, birds, and berries are thanked for the gifts that they provide, for meeting their responsibilities and sustaining life. Clan mother Freida Jacques explains it this way: “We have a culture of gratitude. These words are used to open and close all gatherings in our daily lives, bringing the listeners’ minds together in offering thanksgiving, love, and respect to the natural world.“

Audrey gazes out over the lake, her snowy hair swept to a graceful knot at the nape of her neck. “When I was a little girl,“ she says, “I always heard talk about a land settlement. This was the dream I’ve heard all of my life.“ That dream is finally inching closer to reality, and with it, quite unexpectedly, comes a process of healing and transformation for an entire region.

ON MARCH 11, 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a complaint in a federal court in Syracuse seeking title to their lost homelands. Their claim is made under United States law, but its moral power lies in the directives of the Great Law: to act on behalf of peace, the natural world, and the future generations. The motion begins with this statement:

The Onondaga people wish to bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time. The Nation and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concerns of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation’s leaders to work for a healing of this land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations. The Onondaga Nation brings this action on behalf of its people on the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace, and respect among all who inhabit this area.

The lawsuit is not a land “claim,“ because to the Onondaga land has far greater significance than the notion of property. Sid Hill, theTadodaho, or spiritual leader, of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, has said that the Onondaga Nation will never seek to evict people from their homes. The Onondaga people know the pain of displacement too well to inflict it on their neighbors. Instead the suit is termed a “land rights action.“ When they finally got their day in court last October, members of the Onondaga Nation argued that the land title they’re seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land. This is unheard of in American property law.

In other land claims around the country, some tribes have negotiated for cash, land, and casino deals, reaching for relief from grinding poverty on the last shreds of their territories. But the Onondaga envision a radically different solution that honors their ancestral land and their spiritual responsibilities to it. Above all, the land rights action seeks title for the purpose of ecological restoration. Only with title can they ensure that mines are reclaimed, toxic waste removed, and Onondaga Lake cleaned up. The action strengthens the ability of the Onondaga to exercise their traditional role as stewards of their homelands. Tadodaho Sid Hill says, “We had to stand by and watch what happens to Mother Earth, but nobody listens to what we think. The land rights action will give us a voice.“

The legal action concerns not only rights to the land, but also the rights of the land, its right to be whole and healthy. Audrey Shenandoah makes the goal clear. “In this land rights action,“ she says, “we seek justice. Justice for the waters. Justice for the four-legged and the winged, whose habitats have been taken. We seek justice, not just for ourselves, but justice for the whole of Creation.“

The land rights action could have incited a backlash. In other parts of New York State, citizens opposed to land rights cases have mounted responses as ugly as they are ill-informed, including handmade roadside signs decrying native land rights and inflammatory letters to the editor. But in Onondaga territory, the response has been different, marked by thoughtful conversation, by respect, and, in some places, singing.

AS THE ONONDAGA NATION stands up for justice, it is not standing alone. At the forefront of this community support is a grassroots organization of central New Yorkers called Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, or NOON. It is an outgrowth of the Syracuse Peace Council, the oldest continuing peace and justice organization in the country. Andy Mager, a young father and skillful community organizer, had pulled many of us together for the bus trip to Albany, but the work of the Neighbors goes far beyond that.

As a bulwark against intolerance, NOON has made pathways between the Onondaga Nation and the wider community. Andy knew that the process of healing needed to begin with truth-telling, and with listening. The average person in Syracuse knows almost nothing about the sovereign nation that sits just six miles south of their city, and some folks were wary that the Onondaga action would somehow jeopardize the surrounding community.

Because opportunities for misconception abound, bringing unheard stories to a wider audience has been a focus for NOON. Every few weeks for over a year, NOON has orchestrated a community program entitled “The Onondaga Land Rights Action and Our Common Future.“ On warm summer evenings and dark snowy nights, people have come to a local theater to hear about the history and culture of the Onondaga, stories that escaped the history books: of the origin of consensus-based democracy, of a society based on a balance between male and female leadership, of a culture of gratitude and the Great Law of Peace. Most evenings, there were two spotlit chairs on the dark stage, chairs filled by some combination of indigenous scholars, university professors, clan mothers, grassroots leaders, politicians, scientists, lawyers, all come to think collectively about what the land rights action could mean.

One night, Chief Powless addressed the crowd, framing the land rights action in a historical context. “Sharing our ancient teachings is not just for understanding the past, but for a vision of what the future can hold,“ he said. Fumbling with something in his lap for a moment, he drew from its deerskin wrap a wide belt intricately woven of shell beads: the historic Two Row Wampum. He held it between his outstretched hands and explained that the two paths of purple wampum that travel the length of the white-shell belt represent the treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee more than four hundred years ago. The white ground of the belt represents the river of life down which we all travel. One purple band stands for the indigenous people, traveling in their canoe. The other represents the newcomers, in their ship. The belt documents the agreement that the two lines do not intersect, the colonists carry their ways with them on the ship, the Haudenosaunee hold theirs in their canoes, and neither will try to steer the other’s vessel. “Two boats on the same river,“ he said, is “an agreement to live side by side. But we’re both on the same river. We need the same water. We’re going to the same place.“

“This belt,“ he continued, gently putting it back into its wrapping, “reminds us that our futures are linked. The only way we have is forward, into the future, together.“ Holding the audience in the spell of his gentle voice, he explained that if the land is not healed, if the waters are not clean, then neither of us has a future. The land rights action is for us all.

Because of the bold action of NOON, people whose paths had never before crossed find themselves on common ground. Teachers are inspired to tell new stories in their classrooms, and citizens are organizing public meetings on the future of the lake. Neighborly relations have begun to blossom from casual conversations into work parties on the reservation, shared dinners, and other community gatherings. The past few years have brought the Nation and the city together at a concert by a community-wide choir singing to the lake, candlelight vigils in the city square, shared ceremonies on the shore, and a community celebration with Onondaga members teaching the Friendship Dance. The Onondaga have also formed an alliance with minority neighborhoods in the city, calling for environmental justice and stringent lake cleanup.

Out of this climate of community building, the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment has taken root at a local university, the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. One of its first programs was to hold a teach-in on the land rights action that reached thousands of students and community members. The curriculum now includes “Onondaga Land Rights and our Common Future,“ a class co-taught by faculty from SUNY-ESF and the Onondaga Nation, in which students envision alternative environmental futures growing from the philosophy of the Thanksgiving Address. What would it be like, they ask, to care for and be cared for by the land? Their proposals imagine a future where the interests of great blue herons have equal standing with those of property owners, where urban developments are modeled after the lifestyles of maple trees, powered by solar energy and carbon-neutral. Wounded landscapes would not be abandoned so that new ones could be plundered, but nurtured back to health with the tools of restoration ecology. Communities would cement their relationship to the places that sustain them with ceremony and celebration.

The state of New York has argued that the land rights action will be disruptive, but so far it has been profoundly creative of community—a whole community, a democracy of species, both human and nonhuman. “The beauty of this action breaks my heart,“ one woman said. “But it makes me want to be brave, too. If the Onondaga can stand up for this place, then why can’t I?“

The Onondaga now wait for a ruling on the land rights action. They may have to wait a long time. But then again, they’ve waited before.

HISTORICALLY central New York has been known as a birthplace of democracy, a birthplace of abolition and of women’s rights. Through the leadership of the Onondaga and the hunger for wholeness among the rest of the people who live here, this landscape could be a birthplace again—a birthplace of the rights of the land itself and of a community’s willing responsibility to care for it.

In time, the land rights action could also lead to the rebirth of Onondaga Lake. In the last few years, the lake has given signs of hope, with marked improvements in water quality. The shifts have come as the factories have closed and sewage discharge has been reduced. The water, too, has done its part. With lessened inputs, the lakes and streams seem to be cleaning themselves as the water moves through. In some places, plants are starting to inhabit the bottom. Just this spring, trout were found once again in the lake. It seems to me that the waters are reminding the people: if you will use your healing gifts, we will use ours.

And now, Allied Chemical, which eventually merged with Honeywell, Inc., is finally being held accountable for the condition of the lake. After decades of foot-dragging, the company and the state and federal governments have offered a cleanup plan that calls for dredging the most contaminated sediments and covering the rest with a few inches of sand. Unfortunately, this leaves the bulk of the contaminants spread over the entire lake bottom, where they can easily enter the food chain. Chief Powless characterizes the solution as “prescribing a Band-Aid for cancer.“

The Onondaga Nation has called for a thorough cleanup of their sacred lake, but, without title, their voice has not been heard. The U.S. legal system has not been friendly toward indigenous land rights. Too often, when the well-being of its lands are being discussed, the Nation has had to litigate its way to the table instead of being invited as a sovereign entity.

Joe Heath is the attorney and tireless advocate for the Onondaga Nation. Lately, Joe’s phone rings with requests from towns throughout the aboriginal territory for inclusion in the dreamed-of restoration. These communities too have been damaged. They too have been marginalized by corporate interests. Joe carefully tracks the reports of environmental injury, creating a growing list of work to be done. The Onondaga, once made voiceless by the law, are gaining respect as a voice for the land.

And while the Onondaga didn’t take this action with the intent of acquiring other people’s lands, lands are coming to them nonetheless. A local businessman is calling upon the county legislature to return lakeshore lands to the Nation. Others are willingly selling lands adjacent to the reserve to protect them from suburban development. Another extraordinary example, miles from the reservation, is a beautiful old dairy farm of green meadows and maple woods. It has been in one family for generations, bestowed by New York State for services rendered in the Revolutionary War. Those well-loved acres have been passed down again and again. But the deed carries a clause written by that long-ago forebear that one day the land must be returned to “the Indians from whom it was taken.“ A few years ago, the last heir, now elderly, contacted the Nation to give back what was rightfully theirs.

A neighbor of mine wonders, “Should I give back my land, too?“ But that’s not what the Onondaga are teaching. They don’t ask that we give the land back, but that we give back to the land, to care for it as if it were our home, too.

I think that the land rights action is an invitation for the people of this watershed to engage in becoming indigenous to place. No newcomer can ever match the Onondaga’s identity with these hills, but what does it mean for an immigrant culture to start thinking like a native one? Not to appropriate the culture of indigenous people, not to take what is theirs, but to throw off the mindset of the frontier, the mindset that allows people to bury sacred sites under industrial waste, to fill a lake with mercury. Being indigenous to place means to live as if we’ll be here for the long haul, to take care of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, depended on it. Because they do.

The Earth is generous with us—and forgiving. We can be the same with each other. Becoming indigenous to place also means embracing its story, because the restoration of the land and the healing of our relationship mirror one another. Coming to terms with injustice is an act of liberation. By making the past visible, we can then see our way forward. I suppose that’s why some of us rode the bus to court with our Onondaga neighbors—to bear witness to the telling of truth and to accept the hand offered in healing.

Even after everything, that the people who suffered so greatly can now turn to their neighbors with such a gift seems an act of immense generosity. The Onondaga people are offering us a gift of vision. Out of their endless thanksgiving for the land, they are inviting us to dream of a time when the land might also give thanks for the people.

My love-hate relationship with Turkey Day

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This time of year always fills me with deep contradictions. To be blunt, Thanksgiving, in its purest form, is a celebration of the eventual subjugation, domination, and massacre of millions of indigenous people of this land. As a man who is a proud member of the Ojibwe nation, I viscerally feel disgust at the roots of this holiday and all it represents to those that carry the burden of history.

 

As a person descended from slaves, who still has family in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, the place where my family was held in bondage, I was taught that Thanksgiving was a time to celebrate our freedom and the strength of family and community that got us through and brought us over. Thanksgiving is the celebration of our metaphorical crossing of the River Jordan or, perhaps, the Ohio River.

The truth is that Thanksgiving should be a time where we honor the spirits of those living and dead that fought, bled, and died so that our communities could survive. It is a time to gather around our friends and family and to show them through words, food, and laughter that we appreciate their presence and their love. But it is also a time of obligation.

No two peoples living on this land known as the United States of America have such a tragic and intertwined history as African-Americans and Native Americans. Throughout our shared history of enslavement and genocide, forced labor and forceable removal from our homelands, our fates have touched one another: sometimes in acts of solidarity such as the taking in of runaway slaves by the Cherokee and Seminole and other native nations, and sometimes in acts of violence where slaves served with continental armies participating in the massacre of indigenous communities and indigenous communities that served whites as slave catchers.

Since the end of slavery, the relationship between African-Americans and Native Americans has, again, sometimes been one of solidarity such as the brown/black power movements of the 1960s and sometimes one of  betrayal, such as the stripping of citizenship from black members of the western Cherokee Nation earlier this year.

Yet the truth remains that at this time of profound social change and opportunity, leaders of the African-American community and leaders of both urban Indian and Indian nations should be working together on common goals related to sovereignty, reparations, and reclamation. At times the survival of entire segments of the black community have depended on our native brothers and sisters. That history was, intentionally, kept quiet by mainstream authorities. Divide and conquer has always been their primary tactic.

This Thanksgiving, I challenge our communities to commit to not only celebrating our freedom and our family but also developing strategies to build deep relationships with our native kin. In Humboldt County, California, a small grassroots collective called Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC) has partnered with the Seventh Generation Fund on a relatively new project called the Honor Tax. The two organizations are working closely with small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individual citizens encouraging them to make a yearly tax payment to the Wiyot Nation. The nation on whose lands Humboldt County sits. This is not a charitable contribution but a tax payment acknowledging that the land itself is not owned by those who sit on it but by the peoples that historically belong to it.

These are the types of endeavours that should be championed by people of African descent. If we, the grandchildren of those held in bondage, are to righteously, and justly, demand reparations in recognition of the trillions of dollars of wealth created from our unpaid labor, then it is our moral and civil obligation to advocate for at least as much  for the indigenous peoples of the United States. In the end, it is my hope that one day all of this land will be restored to those from whom it was taken, but until that day comes, it is our duty to work hand in hand to hold up and restore each as we collectively move towards a just and liberated future.  Let’s transform Thanksgiving into a holiday of thanks for each other and an opportunity to create new river crossings on black and red bridges.

Original posted: Wednesday November 26, 2008 12:30 P.M.