The Clay We Are Made Of

Susan M. Hill

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780887554582
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

If one seeks to understand Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) history, one must consider the history of Haudenosaunee land. For countless generations prior to European contact, land and territory informed Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy, and was a primary determinant of Haudenosaunee identity.

In The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan M. Hill presents a revolutionary retelling of the history of the Grand River Haudenosaunee from their Creation Story through European contact to contemporary land claims negotiations. She incorporates Indigenous theory, fourth world post-colonialism, and Amerindian autohistory, along with Haudenosaunee languages, oral records, and wampum strings to provide the most comprehensive account of the Haudenosaunee's relationship to their land. Hill outlines the basic principles and historical knowledge contained within four key epics passed down through Haudenosaunee cultural history. She highlights the political role of women in land negotiations and dispels their misrepresentation in the scholarly canon. She guides the reader through treaty relationships with Dutch, French, and British settler nations, including the Kaswentha/Two-Row Wampum (the precursor to all future Haudenosaunee-European treaties), the Covenant Chain, the Nanfan Treaty, and the Haldimand Proclamation, and concludes with a discussion of the current problematic relationships between the Grand River Haudenosaunee, the Crown, and the Canadian government.

PART I

HAUDENOSAUNEE CULTURAL HISTORY AND RELATIONSHIP TO LAND

CHAPTER 1

KARIHWA’ONWE—THE ORIGINAL MATTERS

My people, the Haudenosaunee, have always shared stories about our land. We told these stories long before a 55,000-acre plot of land along the Grand River in present-day southern Ontario became known as Six Nations. We told them before the Haudenosaunee people moved their homes to that land, part of our traditional hunting territory, in the upheavals following the American Revolution. And we told them even earlier, before written history recorded the arrival of Europeans to Turtle Island.

Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy is rooted in these stories. Of these, there are four major elements, or epics, that express our cultural history: the Creation Story, the Kayeri Niyorihwa:ke (Four Ceremonies), the Kayaneren’kowa (Great Law of Peace), and the Karihwiyo (Good Message of Handsome Lake).1 All four of these epics were recorded through traditional means, including oral texts (stories), speeches, songs, wampum belts, and other visual images. They are represented throughout Haudenosaunee culture in a multitude of ways, including the greetings of the Ohenton Karihwatehkwen (“the words before all else”/Thanksgiving Address). Through the Thanksgiving Address the speaker reminds all present that the earth is our mother and that she supports all life as we know it. This echoes the Haudenosaunee Creation Story, which teaches that the first person born on this earth was buried under the ground, and from her body the plants that sustain life grew and continue to grow to this day. The Four Ceremonies recall the gifts of creation and remind us of our dependence upon the earth. Through the establishment of the Great Law, the Peacemaker taught the Haudenosaunee how to live in balance with each other as human beings of a collective territory. And the Karihwiyo reminds us of our responsibilities to all of creation and the manner in which we are to care for the earth so she can continue to provide for us, as set out within creation.

Onkwehonweneha2 were the original languages of these texts, and the stories remain intact within those languages to the present time. Since the early days of European contact, however, these texts have been translated into English and French, often for the purposes of ethnographic study by non-Haudenosaunee individuals, including those working within missionary efforts. There are, of course, dangers in segmenting and compartmentalizing aspects of Haudenosaunee knowledge. The Haudenosaunee knowledge base exists as a complete entity, and the various parts of it are interconnected and dependent upon each other in order to understand the whole. When one removes a segment of it, that portion ceases to be what it is within the context of the whole. It is still useful for studies such as these, but the ensuing discussions of those pieces are limited representations of the original. Due to the limitations of translating between languages that are based within very different world views, as well as the frequent biases of the European-speaking interpreters, the texts produced through these translations have many shortcomings. Even later translations—often conducted in close collaboration with or solely by Haudenosaunee people—cannot make up for the concepts that exist in one culture but not in the other. Yet, the product of these translations becomes a representation of the original and can be very useful when its limitations are considered. For the purposes of this discussion, the sources cited are representations of the original texts that have been written in the English language; in certain cases there is a directly corresponding Onkwehonweneha text accompanying the English.

The Creation Story

As with most cultures in the world, the Haudenosaunee Creation Story serves as the basis for our understanding of the world and our place within it. The Creation Story holds many of our beliefs regarding the relationship intended to exist between humans and the rest of the natural world. This story has been recorded in a multitude of ways within cultural practices. Representations of it exist not only in the retelling of the story but also in elements such as beadwork designs3 and social dances and songs. Through these various elements of cultural expression the Creation Story remains an active part of everyday life. A striking difference between the Creation Story and the other three epics is the lack of formal procedures to maintain the story as a single entity. Instead, the story of how this world came to be has been recorded and maintained in many forms. Considering the overarching themes of creation and the belief that creation is a constantly occurring and recurring process rather than something that happened once in the long-ago past, it is understandable that the story of creation cannot be expressed in a single form.

Still, Europeans (and their descendants) have sought to record the “definitive version” for centuries. Missionaries were the first to undertake this task,4 although their interests were limited and, therefore, did not produce an in-depth representation of the story. Brief mention of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story, as well as those of other Native peoples, can be found within the Jesuit Relations, a compilation of North American Jesuit records from the seventeenth century, and in other early missionary accounts. Perhaps the missionaries’ interests in studying Native views of creation focussed upon their ability to develop effective means through which to convert the Natives and “save their souls.” Their religious fervour clouded their ability to recognize other views of creation on the same footing as their own idea of creation—the one for which they were sacrificing themselves in order to convert the “New World pagans.” Their religious elitism guided their depictions of Indigenous cultures and practices, often leading them to compare what they saw and heard to “devil worship.”5 In these accounts, issues also arise around translation as well as the Christianization of recorded stories.

The first academic undertaking to study Haudenosaunee views of creation came through the anthropological studies of Lewis Henry Morgan, who generalized his work with the Tonawanda Seneca to be representative of the entire Confederacy.6 While Morgan’s League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee (1851) was a major undertaking in Haudenosaunee cultural study, it only briefly addresses the Creation Story. His only real reference to the story is as follows: “The Iroquois, also, believed that the Great Spirit was born; and tradition has handed down the narrative, with embellishments of fancy which Hesiod himself would not have disdained.”7 In contrast, he described aspects of Greek origin stories in the three pages that preceded this lone statement. Other anthropologists who followed in Morgan’s footsteps in the late nineteenth century, including Horatio Hale and Alexander Goldenweiser, also made only limited mention of the Creation Story. Instead, they tended to focus upon the governance structures of the Great Law and ceremonial rites practised in different communities.

In contrast to his ethnographic peers, J.N.B. Hewitt began collecting versions of the Creation Story in 1889 as he travelled to several Haudenosaunee communities while working as an ethnographer with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), a division of the Smithsonian Institution. Hewitt is often represented as a Tuscarora who happened to be an anthropologist.8 I would argue, however, that through his writings it is clear that he was an anthropologist who happened to be of Haudenosaunee descent. His personal identification as an ethnographer first and foremost is telling in the manner in which he depicted the culture of the Haudenosaunee. For example, in the introduction to his 1903 publication, “Iroquois Cosmology, Part 1,” he discusses the differences between Iroquoian and English languages: “It is no ready task to embody in the language of enlightenment the thought of barbarism. The viewpoint of the one plane of thought differs much from that of the other.”9 While he did have a certain respect for the Haudenosaunee, he clearly did not see them as equals of American society—where he placed himself. Despite his own identification as an American (“civilized”), his Tuscarora descent is often heralded as a mark of “insider authenticity,”10 glossing over the fact that his representations of culture are external to Haudenosaunee society and contain many of the same pitfalls found in the work of non-Native anthropologists.

Hewitt collected five versions of the Creation Story over an eleven-year period (1889 to 1900) and proceeded to publish four of them—the first three in 1903 and the last one in 192811—in annual reports of the BAE. All of the versions begin with an English narrative translation and conclude with a word-by-word translation from the Haudenosaunee languages into English. The first three vary in length but all are relatively short compared to the final publication of an Onondaga language version12 collected from John Arthur Gibson (who held the title of Skanyatariyo, or Handsome Lake), the Seneca Royaner (chief) from Grand River.13

Following Hewitt’s publications of the Creation Story, many others have documented portions of the story in different forms. Some of these versions represent the ethnographic research of anthropologists.14 Others are the products of people from Haudenosaunee communities, whose primary focus was the perpetuation of this epic within the Confederacy.15 Others yet have taken Hewitt’s writings and reworked them using various techniques. For example, Seneca historian John Mohawk focuses much of his dissertation on reframing and re-presenting many of the versions of the Creation Story that Hewitt had recorded and published. Mohawk recognized the value of Hewitt’s work both for Haudenosaunee people—“Hewitt’s work provides some record of how things got to be the way they are, and why”16—and for the academy. Furthermore, Mohawk points out not only the complexities of Hewitt’s “versions” of the Creation Story but also the shortcomings of all of the written forms of Haudenosaunee cultural history: “The essays contained here are not an attempt to penetrate or comment on the linguistics of the piece, nor is there an attempt to provide the definitive version of this story. This is one version of many. The actual story, a classic myth with a powerful ritual tradition, contains nuances buried within the languages which defy unambiguous translation, a characteristic which I tried to leave intact.”17 In this, Mohawk affirms the common Haudenosaunee understanding of the limitations of translating Onkwehonweneha narratives into English. Oneida educator Carol Cornelius also uses Hewitt’s documentation of the Creation Story for her educational text Iroquois Corn in a Culture-Based Curriculum. She says this about the varying “versions” of the story:

There are many versions of the Creation story which differ because in the oral tradition some speakers provide a long, detailed narrative of the Sky World, while others place emphasis on the section of the narrative about twin forces here on earth. Although the emphasis or details change depending on the speaker, the basic story remains the same. The English version [Hewitt’s] uses terminology that is cumbersome in many respects. It uses archaic language such as “verily,” “ye,” “thee,” and “thou,” which one must suspect was used in the early 1900s to enable Hewitt to publish this manuscript for the general public.18

As Mohawk and Cornelius point out, there are many complications with Hewitt’s work—such as outdated English terminology, less-than-accurate and culturally incorrect translations, and the limitations of writing in general—but it does serve as an important resource, especially in terms of the Onkwehonweneha renderings included in the accounts. Many Haudenosaunee people continue to study this source for key information regarding older forms of Haudenosaunee languages that are no longer in common use. Furthermore, its availability to the public allows for its use in this study without compromising more private Haudenosaunee texts.19 Hewitt’s Creation Story texts have proven very useful in finding evidence of Haudenosaunee land philosophy. The discussion of the story that follows is primarily informed by Hewitt’s published versions (as noted), with the overall framework and occasional direct references to my own (English) understanding of...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• Chapter 1: Karihwa’onwe—The Original Matters
• Chapter 2: Kontinonhsyonni—The Women Who Make the House
• PART II
• Chapter 3: Teyohahá:ke—Two Roads
• Chapter 4: Shotinonhsyonnih—They Built the Longhouse Again
• Chapter 5: Skanata Yoyonnih—One Village Has Been Made
• Chapter 6: Te Yonkhi’nikònhare Tsi Niyonkwarihotenhs—They Are Interfering in Our Matters
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography