Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation

Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings

Penelope Edmonds

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137304544
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives, as well as the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'.

1

‘Polishing the chain of friendship’: Two Row Wampum Renewal Celebrations and Matters of History

On a 13-day ‘epic canoe trip’ members of the Haudenosaunee nations and other Native peoples paddled side-by-side with their non-Indigenous friends and supporters down the Hudson River, from Albany to New York City in July–August 2013. Approaching the George Washington Bridge, the participants raised their paddles in a potent salute, signalling a sense of connection, hopefulness and their political intent (Figure 6). Part of the ‘Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign’, the canoe trip was a symbolic enactment of what is known as the Tawagonshi Treaty, or, in the Iroquoian oral tradition, the Two Row Wampum Treaty (or Guswenta Treaty). This was a trade agreement said to have been struck in 1613 between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois confederacy of Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk peoples) on the Hudson River in Mohawk territory.¹

‘We will bring the treaty to life!’ announced the canoe journey organizers. ‘These two equal, but separate rows of paddlers will demonstrate the wise, yet simple concept of the Two Row Wampum Treaty.’² The Native and non-native paddlers represented the ‘two rows’ of shell-beads of the wampum (a type of ceremonial belt) believed by many Iroquoian people to commemorate the 1613 agreement.³ In 2013 this treaty from the early seventeenth century was commemorated and radically reimagined as the basis for a progressive series of social and environmental reforms, and participants signed the ‘Two Row Declaration of intent’.⁴ The Two Row Wampum campaigners aimed to use community-based initiatives to draw attention to Native sovereignty rights, land rights and environmental concerns, brokered and publicly performed through an agreement made four centuries ago. The canoe journey ended in New York City on 9 August 2013, where paddlers were welcomed by local dignitaries and Dutch Consul General Rob de Vos. They then marched to the United Nations to take part in the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

Figure 6 Paddles raised in salute at the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign 2013. Hudson River, George Washington Bridge, New York. Photograph by Jessica Hallenbeck

Interviewed towards the end of the journey, Chief Jake Edwards spoke to filmmaker Gwendolen Cates: ‘It’s getting exciting … we are looking forward to delivering our message to the United Nations and to see who’s going to accept it … every village, every town we’ve been to have been pretty responsive ... they’ve welcomed us and fed us.’⁵ The campaign manager, Lena Duby of the Onondaga Nation, remarked that she had discovered many people had not known who the Onondaga were, but that the campaign had been successful in creating a new sense of unity between Native and non-Native peoples: ‘It’s new territory for them … [but] we are all people … we make jokes, we make friends … we’re all just people and it doesn’t matter how brown we are.’⁶ For organizer Jack Manno, there was powerful – and important – emotional work taking place in bringing the treaty to life and giving it new meaning by paddling down a river to mobilize, through bodily performance, reconciliatory feelings of harmony, accord and goodwill: ‘There’s this incredible generosity that we’ve somehow tapped into … there’s something [here] that allows people to really open up their generous hearts and spirits … it’s been really moving, you know.’⁷

This chapter explores the work of reconciliation, cultural reclamation and sovereignty assertion of the 2013 Two Row Wampum Campaign, organized by the Onondaga Nation and Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation (NOON) in the United States. This event commemorated the 400th anniversary of the ‘Two Row Wampum Treaty’, said to have been struck between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch in 1613. I consider this commemorative event and its genealogy as an Indigenous diplomatic tradition based on Native principles, rather than an originary settler compact, accord or paradigm. With a focus on the political, emotional and embodied, or affective, aspects of the performance, and the tensions between oral and performed versus text-based histories, I argue that the Two Row performance was a potent vehicle for refounding, stabilizing and revisioning political relations between Native peoples, settlers and the state within a postcolonial settler paradigm. Yet I also acknowledge the fraught colonial histories and politics around the emergence of the Two Row tradition and examine its place within the broader ‘Covenant Chain’ tradition of Native accord with the Dutch and English. This history reveals the ambivalent trajectories of the wampum and Covenant Chain as symbols of friendship that have been (and continue to be) variously reinvented for both emancipatory and repressive ends.

Wampum were in use among the Five Nations Iroquois and other Native groups at the time of contact with Europeans and comprised small, cylindrical-shaped quahog clam shell beads (purple wampum) and whelk shell beads (white wampum) strung together.⁸ The purple and white shells of the wampum (also called guswenta/kaswentha) travelling in two rows is commonly understood as a metaphor of the Native birch canoe and European ship journeying together down a river, and the parallel political processes of two nations. Implicit in this symbolism is the idea of each party’s mutual acknowledgement of and respect for the other’s sovereignty. Wampum were held in great esteem by the Iroquois and other Native peoples of the Atlantic coast and used for social and ceremonial exchange.⁹ The connections between wampum and diplomatic rituals of consensus and peace-making are well established in Iroquoian tradition. Wampum have a unique place in the very origins of the creation of the League of the Five Nations, or Haudenosaunee confederacy, also known as the League of the Longhouse. Hiawatha and the prophet Deganawida, or ‘Great Peacemaker’, are said to have used wampum to bring peace to a divided Native society in the creation of the League of the Longhouse. The two are reputed to have ‘established ongoing and annual rituals that incorporated wampum and were designed to provide a means of the airing of future grievances’, as Otto relates.¹⁰ Wampum are significant, then, as both emblematic of the Haudenosaunee ‘Great Peace’ and its symbolic role in effecting and mediating dialogic exchange.

The Dutch document verifying the Two Row or ‘Tawagonshi Treaty’ records the exchange of wampum for a silver chain, although there is some dispute over the document’s historical reliability. As related by historian Paul Otto: ‘ende als een bewijs van Eere ende Toegeneeghenheydt verruylen wy eene silver ketting voor een vaedem Seewant’ (‘and as evidence of the honour and goodwill we exchange a silver chain for a fathom of beadwork [wampum]’).¹¹ The Two Row campaigners asserted that the Two Row Wampum Treaty with the Dutch became the ‘underlying basis’ for all future Haudenosaunee relationships with Europeans and formed a ‘foundational philosophical principle’ of ‘reciprocal relations of peace, friendship and respect between different entities’, especially nation-to-nation relationships.¹² The philosophical vision of the agreement is therefore multivalent in its possibilities, by turns commemorative, conciliatory, engendering of mutual respect, but also decolonizing. As the campaign organizers noted, it ‘serves as a framework for decolonization right across Turtle Island [North America], since holding true to the Two Row means supporting the right of Onkwehonweh [Native] people to maintain themselves on their own land bases according to their own systems of self governance and self organization’.¹³ Onondaga Nation Faithkeeper Oren Lyons described the ‘famous Guswenta’¹⁴ or Two Row Wampum Treaty’s diplomatic significance: ‘This Treaty is important because it established for all time the process by which we would associate with our White brethren.’ The agreement, he explained, highlights that

we will call one another brothers. This row of purple wampum on the right represents the ongwahoway or Indian people; it is their canoe. In the canoe along with the people is our government, our religion or way of life. The row of purple on the left is our White brethren, their ship, their government, and their religions for they have many. The field of white represents peace and the river of life. We will go down this river in peace and friendship as long as the grass is green, the water flows, and the sun rises in the east.¹⁵

With the slogan ‘Honoring Native Treaties and Protecting the Earth’ (Figure 7), the campaign was developed as a partnership between the Onondaga Nation and Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation (NOON), and sought to ‘achieve justice by polishing the chain of friendship established in the first treaty between the Haudenosaunee and European (Dutch) settlers’.¹⁶ Environmental clean-up and preservation were also ‘core components’ of the initiative, as the treaty’s ethical foundations were understood to recognize the mutual dependence of the social and the ecological. Significantly, the Two Row campaign was spurred by the dismissal of the Onondaga’s land rights case, which was filed in 2005. The Onondaga claim that New York had illegally obtained around 4,000 square miles of land in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including most of Syracuse.¹⁷ This dishonoured the Treaty of Canandaigua, which was signed at Canandaigua, New York on 11 November 1794, after the American Revolutionary War between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and President George Washington on behalf of the United States of America.¹⁸

Figure 7 The Two Row Wampum Campaign motif: ‘1613–2013 Honoring Native Treaties and Protecting the Earth’. Courtesy of Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation

The Two Row Wampum Treaty ‘provides an inspirational vision for peaceful co-existence of different nations living on and caring for the same land’.¹⁹ The Two Row Treaty wampum re-enactment was thus an ‘innovative project to take the vision of the Two Row directly to the people of New York State.’²⁰ The self-conscious settlers and allies of NOON called on the government to honour a compact: ‘We aim to use the 400th anniversary to build public support for US governments and peoples to begin to keep up our side of the agreement.’²¹ Later, campaigners travelled to the Netherlands, where a ceremony in honour of the Two Row Wampum’s 400-year anniversary and the five-year anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was held at The Netherlands Centre for Indigenous Peoples in The Hague, Netherlands.²²

Many groups – including the New York History Blog, which billed the event as ‘Paddling through History’ – followed the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign with great interest. Yet heated public debate driven by the treaty’s controversial relationship to recorded history quickly ensued. As the New York History Blog explained, the original wampum belt was lost and the Dutch document that attested to its existence had been claimed to be a forgery.²³ Nearly two decades earlier, in 1987, historians Charles Gehring and William Starna had argued that the 1613 Tawagonshi Treaty document ‘discovered’ by Lawrence Van Loon, a physician, was a fake.²⁴ More recently, Dutch scholars confirmed that ‘the anachronisms and anglicisms in the Tawagonshi Treaty demonstrate without doubt that the text was forged in the twentieth century’.²⁵ Gehring and Starna contacted the Two Row Wampum committee to remind them of this point. The Syracuse Post-Standard reported Starna’s objections: ‘It’s our responsibility to point out to people who apparently don’t know it’s a fake that it is. If the paper treaty is fake … so is the idea of any formal agreement made in 1613.’²⁶ What followed became an intense and emotionally charged debate about the past and matters of history, and indeed the remaking of history, a debate that drew in not only Haudenosaunee and other allied Native groups and their supporters, but also the Dutch.

Despite this, the Haudenosaunee have observed this treaty for centuries, and they argue it has been ‘firmly established for hundreds of years in the oral tradition of the Iroquois’.²⁷ As campaign organizer Manno argued, whether or not the document was a fake or a badly transcribed copy of an earlier document, ‘it doesn’t say anything about the validity or meaning of the agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch sometime in the early 1600s that is part of the Haudenosaunee memory and knowledge recorded in their wampum belts’.²⁸ Indeed, Otto suggests that the forged document does not necessarily invalidate Iroquoian insistence on an agreement with the Dutch in this period. Otto points out that while the Two Row belt as described in the Tawagonshi document would not have existed in 1613, it is possible that an earlier form of it did exist and was later memorialized by the Two Row belt.²⁹

This tension between oral and written history lay at the heart of arguments over the treaty’s authenticity and was the reason why Manno raised objections to the Syracuse Post-Standard’s articles contesting the validity of the 1613 treaty. Calling these articles ‘non-stories’, Manno contested the paper’s exclusive attention to the Van Loon document, attributing this focus to a ‘long history of dismissing Haudenosaunee traditional oral history and belittling those who retell that history as part of their traditional responsibilities’.³⁰ He continued:

For colonial powers eager to take land, and for those who are dismissive of it now, it was best that the early agreements be forgotten. … What is celebrated is a sacred story and a rich message more than a particular moment in history, the moment when the meaning and the stories of two very different cultures came t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Performing (Re)conciliation in Settler Societies
• 1 ‘Polishing the chain of friendship’: Two Row Wampum Renewal Celebrations and Matters of History
• 2 ‘This is our hearts!’ Unruly Re-enactments and Unreconciled Pasts in Lakota Country
• 3 ‘Walking Together’ for Reconciliation: From the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk to the Myall Creek Massacre Commemorations
• 4 ‘Our history is not the last word’: Sorry Day at Risdon Cove and ‘Black Line’ Survival Ceremony, Tasmania
• 5 ‘We did not sign a treaty … we did not surrender!’ Contesting the Consensus Politics of the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index