seven-generation thinking

Healing Our Future: Indigenous Wealth Building for Seven Generations

Producer
Native Governance Center
Year

What does an Indigenous approach to wealth look like? How can Indigenous wealth concepts help us heal our future? What are examples of wealth building happening in Indigenous communities?

Native Governance Center's Indigenous Peoples' Day 2021 event, "Healing our future: Indigenous wealth building for seven generations," provides viewers with an overview of Indigenous wealth concepts and a deep dive into how Indigenous people are building wealth in their communities. It also explores how Indigenous ideas about wealth can help all of us heal for the next seven generations. The event features stories from three Indigenous wealth building leaders: Dallas Nelson, Tasha Peltier, and Dani Pieratos.

Citation

Native Governance Center. Healing Our Future: Indigenous Wealth Building for Seven Generations. Oct. 12, 2021. Youtube video. Accessed Apr. 28, 2023. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMswM6rzo84

Transcripts for all videos are available by request. Please email us: nni@arizona.edu.

Oren Lyons: Looking Toward the Seventh Generation

Producer
University of Arizona
Year

Onondaga Chief and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons discusses the increasingly urgent issues of global warming and climate change and points to Indigenous peoples, their core values, and their reciprocal relationships to the natural world as sources of instruction for human beings to heed in order to combat those issues.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Lyons, Oren. "Looking Toward the Seventh Generation." American Indian Studies Program, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 17, 2008. Presentation.

“A lot of thank you’s today and I especially want to thank my elders here who gave a blessing and reminded me as well as everybody else that we are connected to the earth very closely and we should be thankful for everything that we do. And that was our instructions: give thanks, be grateful. I want to thank the American Studies in…Indian Studies in Arizona for bringing me here, and Moran for taking the time, and Carol for trucking me about, and to David for taking care of me. And everybody’s been so great to me so I really appreciate it here. Obviously going to have to come back and spend more time. Right now, I’m just on the move, but the reason why is important. It’s my mission to bring news to you, maybe not good news, but news that you should know about and things that are going on in the world.

I come from Onondaga, upstate New York. I come from the Six Nations. English call us 'Six Nations,' French call us 'Iroquois,' and we ourselves are the 'Haudenosaunee.' Six Nations: the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Senecas and the Tuscarora. We’re an old alliance, we’re a confederation based on peace and we were gathered together some thousand years ago to cease fighting amongst ourselves and to become productive in creating and working with one another bringing peace. There was a spiritual being, messenger we called The Peacemaker. He has a name and the only time we ever use that name is when we raise leaders and we raise the [Native language], what you call 'chiefs,' then you’ll hear his name, but otherwise than that we call him The Peacemaker. And he came to five warring nations at that time and I won’t go through the epic story of his life and how he arrived at the Mohawks and how he went from one Nation to the other changing these fighting men to peace. So finally gathered on the shores of Onondaga Lake, where 50 men who formerly were enemies of one another and he laid down for us the whole constitution based on peace, the principle of peace and health, of equity, justice for the people and of unity, the power of the good minds and the power of the collective working together --one mind, one body, one heart, one spirit. And we’ve prospered under that instruction over these many years.

And today I represent in the council at Onondaga the Turtle Clan. I myself am a Wolf. I’ve been borrowed from the Wolfs to the Turtle -- temporarily, they said -- that was 41 years ago. You know how Indians are. So I’ve been there for a long time and the Onondaga Nation is the central fire of the Confederacy and we still maintain our structure of raising leaders and removing leaders. We’re probably the last of the traditional governments still in charge of land. And on our nation at Onondaga, we have no Bureau of Indian Affairs; we’re independent. I just traveled from Sweden to here. I traveled on a passport issued at Onondaga and we’ve been using that passport for now since 1977. It’s an instruction in maintaining your identity, who you are, the importance of being who you are and knowing who you are, instructing your children as to who you are. And most of that comes from songs like Mr. Lopez was singing -- that’s our instruction -- to the moon. We call that our grandmother. We have close relations with the earth. The earth’s our mother. You can’t get any closer than that. And from that point on, we’ve always been instructed by the Peacemaker on many things. When he gathered the people at Onondaga on the Onondaga Lake so many years ago and he instructed us how we would sit and what our clans would be and the authorities and the duties of the women and the men and the people and how this would continue and we’ve maintained that. Now in today’s times, we’re kind of alone in this traditional government, but traditions are everywhere. Every nation has kept their traditions, even though the BIA may be there and even though there may be government authorities, the traditions are still there, songs are still there, language is still there. And the information that’s in the language is what people are seeking today, some instruction.

And so I’ve been a runner for the Onondaga Nation and then the confederacy itself and at times for Indigenous people around the world. I was one of those people who were educated and they said, ‘Well, you can talk like they do. You get out there and you tell them.’ And so I get my instructions from the councils. I don’t have any great wealth of wisdom or so forth. I just understand what I’ve been instructed with and pass that on. Our leaders, our people, don’t like to get up in front of people and speak like that unless it’s our own people. Then they can really speak. So what is the nature of my discussion today, tonight? I had the good fortune to speak to your students here and some of your faculty this morning and it kind of outlined for me what I thought I should be talking about. First of all the introduction of ourselves: the Six Nations has about 18 communities, territories, both about half in Canada and half in the United States. We’re in three states. We’re in Wisconsin, New York and Oklahoma and two provinces in Canada, Quebec and Ontario. And then we have our people all over. Met an Onondaga girl tonight at dinner. She’s over here and her family was here and it was really nice to meet one of my young people here. So we travel far and wide and the message is always the same, it’s always about peace. But today some of the things that were told to us might be helpful here.

When The Peacemaker finally had laid out the whole system for us, he said, ‘Now I’m going to plant this great tree of peace, this great white pine.’ He said, ‘It’ll be the symbol for your Nation.’ He said, ‘It will have four white roots of truth for reaching the four cardinal directions of the earth.’ And he says, ‘Those people who have no place to go can follow the root back to its source and come under the protection of the great tree of peace.’ He said, among a lot of instructions to us as leaders, ‘Prepare yourself for the work that’s in front of you.’ He gave us a lot of instructions. Some of them I’ll tell you about. He said, ‘You as leaders will now have to have skin seven spans thick, seven spans like the bark of a tree,’ he said, ‘to withstand the abuse you’re going to take as leaders. And it won’t be from your enemies, it’s going to be from your family and your friends.’ He said, ‘And don’t wait for any thanks because that’ll be slow in coming.’ He said, ‘Move on.’ He said, ‘When people are angry and they speak in a loud voice, you have to listen to what they’re saying because they’re saying something.’ He said, ‘Try to hear the message through the anger.’ And he said, ‘You cannot respond in kind. Listen. Hear what they’re saying.’ And he said, ‘When you sit and you council for the welfare of the people, think not of yourself nor of your family nor even your generation.’ He said, ‘Make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming. Those faces looking up from the earth,’ he said, ‘layer upon layer waiting their time.’ He said, ‘Defend them, protect them, they’re helpless, they’re in your hands. That’s your duty, your responsibility. You do that, you yourself will have peace.’

So he told us to look ahead. It was an instruction of responsibility of what we are supposed to do. So because I stand here as a representative of our Nation, still carrying the titles, seven generations ago someone was looking out for me or else I wouldn’t be here. So each one of us are any seventh generation and ahead of us are our responsibilities. And we have to take that seriously if they are to have a good life like ours. Our people have gone through a lot of pain and a lot of misery. We’ve suffered removals, genocide, yet we’re still here today. I heard the song and I knew we were still here and everywhere you go you’ll hear those songs. So today as a human being, as a species, I don’t think we have time for being Red or being Black or being White or being Yellow or Brown. I don’t think we have time for that anymore. We have to work together. We have to put aside all of that racism that’s been so destructive, continues. We just don’t have time for that. There’s changes coming and they’re close at hand and very soon we’re going to have to gather ourselves together around the world, and mobilize in our own defense, for our own survival, as a human species. We won’t have time for wars. We’ll need all the money that’s being spent on arms for defense of ourselves and protection of all of nature.

One time, long ago, sitting in the long house when we were having one of our ceremonies, Thanksgiving, we had a visitor who came from the north. He was a Mohawk and they asked him to sing and he was singing the [Native language], the Great Feather Dance. I couldn’t understand Mohawk, but I understood some of the words and then he spoke about my family, [Native word], the Wolf, and I said, ‘What is he saying?’ Because as they sang this Great Feather Dance, there’s a preamble where the beat is slow and they sang and they talk about a lot of things before the dance starts. This was all slow. In our Longhouse, the men are on one side of the house and the women on the other side of the house. So I went down to my grandmother who was sitting there and I said, ‘Gram, what is that man saying?’ And she says, ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s an old song.’ She said, ‘I haven’t heard that in a long time.’ I said, ‘He’s talking about the wolf.’ She said, ‘Yes, he is.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s talking about the road to the Creator and how beautiful it is and how we should all be walking in that direction and see the strawberries on the side of the road, the path that we’re taking.” The ‘Good Red Road’ they call it, the ‘Good Road.’ And she said, ‘What he’s saying is that on the side in a path like ours, walking beside us is a wolf, both going in the same direction.’ And I said, ‘What does that mean?’ She said, ‘Don’t know. It’s always been a mystery.’

I ponder that a lot of times and I think that he is the representative for the animal world, the spiritual way. And he’s my family, so I’m wondering what does that mean? And I think that he’s like a, well, our uncle maybe. And that whatever happens to the Wolf is going to happen to us. I think that’s what he is. He represents the earth itself and all the life on it. So when you look about and you see what’s going on today and how they’re treating the Wolf, it makes you think that we have to do better, we have to understand. Our nations, they do know about relationship and that’s what it is, it’s a relationship. Our Lakota friends and relatives they say, at the end of their prayer, ‘All our relations…all of our relations,’ and what they mean is literally all life. And when The Peacemaker was instructing the leaders so long ago, he said, ‘Now into your hands I am placing the responsibility for all life in this world.’ And he meant all the trees and all the fish and all the animals and all the medicine and all the water and everything there is, all life, and that’s a responsibility that has kept us here all these years. That’s how we’ve survived. He said, ‘Give thanks, be thankful for what you have.’ And so I see that our nations, the Indian nations, have created great ceremonies of thanksgiving, some that last for days, of thanksgiving and connection with your relatives. And I think that’s what people have to do now in the world. They have to recognize that they are not independent, that they’re just a part of life and you can’t remove all the animals or cut all the trees or catch all the fish without consequence. And so here we are, today’s times facing the consequence of our lost relationship and our lost responsibility.

When we raise leaders in the Longhouse, the old style, what they call the great condolence, it’s a long day. We go through all the laws, all the instructions, instructions to the leaders, instructions to the clan mothers, to the faith keepers, to the chiefs, and then instructions to the people. And it’s the longest instruction when it comes to the people. The people receive the most instruction because they have the most work to do. Leaders are there to help guide you, to be responsible, to initiate positions but the people are the ones that do the work, they’re the ones that have to be the nation. In our language, we don’t have a word for 'warrior.' That’s an English word and it comes from Europe and they were fighting over there. I’ve been traveling over there and I looked at their history, centuries and centuries of fighting. There’s great battlements over there, there’s castles, there’s amazing instruments of war. In Oslo, Norway, there’s a battlement and it starts way back somewhere around the 10th century and each year they made it bigger and bigger and soon it was big enough to hold horses and soon it was big enough to hold battalions of men and it just got bigger and bigger. And I looked on the walls and I saw the armaments and the shields, the axes, the battle axes and they were chipped and broken, heavy swords were nicked and the shields were sliced. And I said, ‘These people fight. These people fight hard.’ I said, ‘It must be hard to be that kind of a life where all you do is fight from one generation to the next.’ We call our men '[Native language].' '[Native language]' means ‘those men without titles who carry the bones of their ancestors on their backs.’ That’s what we call our men, not warrior, '[Native language],' responsible beings, strong men, strong. And they were [strong] or else we wouldn’t be here. And the women right there with them, strong women. Strong families, good instruction, close relations, carried us for a long time until we run across technology of war, weapons and guns, powder.

I won’t go through all that, but all that’s in our history, all that’s in the past and here it is today. And interesting that I’m standing here representative of the Haudenosaunee talking to you about peace and how do you get peace and how do you find peace. You find it by being thankful for what you have and you find it for being grateful for what you have and being in defense of what you have and being closely related to the life that sustains us. We’ve become so independent from the earth itself that we think we are independent and that’s brought us to this point here where we are. Now we’re about to see what the real authority is and how inconsequential we are. We have to work together now. We have to put aside all of this and we have to raise leaders about peace. We have to raise leaders who are going to look out for the people, who are going to look out for the earth and for the lands and the waters. The cod fishing up here off the east banks of the United States is broken; cod is broken. Cod that were once five feet long, hundreds of pounds, down to one and two pounds, fishing them right off the bottom. Can’t fish the cod anymore. Herring, we’re losing the herring. We’re polluting the oceans themselves. We’re polluting the earth itself. We’re leaving a legacy for our children which is really destructive. The high incidents of asthma in children in the east is amazing now, all the kids got asthma and that comes from bad air, that comes from pollution.

And so the instructions that our people had a long time ago still reverberate, long-term thinking, decision making, long-term thinking and you come across the discussion today about bottom lines. What is a bottom line? That’s an economic term, it means the bottom line. Is it a profit or is it a loss? It’s an economic term, that’s what bottom line means. Somebody asked me one time, they said, ‘Well, what’s your bottom line? Everybody’s got a bottom line.’ It caught me a little off guard. I said, ‘Gee, I never thought about that. What is our bottom line?’ And I thought about it awhile. I said, ‘You know, we don’t have a bottom line.’ He says, ‘Everybody’s got a bottom line.’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ I said, ‘We don’t have a bottom line.’ I said, ‘We live in a cycle, a circle.’ I said, ‘We just go around and around. There’s no bottom line.’ He didn’t have an answer to that, but that in fact is the way it is. Our ceremonies go around the lunar clock, we reach the end it starts over again.

I was talking to the Mayans, our brothers down there in Central America, and I was saying to them, ‘Well, you guys have a calendar that’s coming to an end in 2012.’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘that’s true.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen when the calendar comes to an end?’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘these are 5,000-year calendars so we’ll just start another one.’ Yeah, they made me feel that way too, a little relief there. They did say, though, they said, ‘However,’ they said, ‘there will be a period of enlightenment.’ ‘Oh, what is that, enlightenment?’ ‘Well, you see something.’ I’m thinking, ‘A period of enlightenment, what could that be?’

Well, I thought of this man that was working very hard, decided he was going to take a day off and he was out there on Long Island. Good fishing out there off the Montauk Point in Long Island, big fish out there, come right around the corner. So he said, ‘Well, I’m going to go fishing today, the heck with everything.’ So he went, nice boat, way out there. Hot day. He said, ‘The water looks good. I think I’ll jump in the water, take a little swim.’ So he did. He’s swimming around there, a little ways away from the boat and then he sees this big fin coming towards him, big fin. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. He’s looking at the boat, looking at the fin figuring, ‘how much time have I got?’ Well, that’s a moment of enlightenment. So I hope it’s not going to be that way for us.

The other thing The Peacemaker said was, he said, ‘Never take hope from the people.’ It’s a good instruction. Never take hope from the people. He said, ‘Find a way, find a way.’ So this is hard today, find a way. I’ve been on this road now about global warming for some time and human rights. I’ve been working for our human rights and maybe that’s another section of discussion we should have. In September 2007, September 12th of 2007, Indigenous peoples of the world weren’t peoples. We were populations. In the vernacular of human rights and political discussions in the United Nations, we were always referred to as populations because populations don’t have human rights. Peoples have human rights and for 30 years we’ve been battling in this United Nations for that to be recognized that we are people. And I wondered and I wondered, ‘Why is it or how could it be that there is a declaration, the universal declaration on human rights, so should we not be included and why aren’t we people and why aren’t we included?' Because all those 30 years we’ve been at the U.N., we’ve been developing our own declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. They would not accept the term 'peoples.' They never used that term, we did. They didn’t. And 'peoples' with an 's'. 'People' is a generic term, it means everybody. But when you say 'peoples' with an 's', ah, now you’re talking about Tohono O’odham, you’re talking about Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Apaches, Senecas. You know there’s 561 Indian nations in this country today. That’s a lot of peoples and there were many, many more than that that are gone forever. Still there’s quite a few of us. Here we are. So 'peoples' with an 's', we were fighting to be recognized. Well, on September 13th, the next day, the United Nations adopted the Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with an 's'. We made a huge step on the political scene of this world. Of course we always knew we were peoples but that’s a political term and highly charged. We learned that. When you start fussing around there with language, we learned about terminology, what tribes mean, what bands of Indians mean. That’s why we say we are nations. We are nations! The buffalos are nations. They are nations. The wolves are nations. That’s who we are. Yes! But they didn’t think so and we were subjugated.

And how is that, how can that be, how can you take a whole Indigenous people of the world and subjugate them to something less than human? Well, that was done in 1493 by the papal bulls of the Roman Catholic Church and they said in this directive, this bull, they said, this was the pope, ‘If there are no Christian nations in this new lands that you’ve discovered, then I declare those lands to be terra nullius, empty, empty lands,’ old Roman law, terra nullius, ‘Furthermore, if there are people there and they are not Christians, they do not have right of title to land. They have only the right of occupancy.’ And there, one year after the discovery of a whole hemisphere by fiat, it was taken by a declaration from a pope in Portugal. How about that? And we’ve been struggling ever since. We’ve been struggling to come out from underneath that. King of England said, ‘Well, I’m as good as a pope. I like that idea. Works for me.’ So he issued the same directive, 1496 to the Cabots, colonizing the new land. ‘By my authority the land is yours.’ Over here of course, here we were, happily planting. We were planting corn and they were planting flags. Big difference. It was pointed out today, this morning in our session, someone had noticed that just a few months ago that the Russians had taken a submarine up to the North Pole and planted a flag at the North Pole. Anybody remember that? Now why do you think they did that? It’s the Doctrine of Discovery. They took a lot of trouble to get a submarine and go to the bottom, find the North Pole and put the Russian flag there. They were claiming land. And if you remember, when the United States landed on the moon, what was the first thing they did? I think I saw a flag standing there wasn’t it? First thing. Doctrine of Discovery: it’s operational today. So you say, ‘How can that be?’

Well, it became installed in U.S. federal law in 1823 in Johnson vs. McIntosh and the issue was Indian land and Judge [John] Marshall, a very famous judge said, and it was not Indians fighting over lands, it was two white men fighting over Indian land, saying, ‘Boys, boys, boys. You’ve got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, that land doesn’t belong to the Indians,’ and recited the Doctrine of Discovery. And he went back and he quoted the King of England and the Cabots and installed that into U.S. federal law. 1955; Tee-hit-ton Indians made a land claim and they were defeated by the Doctrine of Discovery [in the] Supreme Court of the United States. Gitxsan Indians made a land claim, British Columbia 1991, not very long ago, and they lost the case to the Canadian government based on the Doctrine of Discovery. Last year, small town Sherrill, New York, suing the United Nation of New York for taxes, went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, ‘Yes, Oneidas, you owe them money based on the Doctrine of Discovery.’ So you think that’s an old law? It’s operational today. That’s why we’re having all this hard time. So it’s racist and it’s also religious law, what you call…a country that proclaims that religion and state are separate. Not under those rules they’re not. How can that be?

Well, we’re studying that. We challenged the 'Holy C' because that’s the root of it all naturally and supported by all Christian nations because that became what they call the Law of Nations. They just made up a law and said, ‘Let’s all get in on it,’ so we lost our land. And if you go to court, you’re going to wind up right there. So there can’t be any justice in the court for us. So the paradigms have to change. When people realize that things are so bad and you understand what’s right and what’s wrong, then you have to change the paradigm itself. Common usage, well, if it’s wrong, it’s wrong. So we’re challenging now the Holy C and we did have a meeting. I gave a strong position on treaties and the Doctrine of Discovery last year at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations and 10 minutes after the Holy C came up to us and said, ‘We have to have a meeting,’ because they have a seat at the United Nations. I don’t know why, but the Roman Catholic Church has a seat there. And they said, ‘We’ve got to have a meeting.’ So we said, ‘Fine. Fine. 500 years, about time isn’t it?’ So we went upstairs and we met with their leaders, the bishop, very well versed and he had his lawyers with him and he said, ‘What is it that you want?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to do something about this Doctrine of Discovery because it’s causing us great pain in the courts today, right now.’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t…we’ve disavowed that many times.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough. You’re going to have to do something better, more profound.’ And he said, ‘What would that be?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would be good if your pope confessed to the Indians and Indigenous people that he was wrong, that the Church was wrong; a confession from the pope.’ I said, ‘You people believe in that confession pretty much, don’t you? Good for the soul they say. How about that?’ ‘Well, there’s got to be a better way,’ they said.

So we are in discussion with them. They did write a letter back but in the meantime we’ve talked to Pace University and they have agreed to do a moot court on the Doctrine of Discovery so we’re going to vet this issue. Right now they’re preparing a position to be made at the United Nations in Barcelona, Spain, this fall on the issue of the Doctrine of Discovery. And I would like to see a hearing held in every one of those Christian nations; France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Sweden. There’s your Christian nations and every one of them should be taught their own history because they don’t know about it, American people don’t know about it but the governments do, they know. So the battle is on. Be that as it may, and we will strive on, but I think before we see the result of that we’re going to be engulfed in global warming and it’s going to take our attention off of everything else except what we’re going to face as humanity.

I was working with a group called the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders for Human Survival. Through the ‘80s, ‘90s we were meeting on that issue [global warming] and there were very luminous individuals there like Mother Teresa, the Dali Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Al Gore. Al Gore was talking back then. He was saying, ‘Hey, problem here.’ And we met and we met [in] Moscow hosted by President [Mikhail] Gorbachev, who’s a great environmentalist by the way, knows what he’s talking about. In 1991, we said, ‘Well, how long are we going to meet here? We’re going to meet, just meet, meet, meet and we don’t come to a conclusion, let’s get to a conclusion.’ So in Tokyo, we came to a conclusion and it was four words. After all these meetings, all these years, we came down to four words: 'value change for survival.' If you don’t change your values that are running this world right now, you’re not going to survive. You can’t run on the values you’re running on right now. You’re going to have to change it. You’re going to have to look to the Indians for that change. Thanksgiving, sharing. You’re going to have to share. Not accrue; share everything, big time. We’ve got a chance. We’ve got a chance. Just the fact that you’re all here. If you’re going to wait for leaders to lead you, see you on the other side. You have to do it yourself. You’ve got to do the leading. You have to step forward and you’ve got to speak up in defense of your families and your lives in the future. You don’t have time. Things are just going to get worse. Talk to the Inuits or the hunters up in Alaska they’ll tell you, ’Whoo hoo, it’s bad up here. Dogs won’t go out on the ice. Hunters don’t know whether they’re going to come back.’ They’ve got to go. They’re subsistence hunters. They’ve got to go but whether they come back is always a question now. They say the same thing in Greenland, same thing in Nunavut. It’s really…you can see the change up in the Arctic Circle better than any other place because it’s really moving at a very fast pace and it’s accelerating.

Now, this is the other thing that you have to keep in mind. The process that we’re engulfed in is a 'compound' action and if you ask what a compound is, compound is what Professor Einstein said was the most powerful law of the universe, a compound. We have two compounds going on right now. One is the ice melt and the other is human population. When I was 20 years old in 1950, there were 2.5 billion people in the world. Here we are 58 years later and there’s 6.7 billion people in the world. That’s a compound, unsustainable and growing as we stand. Every four days there’s another million people born. Did you know that, every four days? That means food, water, shelter and land for every one of those individuals. We’re pressing the caring capacity right now. That’s a reality. It’s hard news, but you’ve got to hear it. And so what do we do? Ah, that’s the question. So you do, you know what you do, you gather your people in a circle, your families, your community and you say to each other, ‘All right, let’s have a meeting here. Let’s have a meeting and let’s decide what we’re going to do.’ And you will, you will decide and you will find a way when you sit and talk to each other like that because that’s how we always used to do. The people will decide. So the fate of our own lives and of the future is in our hands, no one else’s and it doesn’t do me or anybody else any good to say, ‘Well, I told you so.’ That doesn’t mean anything. But mobilization, yes, and this country, the United States has the greatest possibility for change than any other country in the world. We use one quarter of the world’s resources. We’re less than six percent of the population of the world and we use one quarter of the world’s resources. Well, just our change will help a great deal. But that’s the values. You have to make up your mind.

In our meetings overseas talking about energy, a big issue water and energy, because water’s life, water’s food, energy. Well, for so long we were just level -- if you notice, you see the graphs -- for millions of years here we are, human beings just going along like this. And then suddenly about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution they called it, the graphs changed and they start going this way. They start climbing about 1850; both the population and…they’re just together. So what does that mean? It means at one time we were living by the energy of the sun for one day and we could only use one day’s energy. We couldn’t save it, couldn’t store it, there was no electricity, you had to work with the sun and we did. That’s how we planted, that’s how we harvested. We worked with the sun, one day at a time so we couldn’t exceed, there was no way. Well, when we discovered electricity, ooh, things changed. Now there was refrigeration, now there was storage, now there was energy storage and the more energy we made the more we used and if we make more energy today we’ll use more. Why? Because that’s our values; so we have to change our values then. Can we do it? Well, I say yes but that’s really your answer, not mine.

I mean we live at Onondaga, eh, we’re like you guys. We’re pretty close, the same kind of lifestyle but we do keep our ceremonies and we do know who we are and we do give thanks and I think that’s what you’re going to have to do. You’re going to have to find your ceremonies again, you’re going to have to find a way to give thanks, to get your relationship back, to understand how close you’re related to the trees that you’re cutting down, your grandfathers. There’s renewable if you know how to do things, if you’re judicious. Old Indians used to have a game; it was a game everybody played. And you’d be traveling back in the old days and make a camp beside a stream somewhere, river, good place to spend the night, you’d make a camp. Then the next day you would leave but before you left you would put back every leaf, every twig so that the next person coming along would have to look and look and look to see whether somebody was there. It was a game. It was a game about being thankful. It was a way to understand how to keep things so they wouldn’t even know you were there. What a good game. What a peaceful way to deal with Mother Earth. That was our style.

So we have to think about things like that. We have to work with one another, we have to be much more friendly than we always were and we have to share. That’s the biggest issue, share. It goes against the grain of private property, goes against the grain of capitalism, but that’s brought us to where we are today. So if you want to hang onto that, there’s consequence. Our options are fewer and fewer every day. Every day we don’t do something we lose a day. We’re approaching the point of no return when no matter what we do will not matter at all ever. We turn our fate over to the great systems of this earth who will regulate, who’ll regulate our population, will regulate the temperature of the earth and we will be involved there as a consequence. So this is what I’m telling you and I’m not an alarmist, but I have been running this road for a while now and I think people have to know the truth and this administration that’s presently in control has been really negligent about giving the truth of the situation of the earth itself because it interferes with business. Well, Telberg, they said, ‘Business as usual is over. You can’t do business as usual, you just can’t.’ And it’s going to be cooperation rather than competition. You’re going to cooperate. If you’re going to survive it’s going to be cooperation rather than competition. It goes against the grain of this great industrial state here but nevertheless it’s a reality: share, divest, share.

You’re going to have to deal with Africa. You’re going to have to look after Africa. What happens to Africa happens to us. You have to feed people where they live, you have to provide for them, otherwise they’re here. They’ll go where the water is; they’ll go where the food is. So great migrations pushed by circumstance is what we’re looking at. Anyway, I think that we have maybe another Katrina, the fires that you’ve been enduring here, they’re not going to go away, they’re just going to get worse. Fires are here, floods, wind, grandfather. We call them grandfathers, soft winds, but they’re powerful; they’re coming. And let’s hope we have foresight and I say let’s hope we have the will, the fortitude to take on the responsibility of value change for survival. We have to inspect ourselves, every one of us, myself included and we’ve just got to do better. We have to enlighten ourselves, we have to learn, we have to understand what is coming, then you can deal with it. We’re always instructed, ‘Don’t put your head down, never put your head down, keep your head up and keep your eyes open and look and see. Always keep your head up.’ That’s where we are right now. There’s something in the wind, we know that, so we have to find out specifically what it is.

So in that regard, I’ll be a little practical here, I’ve been…I use these books myself and, let me see, here’s one, 2008, called the State of the World: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy. Good ideas in there; practical approach to reality. You can find this book. It’s only about $20. It’s the 25th anniversary of the World Watch Institute and they have a huge science section and they’ve been collecting this information and every year they just add more on so they’re right up to date. Good book to educate yourself. It’s available for $20; you can spare that.

Here’s another one. Plan B, what’s that tell you? Plan B, we’re already in Plan B. Lester Brown. Okay, this is this year. Oh, man, this guy’s got it down. You get through this thing you’ll know what they’re talking about. But he doesn’t leave you without hope. He gives a lot of direction, a lot of ways to move and what to do so you’ve got to keep your head up and you’ve got to move and you’ve got to take…we don’t have time, time’s a factor now in everything really.

Okay. Let’s see what else we’ve got here. Oh, here’s one. Pagans in the Promised Land: Doctrine of Discovery. This is the hottest one. It’s just come out. You can get it on Amazon. Pagans in the Promised Land, this is the Doctrine of Discovery and this really discusses laws and all of the information here. Steve Newcomb. A young man came to us, elder circle 1991 carrying stuff under his arm saying, ‘Hey, you guys got to see what I got here.’ And that’s when we found out about the Doctrine of Discovery. Now it’s…we’re in consultation.

Here’s one: Voices of Indigenous People. This is the first statements that we made at the U.N. [in] 1993, the first time we addressed the United Nations. 1972, I was with a group of people who were trying to get to the United Nations and they wouldn’t let us across the street. We couldn’t go across the street. There was a phalanx of police and we had to be on this side of the street looking at the U.N. building, 1972. 1993, I was the first one to address the general assembly on the dais of the U.N. So the progress, hard fought progress to get there. But these are the words of the leaders of Indigenous people around the world, pretty much the same today as when they were done. But what’s good about this book here is it has the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in its pure form. Now the one that’s passed has been modified. We lost traction here and there but we did keep our main principle but we did lose some. But the original is right here in this book. So some day maybe you’ve got the time to see what that is.

Here’s another one. It’s written by Lindsey G. Robertson called Conquest by Law. This is again the Doctrine of Discovery. And here was a guy that was just curious about it. He got some names and he said, ‘Gee, I ought to follow what happened to these people.’ And he found out that the law firm that was fighting this case had all of these papers and that they put it in a big trunk, it was going to go to England. So he found the family in Ohio and he said, ‘Can I find out where you sent those…that trunk of papers on the Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson vs. McIntosh?’ They said, ‘Well, it never went. It’s downstairs in the cellar.’ So that’s what this book is. So stuff like that, stuff we didn’t have before we do now and things have got to change and fairness to everybody. I’m going to leave some of this stuff with the University.

Do you know that in March of this year that the State of Arizona supported the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a state? Did you know that? That’s a great event, first state in the Union to do that. I have it right here. I was here or up there in…so you can be proud. Here’s the event that’s in here. It also has a complete description of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as it is now. So I’m going to leave that here, people can copy [it] and you can look at statements made.

What else here? I know we have somewhere…oh, here we are. Statement: The ice is melting in the north. This was a statement that was given by the Indigenous people at the United Nations in the year 2000, eight years ago we said, ‘The ice is melting.’ Now they didn’t listen to us then but here we are halfway there but we’ve still got time. So I’ll leave this with you as well. So you’ll have something to work with and maybe it’ll be the great State of Arizona that changes everything, who knows and why not? You’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got a lot of Indigenous people here, you’ve got a lot of Indian nations here still hanging in there.

So I think that’s enough for tonight, don’t you? I mean I don’t know what you were expecting. But we’re all in it together. There’s one river of life, we’re in our canoe, you’re in your boat, we’re on the same river. What happens to one happens to the other. So it’s in our hands; that’s the end of my message, I think. It’s up to us to organize. They’re doing it in Europe, big time so you’re not going to be alone. You’re not going to be alone. They’re looking for allies. We’re looking for allies. So as a runner from the Haudenosaunee, well, I’m walking now, I don’t run much anymore but I bring you this message as a fellow human being and as a man with a mission and I think it’s a good fight. I think it’s a good fight and I like a good fight. Let’s do it, let’s get on…let’s get on with it. Educate yourself. I’m leaving some stuff here and organize, sit in the circle, talk. Don’t just do something; make sure it’s a good move. Talk it over, work together because unity…

When The Peacemaker brought the five nations together he took an arrow and he broke the arrow, then he took five arrows for the five nations and he took the sinew of the deer and he bound those arrows together, he bound them together hard and then he said, ‘Here is your strength, to be united, one mind, one body, one heart, one spirit, your strength.’ We’re brothers and sisters, we can change blood. That’s how close we are.

Take your time, take your reflections and think about it and ponder it and talk and talk and work your way careful into a good move, strong move. Tell all your relations.” 

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "The Strategic Approach to Leadership"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders discuss why it is important for Native nation leaders to take a strategic approach to leadership, stressing that the decisions they make must be made with the culture and values of their people and the next seven generations in mind. 

Native Nations
Citation

Briggs, Eileen. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. December 1, 2011. Presentation.

Lyons, Oren. "Rebuilding Healthy Nations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Makil, Ivan. Nation Building seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 6, 2005. Presentation.

Pico, Anthony. Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project for American Indian Economic Development, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 2004. Presentation.

Russell, Angela. "Leadership and Strategic Thinking" (Episode 9). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Oren Lyons:

"From our directions and from the instructions given to the leaders of the Haudenosaunee when they say -- among many other instructions -- we are reminded and the words are direct, 'When you sit and you counsel for the welfare of your people, think not of your children, think not of yourself, think not of your family, not even your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of seven generations coming.' Now that's an instruction on responsibility, a very serious instruction on responsibility. Peacemaker said that, I don't know, a thousand, maybe two thousand years ago. It resonates today. Today it resonates. Be concerned about the seven generations and how we are going to survive and we survive by doing on a daily basis."

Anthony Pico:

"The strategic question the Viejas council engages should not be 'who runs the mailroom?' but what kind of society are we trying to build? What are our priorities as a community? What uses should we make of our resources? What relationships with outsiders are appropriate and necessary? Who can we trust? What do we need to protect? And what are we willing to give up?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think that there's a general receptiveness to the new ideas that come. I think the biggest challenge for ourselves is how we listen to each other, say what about, what have we forgotten. Because that's where our biggest challenge...and I have to say I don't know if the word is fight or struggle maybe, is that you have people coming in and saying, 'You have forgotten who you are because this is, look at how you're running this meeting. Look at how this is getting done.' And it's important that that auntie stands up and sort of reminds us and maybe scolds us about, 'Look at, look at the way things used to be done. And look at this.' And that's what, I think in my analogy, that's the message she's giving us, is remember who you are. What were and are the values you were raised with? And look at how we're behaving now and how we're getting this done, how we're approaching something, what we're open to, what can we bring to this, and not just swallow this idea from the outside, whole, and say, 'Hey, we've been successful. Because that's this idea -- we did the thing.' Did we do that at the compromise of ourselves? Have we stepped back and given ourselves time to say, 'Does that fit us? Is this right for us? Is how we're doing this work for us?'"

Angela Russell:

"Well, among our people, when we say leader we say '[Crow term],' which means a good person or a good man, and I think leadership is extremely important to all of our nations, and it's important not only for the leader to have a vision for his people, but as citizens of a particular nation, we need to be very supportive to our leader, but we also need to be participatory in a sense that we need to give some direction, we need to give support, we need to give encouragement. I think too many times it's easy to be very critical and to not look ahead toward the vision. You have to have goals, you have to have reachable goals, whether they're short-term or long-term. So leadership is very important, but it's a very, very difficult thing, because in the past our leaders were usually men who had many deeds, many accomplishments and that's how they became a leader. They were supported by the community, and today it's a whole different role, different dynamics, a different society we live in -- lots of challenges ahead for leaders."

Ivan Makil:

"And as leaders, that is one of the responsibilities you have, is to have that vision and to help to define a vision for you people so that there's going to be several paths that you can take but you want to define something that provides the kinds of things that your people need, the kinds of things that your people are looking for, the kinds of things that are consistent with the lifestyle and those values that are important to your people, the kinds of things that I call seven-generation thinking. Seven-generation thinking meaning very simply that when we make decisions -- and this is a traditional concept as well -- that we think about the impacts of our decision on the next seven generations. Our ancestors in the Phoenix valley two thousand years ago built a canal system and they did it with a lot of vision. They did it with a lot of thought. But interestingly enough, two thousand years later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the settlers came in here with all their technology and their engineers and they're going to lay out, map out this whole new system of irrigation for the valley so there could be growth and opportunity in the valley for Phoenix. So they started mapping this area out and you know what was so interesting? The areas they laid out for the canal system for the Phoenix valley were a direct overlay over the traditional hand dug canals that our ancestors built two thousand years ago, because it made sense, because it was seven-generation thinking, it was thinking about the impact on the next seven generations. And although that's a concept, just think: that system lasted for more than seven generations." 

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Oren Lyons

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in October 2003, traditional faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation Oren Lyons shares his experience in various roles within the international Indigenous community. Lyons also shares his involvement in the U.S. Senate's passage of a resolution in 1992 that formally acknowledges the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy to the development of the United States Constitution, and his special relationship with the nation of Sweden, whose leaders are confronting the realities of global warming.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Lyons, Oren. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Buffalo, New York. October 2003. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Oren Lyons, a citizen of the Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, is faith keeper of the Turtle Clan. At the request of Clan Mothers in the late 1960s, he gave up a successful career as a commercial artist in New York City to return to the Onondaga Nation. The Onondaga is one of six nations in the Iroquois Confederacy. Chief Oren Lyons spent his childhood his says, ‘running about the Nation,' where he learned ceremonial practices including the game of lacrosse. He says that when you talk about lacrosse you talk about the lifeblood of the six nations. He was an All-American lacrosse player as a goalkeeper when he was a student at Syracuse University. In 1990 he organized an Iroquois national team that played in the World Lacrosse Championships in Australia. In 2003 Oren was inducted into the International Scholar Athlete Hall of Fame at the University of Rhode Island's Institute for International Sport. His personal story ranges widely over many experiences; hunting, fishing, coaching, painting, activism, traditional leader, crisis negotiator, author and teacher. He is a Professor of Native American Studies at State University of New York Buffalo. With John Mohawk he published a major work, Exiled in the Land of the Free. Presence at the most significant recent events for Indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad, in 1972 Oren accompanied a peace delegation of the Iroquois to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington which had been taken over by the American Indian Movement, AIM. In 1973 he led a delegation to the Lakota Nation during the standoff at Wounded Knee. In 1977 he was instrumental in organizing a group of Native leaders to speak at the United Nations in Geneva. Through Oren's work in educating leaders the United States Senate passed a resolution in 1987 that formally acknowledges the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy to the development of the United States Constitution. Oren has a special relationship with Sweden. His philosophy of responsibility to the welfare of future generations has struck a responsive chord in Sweden's leadership, which is facing the realities of global warming. In the north of the country Oren has a working partnership with one of the oldest cultures in the world, the Forest People, fishermen and reindeer herders. Often in the limelight Oren Lyons remains compassionate and humorous using his visibility for matters of urgent concern, tribal sovereignty, the survival of Indigenous people and their traditions and the perpetuation of Creation. Speaking before the United Nations at the opening of the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993 he said that, ‘when we walk upon Mother Earth we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. Mother Earth is not a pleasant metaphor for Oren Lyons. He is gravely concerned about Her survival. He believes human beings can be productive and supportive of Nature or they can be parasites. They are, he declares, ‘presently the latter. There are forces that will check this unbridled growth such as disease and lack of food and water. Privilege will not prevail. There can be no peace as long as you make war on Mother Earth.' His message of peace also took him to the streets to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Committed to religious understanding as a way of reducing world tensions he has participated in ceremonies with Buddhists, Christians and other groups at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and in other religious venues. Though Chief Oren Lyons' message to the world is prophetic and urgent, his lectures always include an encouragement to people to take good care of their families. He is himself the father of two children. At the end of his interview with the Institute for Tribal Government in Buffalo, October, 2003, Oren said, ‘I have two instructions. Be thankful for what you have and enjoy life.'"

Life as a child

Oren Lyons:

"Well, I grew up on the Onondaga Nation territory. The time that I was growing up they called it the Onondaga Reservation. My mother was a Seneca, the Wolf Clan and she was married to my father who was Onondaga, the Eel Clan. Although I was born in the Seneca Territory, Seneca Nation, I just happened to be born there, I was brought up, the whole family brought up at Onondaga. Since the process of our way of keeping track, it follows the woman; I'm Seneca, following my mother, Seneca Wolf, as was her whole family. In 1972 I was adopted into the Onondaga Nation. So now I'm Onondaga, still Wolf but borrowed into the Turtle Clan and I've been sitting for the Turtles since 1967. So we were brought up Indian style. My early childhood was just running about the Nation. I don't think I saw a White person until I was about four years old. We didn't travel downtown. We didn't go down...Syracuse is just down the road. We're about today, jump into the car and you're downtown Syracuse in 10-15 minutes. So we're right there in that all your family is around, grandmother's down the road. You've got all your relatives are everywhere in a real community so that even though you may not be related, just wherever you happened to be at dinner time, that's where you ate. People just sat you down wherever you were. And if you lived off the main highway, which is where the spigots were, then you had to go to the springs and carry water. So we carried water all our lives mostly growing up and cut wood, hunted, hunted for food. And we were very good at it. Everybody was planting. I remember my father planting fields in the back and using the old style of, what would you call it, plow, the plow that you have the handles behind the horse and that's tough plow because you hit rocks and you're like flying all over the place. The horses were very patient with us out there. They knew more than we did about plowing and so forth. Cold winters, no such thing as insulated houses. There was a school on the reservation, still is. It kind of was like an outpost of extension of White people into our land. There was no such thing as a Parent-Teacher's Association or anything like that. You just sent the kids to the doorway and left them and picked them up and no interaction. And for us it was like going into this outpost with all White teachers and strange ideas and different talking people. It was a trial every day. We were pretty independent, rambunctious kids. I know it was a hard time for them. But school was something to be endured. And most kids quit sixth grade, went on to work. So the reservation, the Nation itself was a very traditional Nation, still is I think. As far as I know we're probably the last of the traditional chiefs and leaders in North America who are still in charge of land. There's no Bureau of Indian Affairs, we don't allow them on our territory. We don't allow the state police nor any police except our own people. So we have working arrangements and it's not unusual, that's just the way we were always brought up. We were brought up to be who we are and we don't think it's strange. But as I travel about then I see the differences. The long house was the center of activities all the time. Ceremonies were going on, there was always dances, there was always feasts going on, there was always community activities."

The story of the Great Peacemaker, a spiritual being who came to the Iroquois Nation 1,000 or more years ago

Oren Lyons:

"We didn't learn that story, we lived it. So you don't learn something that you're living and if you're living it then you're just involved in it and you don't think of it as learning cause that's the Great Law. Peace was what governed our people. You were just involved in it and never thought much about it. In the traditional style of governance there rarely is there sessions where people will sit you down and talk to you like that. You just learn by participation and by watching. So the Great Law of Peace is a daily event. It's how you live. It's how ceremonies are performed, how leaders work, how the community operates. It's all...that's how we're brought up. So we're brought up very free, very independent and very aware of who we were in terms of our Clan and our Nation. People kept track, very close track of Clans. The Great Law of Peace is our second gift or second message. The first message that our people received was how to live, non-Indians call religion. I don't really have a word for religion. It's how you live day to day. And so the ceremonies and all of that was given to us way, way, way, way back. We don't know when. But we know the stories and we know how it came and we know all of that. And they are epic stories, they are great, great stories. The Great Law of Peace came when we were in battles and when we were neglecting the first message which was how to live. It was terrible times for Five Nation people. We were battling, we were fighting one another and we were fighting internally. The men were on the war path, so-called war path all the time. They were moving, they were fighting, fighting each other, fight anybody. Children, women, they were hiding, they were in the woods, they weren't even in their homes because they were afraid and it was a terrible time and here comes the Great Peacemaker. His intent and purpose was before he was born and his mother was a virgin, which she didn't know how she got pregnant and when the baby was born her mother tried to kill the baby three separate times and then the third time she received a visit from spiritual beings and they told her, ‘You're not going to be able to do that and don't do that because this person has a mission.' And so the story of him growing up was also one of being different and being singular in who he was."

The Peacemaker's process was thought, not force. He moved from the Mohawk to Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca

Oren Lyons:

"And he said, ‘my business is peace. I want to talk to your leaders.' And they laughed and they said, ‘Well, you've got a lot of work, you have a lot of work.' He was very insistent and that impressed them so they said, ‘All right, we'll take the message.' And so he left, they left and they started out and the first night that he spent, he spent at a lodge that was there, there was a woman by the name of [Mohawk Language] and she was an Erie, she was an Erie woman. They call it cat nation and she was, her mission was to provide food and lodging for the runners and the fighters up and down... But she said that she had a rule and that was that no discussion of war, no discussion of battle, that they could spend the night, they leave their weapons outside and she'd provide them with food and so forth. So that was what she did and when the Peacemaker stopped and he told her his mission was peace, she said, ‘Well, that's wonderful. I believe in your mission and whatever I can do to help.' And then there's this story of [Mohawk name]. [Mohawk name] is an Onondaga who was exiled from his own land because of the fierce leadership there with this fierce leader by the name of Tadadaho. He was evil incarnate and powerful and ruled and had killed three of his daughters and he was mourning. He just left and he was in the woods all the time and the Mohawks knew about him and he kind of drifted up their way and they said, ‘You should go talk with this man, he talks like you do about peace.' So he did and there's a whole epic story about how he became a partner with the Peacemaker. And then they convinced these leaders, they changed their minds and then they moved west to the Oneida and the Oneidas were going through the same thing. And so the story goes after convincing the leaders of the Oneidas to come with them then they went to Onondaga and they couldn't deal with Onondaga, he was too strong. Tadadaho wouldn't...he did all kinds of things and they couldn't get to him. He lived in a swamp, he lived by himself and they couldn't get near him. His hair was covered with snakes, he was twisted. He was just evil and powerful and a cannibal on top of it. He didn't want to talk with them about any peace or anything."

To solve the difficulties, a woman suggests a song for approaching the Onondaga leader

Oren Lyons:

"They learned the song and then they all approached him and they said it affected him, the song affected him and that even as they approached they could see him transforming, they could see the snakes dropping from his head, they could see he was transforming into something like a human being and eventually they talked with him. And then they bargained with him and ‘Your title will be the leader of the Five Nations and they will always come from Onondaga and this will always be the central fire.' And they bargained with him and he agreed with that and he transformed him and the Peacemaker transformed him, the most evil of all beings. And the lesson there is you should never give up on anybody, that anybody can be redeemed."

The Peacemaker lays down the foundations of governance

Oren Lyons:

"And then he began the discussion on governance and how you shall operate and how you shall function. And so the women were chosen as the keepers of the nations actually. So the identity of children is directly what the woman is and that's the law, one of the oldest laws we have. And that continues today and it is still her duty to choose the leaders and oversee the conduct and activities and oversee the general welfare of the clan itself and indeed act like the Mother of the Clan and of the people and very, very hard work. We have Clan Mothers today doing that today just as they always have been and it's difficult work. You give your life over to the people and then of course when she chooses the leaders then he said, ‘Her choice, it shall be her choice.' And I think that's the genius of why we're still here. I think that's what makes the Iroquois so strong was that the balance of relationship and governance was between male and female, men and women. They had equal responsibility and very much work to do but the essence of it was that leadership was chosen by the woman. And it had to be ratified then by the clan by consensus. There was no voting. You had to all agree which is a harder way to do things but of course when you come to a total agreement you're much stronger."

The Peacemaker established a system of democracy

Oren Lyons:

"Then what he said, the Peacemaker when he laid out the foundation he said, ‘There will be elder brothers and younger brothers. You will have two houses and this is how you will work together is your houses. This is the dynamics of your governance, two houses, even within your Nation there will be two houses and this is how the clans are set and that's how the houses operate together. So we're talking about governance now. We're talking about how the establishment of a democratic government, which I believe is the basis of Western society. The democracy that they talk about that comes from Greece is not here. They learned what we knew."

Western democracy and the U.S. Constitution have roots in the Iroquois Confederacy

Oren Lyons:

"Now when the Peacemaker had them throw these weapons of war into the currents under the earth, he said, ‘They'll be carried away to nobody knows where and you'll now rely on the rule of law, the rule of peace and the process of governing people by their own consent.' And so I would say that democracy, Western democracy is based on that. I talked about this meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when the Onondaga Chief talked to the leaders about having a union, 1744. All of that was heavily recorded. It was recorded very well and there's a very thick and large book on just that 1744 treaties and this book was printed by Benjamin Franklin. All those words were taken down to Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin read the reports and he said, ‘This is a good idea.' Ten years later he called the Albany Plan of Union and he asked the Six Nations to preside to talk about governance, talk about democracy. And at that meeting there was a spy from the King of England and the word went back and the letter is available warning the King of this discussion by people of governance by the people. So they knew very well what was going on and they understood the hierarchy and they understood... And by rubbing shoulders with Indian nations and people for 200 years transformed the Englishman to an American because in those days when you said you were an American, an American meant to be an Indian. And so Benjamin Franklin really saw and said...there's words where he directly talks about that ‘savages can make something like this why can't we,' and he followed through. And so the Albany Plan of Union transformed into the Continental Congress and the Continental Congress was formed very, very much on the lines of the Confederacy. They called themselves the 13 Fires. They called themselves the Grand Counsel. They used all the euphemisms and they used wampum, the original... At the Boston Tea Party when they dressed up as Indians, they didn't dress up as Indians, they dressed up as Mohawks. They were dressed as Mohawks and so the whole idea of being free and different and fighting your father and so on. 1775 when they came to our...asked for a meeting at German Flats where they wanted us to join them in the coming battle, the revolution, our leaders said to them at the time, they said, ‘well, we know your father. We have a lot of agreements with your father, we love your father and we know you as well and we have agreements with you as well. But we see this as a war between father and son and we would much rather step aside and not be a part of it.' And the delegation from the Continental Congress said at that time, ‘Good,' they says, ‘because that was our second request. If you are not going to fight with us, don't fight against us.' And so it served the purpose of the Confederation because they knew that this battle was going to be taking place around them and probably across their land, which it did finally and they wanted a neutral position because they had their hands full with the French as well. There's a whole history of the French and Indian War and that was mostly fought by Six Nations against...on behalf of the English. All that history, all those meetings, hundreds and hundreds of meetings that we had, we knew each other very well, the leaders. And our leaders traveled and if you go down to the Philadelphia you will see in front of the Hall of Independence where the Liberty Bell is you'll see a square of greens out front, it's out front there's an open square, that's Six Nation land. We visited there so often, we camped right there. It's our land today even. So these kinds of discussions you find really a complete discussion in our book Exiled in the Land of the Free. And we wrote it because the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of the United States was coming up and they were making no consideration or no place for the Indian people and we said, ‘How can you do that?' When we went to Washington we said, ‘Well, where do you want the Iroquois to stand in your celebration?' And they said, ‘Why?' because they had no idea, it's not in your books, they don't teach it, it's not in the school. Nobody teaches that history that I'm talking about. And we said, ‘Well, we gave you this idea of democracy. We held your hand through the process, our leaders.' And so it was presented to the Congress, we took it to Senator Inouye and the result was that the passage of S76 recognizing the contributions of the Iroquois to the Constitution of the United States on the principle of democracy. So I say that Western democracy is directly from our roots. When they came over on the Pinta, Santa Maria, they weren't bringing any democracy with them, at all. They brought a lot of pain with them and they brought a lot of ideas about ownership of land and so forth but they didn't bring democracy. And when the ship the Mayflower came over, that didn't bring democracy either. They were escaping the King of England. Democracy didn't come over on the boat. Democracy was here and it was all over the country, it was all over. The whole country was democratic.

What went wrong in the new U.S. democracy?

Oren Lyons:

"With our reception of the Great Law that spiritual center, that spiritual peace, is the center of it, it's the foundation of our Confederation, spirituality, the spiritual law and we said, ‘Well, that's not a good idea. What you're doing is going to come back.' And then when they consolidated their power and they actually began to go over their own records on the Continental Congress and they were doing the Constitution, they began to reinstitute European law and closure, one of the private property. They couldn't deal with slave ownership. That's going to come back to you. We told them at the time, ‘How can you have a democracy when you imprison men, people? And where's the women? Where's the women in your democracy?' The way I look at it like if you were looking from the moon down to the earth at that particular time you would see a great light as they picked up this idea of democracy. And then if you watched over a period of time you would see that light diminish until finally in 1843 or 1844 they start talking about manifest destination. And Christian rule and Christian law has always been a problem with us and for us. They've always called us heathens, they've always called us pagans and they said we have no standing because we're not Christian. So the whole taking of land across America is based on that Law of Discovery, not being Christian. It still prevails. It's right in the U.S. constitutional law now. So it's tough to do, tough to beat."

Schooling for leadership included hard work and lacrosse

Oren Lyons:

"As I was growing up, my father left the family and I became the hunter. My mother was tremendous, a woman of great integrity, never said much but kept that integrity. She never drank, she never...anything like that, just took care of the family, a very strong woman. And I quit school in the seventh grade because I didn't like the teachers, they didn't like me and I knew they weren't doing right by the people there and I just didn't get along with them, I challenged them all the time. Life was miserable for me. So I would set my shotgun aside or my fish pole and then as soon as I'd get off the bus down at the school I'd walk back and I'd spend the day in the woods fishing. And those years probably were my best teachers because I learned a lot about developing your own character. When we were growing up we had to go and cut wood and carry poles, hardwood poles, 30 feet long. One pole of oak is very, very heavy. And you carry four or five or those poles, put them on your shoulder, that's a big load. But all the kids were up there. We cut the wood, trimmed the wood, wearing sneaks in the wintertime, colder than a son of a gun. There'd be snot all over our sleeve from wiping our nose and getting the wood back and cutting it up and bringing it in. It was hard work, took a lot of character; that built character. It was good training, probably one of the best trainings I had because it built that reserve, that strength that you get from finishing something, getting it done. So I didn't really go to school. I was an athlete and we were playing lacrosse already and that's part of the fabric of the community. And your heroes are the lacrosse players and even the ceremonies in the Long House includes lacrosse. It's not a game; it's part of the fabric of our nation. And that's how I grew up, grew up playing the game and that's what gave me the offer to get to school."

Drafted in 1950 Oren found the discipline of the Army useful

Oren Lyons:

"I don't know how they drafted us because we weren't supposed to get drafted but I did. Anyway, I wound up in the Army and I said, ‘Well, this is...I don't know how I'm going to do here,' but I found out that they recruited for the Airborne came around and you get $50 more for being in the Airborne, for hazardous duty pay. I said, ‘$50 more a month. I've got to go there,' because I was sending money home to the family. So I got $50 more. So we got into the Airborne, went into the 82nd Airborne, went down to the jump school down in Fort Benning, Georgia. And then I was assigned to the 82nd in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We jumped around different places. We had to, we were so-called Honor Guard of America and if anything happened directly to the...we were the ones to be there first. So we were prepared all the time for combat. So I learned a lot, I thought the Army discipline was good for me. I didn't like it at all. When they captured me the first time they put me in jail for truancy I guess and I was just like a wolf. I didn't want to be in there, I didn't like the man and I didn't like the ideas, I didn't like anything and this truant officer, I still remember him sitting there chewing on a cigar looking at me and saying, he says, ‘You know, you dumb Indians,' he says, ‘you can't even talk, you can't answer, you can't answer me why are you not in school.' And I couldn't answer him. I was mad and I was thinking, ‘Gee, maybe I can get one punch in on this guy.' And he was looking at me and he says, ‘Don't even think about it.' And they put me in...they locked me up. I hated that. But I went to work and I did all the little stuff you do to get by. Hunted and worked in labor, dug ditches, did all of that."

Leaving school so young yet becoming a professor

Oren Lyons:

"So when I got out I went back to playing lacrosse again right away and doing a lot of heavy drinking and doing a lot of what kids do at that age. I was boxing; I was boxing at the time. I boxed before I went in; I boxed in the Army. And when I came out I was asked by the coach from Syracuse University he said, ‘Well, why don't you come up here, play lacrosse for us and box for us.' I said, ‘Well, I don't know. I don't think I've got the credentials.' He said, ‘Well, you've been in the Army.' He says, ‘You know, take the GED test in the Army.' I said, ‘Well, I don't know.' I said, ‘I took a lot of tests.' And he said, ‘Well, why don't we look for your tests and why don't you make application. Come on up.' So they recruited me. And when I graduated four years later, he said, ‘You know, we still haven't got your records. We were looking all through the Army.' He said, ‘Maybe, maybe we can just forget looking for them now.' But I had done very well. I made the Dean's List. I was a good painter; I was an artist, that's what I did. And so I did very well in the art course. I drew all A's and I had suffered through English and suffered through all the other courses but I managed to get through. And as a matter of fact they have an award they give to the outstanding Junior scholastic athlete and they call it the Orange Key Award and I won that award my junior year. And so it's a contradiction of moving away from school so early and then finally actually winding up to be a professor at the end of the day."

Art, New York City and lacrosse

Oren Lyons:

"The artwork is what got me into the university. So when I graduated I wanted to go south. I did very well in the lacrosse. In 1957 we had the first undefeated team at Syracuse University and we had an amazing team. Jim Brown, the big football player, was on our team. Billy Brown played for the Boston Patriots. It just went on. We had this amazing team. We were undefeated and we beat West Point, the other undefeated team in the country that year. It was a great year. I became an All American, made All American the next couple of years and then I went south. I went right to New York City. I was going to take up art, staying in this little room in the YMCA and running around looking for a job and carrying my portfolio around realizing, ‘Hey, this isn't going to be so easy,' and New York City being the Mecca of artists and competition. The amazing thing I learned about New York is nobody talks to anybody. Nobody's friendly, nobody says anything. You can just not talk to anybody for days on end except in an interview or wherever you're going, just no conversation. It's strange coming from a Nation where everybody talks to everybody. But anyway, a knock came on my door at the YMCA and there was a short man, bald headed and he had a mustache, gray mustache, and he says, ‘I'm Dr. Schoenbaum, Pinty Schoenbaum.' Pinty, they called him Pinty. He said, ‘I want to ask you if you're going to play lacrosse for the New York City Lacrosse Club.' He had tracked me from Syracuse and found out where the heck I was, don't ask me how. But he said, ‘Play for our team.' I said, ‘Sure. You've got a team down here?' ‘Yeah, we've got a team.' And so that helped me a great deal. I moved right into...I had some kind of friendships again, back to lacrosse again."

His career as an artist and art director

Oren Lyons:

"I finally landed a job at Norcross Greetings Cards and it was kind of like a little safe haven, didn't pay much at all but it was recognized in New York City as probably one of the best training grounds for art there is, practical training. Because with all my four years of college and abilities up there I took one look at my work and I looked at the professional work that I was up against and I said, ‘I need to refine, I need to get back to...get up to standard here, long way to go.' So I took a job there, started our $45 a week, coming out of university and I could have made that $45 in half a day working on construction. But it was a real shock to me to do it but I took the job. I was more in the art directing because I was doing artwork at night. I was freelancing all over and I had a lot of work. I was a good artist and I was doing a lot of illustration, a lot of sports illustration and I...once people found out who you were and where you then you could work. I was more or less running an ad agency right out of the company too because we had 250 artists and every one of those artists that was at Norcross was a very independent artist on their own. They were all freelancing and Norcross was easy to...easy work for a real professional. And I was doing my own work, I was doing a lot of illustration. I was getting a reputation. But I was not liking New York. Things were changing, I had children now and I didn't like the idea of bringing them up in town. You can't leave a child two feet from you, you cannot. You just have to tie them together. You just don't dare let a little girl wander. So it was constantly to keep the kids in the school and then...so I moved out to New Jersey. And when I moved to New Jersey I played for the New Jersey Lacrosse Club and I commuted back and forth, bought a house out there. But still I didn't want to bring the kids up in a foreign country so I said, ‘Well, I want to go back home.' And it was about that time, '67 when Clan Mother asked me to be leader chief and I agreed but it was about the end of my marriage too because my wife didn't really agree with that. She did not want to be sharing me with the Nation."

Returning to Onondaga and working for Indian culture and sovereignty across the nation

Oren Lyons:

"And when I got back, this was 1970, when I got back they said, ‘Well, you have a lot of knowledge. We want you to go to school and learn about museums. We want to put a museum here.' So I took a master's course at Cooperstown, which was again a very good event for me. I learned a lot about museum technology and history and that was a dual course I was taking, History and Museum Technology. So when I came out from there I was qualified to teach and John Mohawk and Barry White and several of the young people they said, ‘You've got to come to Buffalo and you've got to start an Indian class at the university.' They said, ‘We've got Black studies, they've got Women's studies, they've got Puerto Rican studies, they've got no Indian studies.' So they were really on my case and they followed me everywhere I went and by that time I was moving. When I came back home I was working with the leaders already and we traveled. We took what they call the Unity Caravan, which was a composite of leaders from Oklahoma, Hopi and Iroquois and we just went...we did a tour of the whole United States stopping, telling people at the time the importance of keeping your language, the importance of keeping your traditions and we were a traditional group and we made this circle four times. We went around, four years we went around. We were at Alcatraz. We stopped when they were having the problems there and helped the spirit of the people cause they didn't have any elders there. And so they were so happy when all these...carloads of...we traveled in a caravan of 20-25 cars and we would just come to an Indian territory, set up camp and talk about tradition. And a lot of the people I see today who are now leaders remember when we came through and how that influenced them and how they remembered the importance of your language and the importance of your tradition and customs and your land. And I felt...it was in my really strong years and I felt that I was doing something positive."

A new chapter in the lacrosse story, the Iroquois Nationals

Oren Lyons:

"In 1983 I got a call from my friend Roy Simmons, Jr. whose father was the coach, Roy Simmons, Sr. And now, Slugger we call him, Roy, Jr., was now the head coach of Syracuse University and he said, ‘Can you bring an Iroquois team down and play Canada at the NCAA finals?' And I said, ‘Gee, I don't know. We haven't played field lacrosse in a long while. I don't know.' He said, ‘Well, think about it. We'd like to have an exhibition match.' And so I thought about it and I said, ‘Geez, why not.' So we did. We got the boys together and we took a team down there. It wasn't easy and we got roundly defeated but the boys liked the game. I said, ‘Hey, this was a good game, let's get back into it.' The following year, in '84, we played at the Olympics in L.A. and we had the consent of the Olympics because we were promoting the return of Jim Thorpe's medals. And it was called the Jim Thorpe Memorial Powwow and Native Games. And the center was going to be the Iroquois Nationals playing Canada again. But England heard about it, they called us up and said, ‘Hey, you guys are having a game, you didn't invite us.' I said, ‘Well, yeah, but you're so far.' ‘We'll be there.' England flew in. Australia was touring Canada. They had a lacrosse team touring. They came down. So there we had...and then the United States said, ‘How the heck do you guys have a game and you didn't tell us.' So we had the five nations playing again and we had the Native games down there and we did very well. And so England said, ‘You boys play a very good game.' They said, ‘You want to come over and play us over next year?' We said, ‘Well, we're traveling on the Iroquois passport. You understand.' They said, ‘We'll manage, don't worry about that.' So we went over and we were very successful. We won every game but one over there and very happy. The boys were getting into the game so we said, ‘Well, we want to get into the International Lacrosse Federation, let's get into the big game.' So we petitioned and we had a lot of problems with Canada and so we were not allowed to compete in the '86 games but we ran our own tournament here at UB and we invited everybody but Canada cause they were hosting the game. And in '87 they called me and they said, ‘We had a vote, the ILF had a vote and they want to vote the Iroquois in as a full member nation,' the International Lacrosse Federation. I said, ‘On our terms.' They said, ‘On your terms.' I said, ‘Great.' And they said, ‘And get ready for the games in Perth, Australia, in 1990. So while all this stuff was going on we filled the team and we took a team over to the Perth games, world games in 1990. There were four teams when we joined. We became the fifth nation and now there's 14 nations including South Korea, Japan, Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden. They're all playing and Tonga wants a team. This is all going on, this is all part of this whole fabric in the meantime, which affords great recognition to the Haudenosaunee because when we play, our flag goes up with whoever we're playing. So the Haudenosaunee flag goes up with the USA or Canada or England or whoever. Well, the sovereignty as I was talking about, the Iroquois Nationals are certainly a very serious element of manifestation of sovereignty and so that means we have to deal with state departments around the world, it means we have to have Visas because our passports are Iroquois. So it's advancing our culture, it's advancing our presence, it's advancing people's understanding of Indian nations, internationally. It's certainly developing a better understanding among our own people, respect for other nations, respect for other people, respect for the American flag. If you go back to the times when we were battling at Wounded Knee and around and flying the flag upside down or burning it or whatever else, now when the United States plays the Iroquois our men stand at attention, take their hats off in respect. That's a big move. That's a big change but it's mutual respect is what it is and that's what brings that. So they understand that they've grown, our players have an amazing growth sense. Now they've traveled, they've been around the world, they play Japan, we've played in Australia, we've played in England, we've play Canada, we've played all over. That's exposure for our own people to learn about other nations, other people and the game itself is really founded because it's our game and so we're like the grandfathers of the sport and we get that respect from around the world. We work with them very well and it's a great avenue, it's a great venue for interaction, positive."

Working with Indigenous people internationally and with the United Nations

Oren Lyons:

"So on the other hand when we move into the U.N. and we're in the working group for Indigenous populations, the discussion still is and we still have not cleared the fact that we are peoples, not populations. ‘Peoples' with an S. ‘People' is generic, peoples means specific. So when we try to put our names as peoples the U.N. still calls us populations. And of course if you're a population then there's no human rights for populations. So the discussion is really fine tuned and our biggest adversary is the United States and the issue is the issue of the self determination, the right to self determination. And they say, ‘Well, you have a right to self-determination as far as we allow.' And we say, ‘The right to self-determination is absolute and there's no modification or else it's not self-determination.' But for Indigenous people, yes, it is. Of all the people in the world, when you have the human rights of the world, they don't apply to Indigenous people. We had to write our own. Why? The issue's still land. Land, who owns it and who are you. It goes back to the time of Columbus; it goes back to basic issues. The issue you brought up right now. They're saying, ‘And you can't tax.' So all of that is still unresolved and the United States has a very hard time to acknowledge first of all the damage they've done to Indian nations. They have a hard time to look at that. They have a hard time to acknowledge the lands that were taken, stolen. Even today they can't bring themselves to pay...here they are in Iraq, they're looking for $87 million to rebuild Iraq and they can't pay the $8 billion that they stole from the Department of Interior of Indian land. So where do you go for equity as the peacemaker said. We have to go to the international field and that's why we're in Europe. We can talk to them over there, we talk to the State Department over there but hard to get them here. And the whole issue of Indigenous peoples reflects earth and reflects land. Australia: the lands taken from Australia. Now they have recently won a case where they have agreed that the basis of land taking, which was the Law of Discovery, the Supreme Court of Australia says, ‘That's not a valid position.' That court case rocked everything everywhere around the world because you go to South Africa, you go anywhere, all the colonization that's taken on is on that basis including the United States and Canada. So we're still, when you say ‘the land of the free, the home of the brave and the land of the free' you're talking about Indians because...and you come down to the issues that they cannot resolve and get these things ready and clean their house. I'm talking about the United States and Canada and Central and South America as well. If they can't clean their house how can they go around the world trying to clean everybody else's house?"

Present and future dangers facing Creation

Oren Lyons:

"And coming up on us now is global warming. Now these issues that are coming here are very, very serious. They're going to make any conflagration that you have around the world minor when they start to manifest. And actually I've been studying this and I've been...most of my work in the past three or four years has been in that area because the danger is so evident and we're pushing toward an ice age. We're forcing the issue to an ice age and people don't understand that. There's a convection going on in the Atlantic Ocean where fresh water now has reached all the way to the Carolinas from Greenland, from the ice and snow melting in Greenland, fresh water all the way to the Carolinas. This convection is what's slowing down the currents and the University of Bergen in Norway who monitors the gulfstream said that the gulfstream is slowing down and that if it continues to slow down at the past it's slowing down, it could conceivably stop altogether in the next 15 years. Now if you can comprehend what's going to happen if the gulfstream stops and you talk about economies and you talk about what's going to happen, well, it's going to freeze, things are going to freeze. You'll trigger the ice age and it's happened before, it's not something that's never happened before, we're just pushing it with our fossil fuel, over extended fossil fuel use and all that. Global warming is real. I'm now working with scientists who are willing to speak up now. But the attitude of this present administration, the Bush administration on environment is very, very bad about environment. They're just not interested in it, they're interested in business. But it's responsibility, they have to look for the next generation and they're not looking for the next generation. So I asked the scientists, I said, ‘Okay, what happens? What happens when...how does this trigger happen?' They said, ‘Well, it's like a dimmer switch on the wall. You want more light you turn the dimmer switch,' and that's what we're doing with energy, more and more, more and more and now we come to the end of the dimmer switch, right? You can't get anymore, but we want more so we hit it once more and now the switch, actually the dimmer switch becomes a switch, it goes from hot to cold, switched. The earth itself has its own systems and when it gets too warm it cools itself off. That's the ice age. So we're pushing that now. Now the [1:02:36] ?? people from off...the marine biology units at the [1:02:42] ?? have said that this convection here is going to cause that, is going to cause the switch to turn. So they asked them, ‘Well, when?' They said, ‘It's all the way down now.' It wasn't there in 1960, nothing. Now the freshwater's all the way down here, it's slowing the current and it'll get farther. The ice is melting faster. We're in a compound. There's a compound of melting. The faster it melts the faster it melts. We're compounding. We have a compound in human population. Put them two together and you have big problem and so why are we in these insane efforts for oil and industry when we're not looking at the big picture and that's my...I said, ‘We've got to look at the big picture,' and I think it's criminal that a government doesn't look to the future and actually tries to cover it, tries to change it. It's very serious."

Amidst much negligence, hopeful signs

Oren Lyons:

"Yeah, there are. Yes, coalition is coming now. Scientists are saying, ‘Yes, we have to speak up.' So yes, on a positive side, we can slow it down if we go into a total mobilization just the way they did on the terrorists, same kind of mobilization. The system is there but it's going to manifest itself now, you're going to start to feel it and it'll get warmer and warmer and warmer and then it's going to switch and that could be in a year's time, that could be ten years. I have no idea. But we're pushing it now and so that's been my message. That was my message to the Bioneers and it goes back to the Peacemaker saying, ‘Don't make a law against that spiritual law,' and that's what we're doing, precisely what we're doing. Challenging that spiritual law, you can't win. My grandson says to me, ‘Grandpa, what's going to happen to me?' Hmm, hard question. That's what the kids are saying, ‘What's going to happen to us? Who's going to look out for us?' And if the adults don't do it, if the families... who is? And that's my message. People can do it. I think very clearly that the fate, our fate is still in the hands of the people. I believe that yet. But we're losing ground. Every day that we don't do something we get closer to the point of no return. So if you're not going to think about your grandchild much less seven generations, it's pretty murky out there right now. So it means that you have to try hard. You've got to maintain your own integrities, you have to maintain your own cultures, your own prayers. I remember Priscilla V. Hill, our elder from the elder circle, she said to me, she says, ‘you know, people forget how powerful prayer is, how strong prayer is.' Our people in particular cause we're spiritual people, we pray a lot and we pray all the time and we believe in a higher power, we believe in the ultimate authorities and we understand a lot of that and that's what the ceremonies are about. That's the integrity. Now if everybody could get on that kind of a line, then we wouldn't have what's going on now. But we have a secular world now. Spirituality is rare. We have commerce."

Promising new alliances

Oren Lyons:

"I think the religions that we have to deal with are the ones that are made here in this United States. They just make their own religion; they become what I call the hard right fundamentalist religion. They're not really listening to the teachings of their teacher. They're making their own statements. So religion has been a spear right into our breast. That's how they came, that was the spear that entered us and it's been a problem but on the other hand in today's times our best allies are religious leaders. So you know, people go, people change, we come to a common belief and we're getting there, getting there. But is it going to be...when? We're in a bind now; we're in a time bind. So I don't know. Gorbachev is a great leader; he's a great environmental leader. Al Gore, if he'd get back into gear. He belonged to that parliament who worked with us, global forum of parliamentary and spiritual leaders. Gore was in there. It's a race. But I think when the manifestations, when the fires get more, which we had all those fires last year, there are going to be more of those. This year, fire's burning up there in British Columbia all over, dry, climate change and we're going to get wind storms. The winds are coming heavier. The slower the ocean goes the quicker it warms up, the quicker it warms up heavier winds and we're spawning these big hurricanes now. We're doing that. So all these things are coming and one of our chief allies is the insurance companies. They're saying, ‘Listen to those people, it's true what they're saying.' They have to pay. And they know what the damage is costing very year, more and more and more. So I don't know politics are so peculiar in this country and around the world. And the avarice of man and the greed, the unleashed greed is fundamental to all of this. Still, I believe that it's still in the hands of the people. If people want to get out there and they want to make themselves known, then things are going to change. If they don't, then you suffer the consequence and it's not happy. But as long as we can, you never take hope away from the people. Hope is always there and I urge the people to take action, do what you have to do. Vote this administration out. That's what's got to be done. They're very, very damaging. I think in this contemporary society everybody has gone kind of a little nuts and the idea of money and this cycle of work that people are in, they've got no time for anything. I feel it."

The future is still in the hands of the people

Oren Lyons:

"This is still a democracy. This is what we helped way back there in 1775. It's a democracy yet and if people act on it, it will be. But if they just submit then that's what's going to happen. It's what I call corporate states. They have more gross national product than most countries. The corporations have allegiance to no one, they don't have any human rights, they don't have any concern about health. They have a concern to put money in the hands of the investors and that's the big deal. We're looking at the kids now and we're going to have the grandchildren and looking at trying to see this future. In the global forum of spiritual and parliamentary leaders after all the years of leading we came to a conclusion. Why were we meeting, what was going to be the substance of this whole thing? And we came to a decision under the leadership of Akio Matsumura who's a brilliant man and a great humanitarian and we came to the conclusion it would be four words, after all our meetings with all our people: value change for survival. We either change our values or we're not going to survive and we've going to have to get back to the basic values of family, of relationship rather than money, acquisition. Private property doesn't work. That's the song of this nation, private property. And so you lose community. The community is what we're after and getting back into the community of the earth itself because that's one big community, we're all one. We're a long ways away from that. But we can do it, we can get back and around the world, yes, they are trying, yes, yes, they are trying. But we have to get better leadership in this country. We have to get leadership with vision and with responsibility to the future. That's what the Peacemaker said, seven generations; make your decision on behalf of seven generations coming. You, yourself, will have peace, that's just common sense. Never give up. That was a big lesson, don't give up. Don't give up on anybody. They can change. In Sweden now we have a coalition of very active people and among them is one of the best filmmakers in Sweden, a very famous man and along with another active person that promotes events and so forth. And they have agreed to do a film on, a feature film on global warming. They said, ‘We know how to do it,' and they've prepared it. And so what I'm trying to do now is get $2 million from somewhere to get this film made and then we'll get it distributed. We want to do it in six languages simultaneously so the message gets to the people and they know how to do that. Now that's urgency, that's awareness that you've got to bill to the people cause leadership knows what's going on. They're just not pressed by the people. So that is one of the things I'm working on. I also work on the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders and Youth on the issue of keeping your culture and so forth. I think the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse teams is great fun for me and great for everybody and it's a great venue for interaction so I always put a lot of time in that. And teaching is good cause I talk directly to the children. And family, getting back to the family. So that's where I'm at. I work with the Sami people up north and they have the same problems we have. Global warming is really manifesting up there. Ice is melting, a big problem for the reindeer because it melts and freezes and they can't get to the grass, the liken. They can starve in a short time that way. They live on a daily basis. But they have good years and bad years and they have the same problems with the people, there's racism and so forth. Positive though, the government is much more positive over there towards them than here towards us. We shouldn't have to be suing the federal government for money it owes us, that belongs to us."

Building strengths and making peace

Oren Lyons:

"Peace is a dynamic action. Peace is not passive. Peace requires a lot of action and a lot of activity. It's light, it's light and it has to be always pushed, always promoted, always acted upon. On the other hand negative energy is heavy and it's dark and it has its own strength on that. If you stand still, you lose. It's easier to sleep in the morning than to get up. It's easier not to work than to work. It's always easier to do the negative than it is the positive. You have to recognize that and you have to do your own personal battle and you have to make your peace with creation and I would say coming from Priscilla V. Hill, ‘Peace and prayer are powerful.' That's the basis of where you go for your strength. Individually we're not strong enough for anything so we've got to get people back on line, spiritual path. Thomas Benyaka used to say, the old Hopi elder and he made his trips around, all the time he always said the same thing, ‘Prayer, meditation; prayer, meditation,' and that's powerful. So we have a spiritual strength and available, we should use it. It's more powerful than anything and that's the ceremonies. Thanksgiving. We still hold it. I'll say one more thing. In the longest walk there was an elder from Japan, the venerable Fujison. He's 100 years old and he was in charge of the peace Buddhists, they come and they sing that ‘no more [1:19:09] ??' and they play that. That's his people. He instructed them to come on the longest walk with us and they did, they walked the whole way, they're Buddhists. And he came along, later on and he was being pushed in his wheelchair. He had a sticker on the side said, ‘The Longest Walk,' and they hosted us when they had a pagoda in Washington, D.C. and they hosted everybody that came. They had a big meal they cooked for us and everything and they were sitting in a circle on a table and the elders were there, Chief Shenandoah, some elders from Lakota Country, Chief Farmer and I remember Chief Shenandoah saying to him, ‘Why are you here with us? Why have you...what have you...why are you here? Why have you joined us?' And the venerable Fujison said, ‘I have studied human relations around the world,' and he says, ‘I don't think there has been a people that have been more abused and have suffered more than the Native American people.' He said, ‘Yet, you have kept your spiritual center.' He said, ‘It's strong, it's crystallized.' He says, ‘Of course you have all the problems, of course you have this and you have that and you have drinking and drugging and all that.' He said, ‘But you also have kept the spiritual core.' And he says, ‘And I believe that the spiritual center of the earth is here in North America with your people.' That was his statement. I never forgot it cause we don't think that way. We just go along and do what we do. That was his observation and it makes me think every now and then what that means."

The instruction Oren Lyons would leave

Oren Lyons:

"I have two instructions to our nations. Be thank for what you have, there's all the ceremonies. Second instruction was, enjoy life."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo Credit:
Oren Lyons
The Onondaga Nation

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government 

 

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "The Importance of Strategic Planning"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders explain the importance of strategic thinking and planning to effective Native nation governance and emphasize the consideration of future generations in Native nations' decision-making processes.

Native Nations
Topics
Citation

Hurtado, Denny. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Interview.

Makil, Ivan. Nation Building seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 6, 2005. Presentation.

Minthorn, Antone. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Interview.

Ninham-Hoeft, Patricia. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Interview.

Antone Minthorn:

"When you're talking about planning, our negotiators at the Treaty of 1855 were always concerned about the children. 'We're here because of the children. We're negotiating because of the children. That's why we're here.' They made that point very strongly while they were there negotiating. And to me as I'm sitting there reading that, all of a sudden it just dawns on me: 'They're talking about me.' And you know that kind of hits you deep because you say, 'Well, I have the same responsibility...to the children.' They've got to be taken care of."

Ivan Makil:

"And as leaders, that is one of the responsibilities you have. Is to have that vision and to help define a vision for your people so that there's gonna to be several paths you can take. But you want to define something that provides the kinds of things your people need, the kinds of things your people are looking for, the kinds of things that are consistent with the lifestyle and those values that are important to your people, the kinds of things I call seven-generation thinking. Seven-generation thinking, meaning very simply, that when we make decisions -- and this is a traditional concept as well -- that we think about the impacts of our decision on the next seven generations."

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft:

"I've seen too often, especially in my tribe, where the focus has been on helping the general manager of the casino manage the casino better. So, conversations maybe about how to get a better slot system in or how to get the air conditioner to work better. And we'll spend hours talking about those kinds of things -- or how to hire the next public relations campaign to educate the business community around our tribe. When what's missing then is that no one is talking about, 'Where is this tribe going a hundred years from today?' and 'What do we want to be a hundred years from today?' And it's hard to do that.

I think I've come to the realization that we don't really spend a lot of time talking about those things as kids, or as young adults, or even in college. So when you're elected and you figure out that's what you are supposed to do, it's hard to do that. It's hard to carve out the time to really talk and debate with one another about what you think the future should be and so you get distracted by the little stuff. Because those are things you're familiar with and you know how to help that way and when you leave you feel like you have a sense of accomplishment that, 'Yup, I helped avert another crisis today. I must be earning my keep.' So it really takes discipline to get yourself to talk about vision."

Denny Hurtado:

"The tribal council itself having some stability and some continuity. I think that's really critical. Because what happens is, when you have elections and a whole new council comes in, it just set the tribe back another five years because you start over new, basically. So, I think what successful tribes do is, they have these long-term plans -- five, ten, fifteen, twenty years into the future. And I think that helps the stability of the tribe in a way that creates a venue for when a different council member gets on there, a different chairman; at least they still have this plan that they follow and it creates some continuity."

Regis Pecos: The Role of Core Values in Cochiti Governance and Renewal

Producer
Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

In this excerpted video, former Cochiti Governor Regis Pecos provides an overview of the core values that are integral to Cochiti's culture and way of life, and shows how his people relied on the application of those core values to overcome a catastrophe and rebuild its nation and community.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Bush Foundation.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pecos, Regis. "The Role of Core Values in Cochiti Governance and Renewal." Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation, Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 2, 2011. Presentation.

"[Cochiti language] is, in my language, a greeting to all of you. I wanted to first express my appreciation and thanks to the, our sister and our elder who shared with us this morning a prayer and a song. And sitting back there as she sang really, it's not difficult to become emotional. If you think about how, over time, these songs of our people have been shared and really, no matter what language, it resonates deep with inside of us because those are the voices of our forefathers, those become the voices of all those who've gone before, that we are connected to, and so it's a beautiful way to remind all of us of the sacred trust that we have to all those in our communities, to all the children, to all those who are yet to be born. And I want to thank the Bush Foundation, as well as the Native Nations Institute. One, for creating the opportunity for this kind of discourse that really also needs to be said in congratulating all of you, in all of your respective capacities, to take this time in our collective journey to stop and reflect. I want to share with you, and I'm going to use my Native language because I think like the song shared with us, to begin this dialogue today, it's only in our language that we can fully come to appreciate and understand what enormous responsibility we have, at this particular time in our journey, and how everything that we do affects so many more into the future. But it also is a way to honor all those who have gone before who, in their time, rose to the challenge to define our inheritance, all that defines who we are as Indigenous people. And so I want to begin in sharing with you, something very intimate about Pueblo people. And I want to begin -- I have only 30 minutes -- and I'm going to take you from our time our origin or emergence or creation, all the way to 2012 in 30 minutes. So we're going to be on a fast track here. But, for us, this is how we describe from where we come from, what we're connected to that defines our present day sacred trust, to those who have gone before, but to those yet to be born...

This we call the gifts of the Creator. From this the Creator also gave us something that we call our traditional calendar, the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month. In all of our societies and all of our cultures we all have a cycle, don't we? We all have a cycle and here for us it's broken up into winter, spring, summer, and fall. But each of us know intimately something very similar to this calendar no matter where we are as Indigenous people. And this process, during the course of the year, is an annual renewal of these core values, reminders, validators, confirmation, reaffirmation of all that is connected to our core values. Year round we engage in this process. And if I went to table to table to ask, when is a time in your life when you find the greatest joy and peace in your existence? I'll bet to say that every one of you will point to a time somewhere in this cycle of our traditional calendar where we are engaged in ceremony and we feel the peace because there is an expected kind of behavior that connects all of us. We hear the children laugh, we see the love and respect given in accordance to our elders, we see those who are singing, those who are dancing, those who are supporting ceremony by observation and support and encouragement. Don't we? And we find incredible sense of joy and peace engaged in this process.

But, over time, our elders also spoke that along this journey that there will be times along our journey that there will be many challenges to these core values. For the Pueblo people it came at a time when conquistadors came to New Mexico, threatened the core values: our land, our way of life, our people, our families, our resources. And what was the response? As all of you in your time as you reflect upon your past and your history there have been similar challenges to your core values, the core values of who you are. And often our forefathers knew the only way to continue to sustain a way of life, to protect all the gifts of our Creator, was sometimes to give their lives to resist these threats. Right? Our forefathers gave often their lives so that we would inherit all that we have that sustains who we are as a people.

And so the Pueblo people in that time revolted in 1680 to move back the Spanish colonizers in what is now New Mexico. Upon their return was our first challenge of adaption. In order that Pueblo way of life, as the Creator gave to us, would survive they compromised necessarily and adapted to embrace Catholicism in order that our own way of life as was a gift from the Creator might survive. It also compromised to embrace an overlay to Pueblo government as they knew and as we knew it since time immemorial that results in a layer that is still part of that adaption today as we have governors and lieutenant governors, viscales, which is an overlay. But they adapted to protect our own internal leadership that continues to this day. And in that process of the first adaption, to protect what the Creator gave us, affected our governance system, creating one of the rare theocracies in this world where there is no separation of church and state. If we go through the rest of history since the time of colonization that all indigenous people have experienced, in all parts of the world, but for all of us in this country, right?

I just want to quickly take you through a timeline that would look something like this for everyone. Since colonization, since the U.S. experience, here we are, us, today. And here are our parents. Here are our grandparents. Here are our great grandparents, and so on, our connection to the past. In the last one hundred years, there is a personal connection to the imposition of federal policies and laws that threaten in the same way our core values. Our lands have been reduced, policies prohibiting the practice of our own way of life, policies and laws that attempted to destroy our family institutions, to destroy our communities. But 1934 became an important imposition for us to remember because 1935 is a reminder of one of the most significant impositions of recent history that affects the very foundation and framework of governance in our communities, the transformation, the detribalization of our own traditional governance systems, right? And the way in which many of our communities, that kind of imposition has resulted in the kind of dysfunction that results in similar dysfunction in this country. That when you turn on the television, turn on the radio, and all you hear is adversity and antagonism between the republicans and the democrats, right? Sometimes we think whether or not they are for the citizens of this country because it all is about what, the maintenance of power driven by the economics. And if we can imagine that kind of dynamics at one level, think about what that does in small communities where that kind of imposition results in tremendous conflict, sometimes unresolvable it seems. But let us think about that imposition and the lasting impacts and let us think about what happened in 1980 during the Reagan administration, where sometimes the unconscious imposition, in the name of development, results in equally devastating, the destruction of our core values with this kind of imposition for planning and development that has resulted in a whole other overlay, that results sometimes as it did for us; one of the first experiences, experiments in this country with private investment on reservation lands. And sometimes this kind of scenario drives us away from the core values paradigm of decision-making when we consider the cost and the benefits of imposed development.

On our reservation, as a result of these kind of proposals imposed, was a master plan for development. Forty thousand people -- where our Pueblo leased half our reservation for 99 years, creating an unprecedented non-Indian government that in time would compete against us. But an associated development with a master plan of this kind, unheard of, was a construction of the tenth largest man-made lakes in the world and in this country that destroyed in the process, revered places of worship. How could it be that this kind of decision would be made by leaders in our community? Well it happens when we move away from our core values, to disregard the costs and the benefits whether or not these decisions are compatible with the protection of something as sacred as our core values. And so it was for a predominately oral society, a traditional governance system, we had to work from within, stepping back as you all are in your respective capacities to assess what is happening and what is likely to happen if this continues. The obvious for us is that we would become a minority on our own reservation within just a few years if the master plan and the development were to be pursued and it became a reality; forty thousand on a reservation where we number just around a thousand, leasing half the reservation for ninety-nine years. I have a grandson who would be an elder in the community before that expires in 2065.

The destruction and the desecration is something we can undo with regard to where our emergence and our origin centers. So the elders said do what is possible to undo the mistakes made. And so now for the last thirty years we have been engaged to undo this master plan from within developing probably one of the first community development corporations as was recommended by the Reagan administration as a way to separate traditional governance from governing major business and development. But we chose to move in the other direction to really use the core values as the heart of our decision making and strategizing in how to reclaim, how to re-control so that those children yet to be born in fulfilling our sacred trust might still have a homeland. For the children yet to be born can still have a place to call home; that they might inherit from us, the language that connects them to the core values the Creator gave to us that they still might have a meaningful way of life connected to family, connected to community, connected and revering the relationships to the resources and the environment. But most importantly, that they maintain at the core of their existence, the kind of love and respect and compassion that comes with living core values as central and being the heart and the soul of what the Creator intended in the gifts the Creator gave us, in the traditional calendar of engagement of reaffirming and validating that that is what is the meaningfulness of our lives is to have that connection.

So over time there has been all these impositions using education as a classic example with the creation of boarding schools in 1890 taking children from our families from our communities to destroy all our core values, to wipe it out of existence so that we would become like everyone else in this country. Right? But our forefathers resisted. Think about when we became eligible as native people in this country with head start. What we still have not reconciled is one other classic example. That when we embraced head start we never asked the question of where is it a head start to? Is it a process of accelerating fluency of English at the expense of our mother tongue central to our core values? Since the time of forced integration of Johnson O'Malley into public school, the racial and discrimination that was epitomized in that time that resulted in many adults in their time making conscious decisions that they would not teach their children their mother tongue because of what they experienced. Right? A threat to our mother tongue. And today in this time of self-determination, let's ask ourselves that as we're controlling BIA schools, as we are now contracting schools through grant schools, tribally controlled schools now in our own communities, let us ask ourselves, what are we doing differently in this time of self-determination from those times when we didn't have control and that we were critical of? Right? Does that make sense? What are we doing differently in this time of self-determination from now that we are in control different from those times when we didn't have control and that we were critical of?

Education has been one of those other classic examples that has been elusive; knowing full well that that formal education process is a process and a movement from our core values. Right? At the expense of diminishing the influence of our cultural education connected to our core values. Think that in 2011 there are a few places in all of Indian Country that really has been able to strike a balance in the way that we educate our children. What we've not been able to do to maintain the connection of all those who we encourage to go out and to get an education in hopes that someday they might come home to be a part of the capacity of our communities, to create the kind of insulation so that we can preserve and maintain the internal aspects that connect us to those core values while we create the capacity of another concentric circle as we have in pueblo governance to deal with the external forces so that we insulate and protect the oldest form of our government system closest to our core values where we have been able to strike that balance internally, maintaining the leadership of our spiritual leaders, of our clan leaders who have their own role for the maintenance of this the maintenance of our traditional calendar so that what we have built over time are these concentric circles.

But all of these concentric circles that define shared responsibilities that insulate and protects the internal core and maintenance of our way of life while the capacity in another concentric circle deals with all the external forces with state government, with federal government, with business and development. But the center of the heart and soul of the strategy is how do we maintain the indigenous knowledge tied to our core values while we are able to deal with development in ways that does not threaten the survival of our core values, with our connection to all of these core values, as business and development can, in ways that in this time of self-determination to think about this in conscious ways that in this time of self-determination we cannot afford to do this. We're here today, us. The decisions we make today affect our children. Right? The decisions we make for those of us who are grandparents are already there affecting grandchildren. How many have great-grandchildren? The decisions we make today, we're already here effecting multiple generations but a hundred years hence. Our responsibility is to maintain these connections. The worst that we can do if we are unconsciously making decision not connected to the core values is to do this; is to contribute to the disconnect of future generation to our core values and thus breaking the relationship and connections that have existed since the time of origin of emergence of creation that has sustained our relationships our connection as the Creator intended along this journey.

For us in Cochiti, the threats to our survival, to our core values was real. But over the course of the last thirty years we have really used our core values to return to our policy making, our decision making to those set of core values to fully evaluate using the core values of all decisions with this very simplified cost/benefit analysis. That if a decision is going to be a threat to our core values it better have greater benefits because what we cannot afford to do in this time is to contribute to what the federal government failed to accomplish in all that it did to conceive policies that disconnected many from their homelands in the creation of the reservation, the laws that they created to kill our mother tongue with language prohibition, laws that they created to disconnect us from our way of life when they created codes and laws to persecute religious practitioners, laws and policies they created to dismantle family and community, laws and policies that they created to completely reorganize traditional governance systems, laws and policies the federal government created to completely remake our jurisprudence system, laws and policies this federal government created and implemented to disconnect us from our most precious resources. Right? But here we are today, starting with a prayer, with a beautiful song that represents that connection to our core value; using language as a way to communicate; rethinking how we maintain a way of life, our sense of spirituality. Here we are reflecting on how we restore our governance systems; that in the name of revenue and employment and development that it cannot be the ultimate compromised and demised to our core values. Here we are evaluating how governance, more comprehensively, is interrelated to all of the core values in this core values paradigm and not isolated. And how in isolation, if we treat it that way is a demise to the rest of the core values in this cost/benefit analysis, absent the core values.

And so I'm here simply to share in a very short period of time what holding true to our core values as the Creator intended has resulted in a second chance to maintain that connection as we have done in our little community of Cochiti, challenging the United States of America in its desecration and devastation of our place of worship and prevailing; undoing a master plan that would have brought forty thousand people leasing half the reservation with a non-Indian government. No one gave us a chance but we prevailed. Stopping hydroelectric power at that same sacred site, suing the federal energy regulatory commission. No one gave us a chance but we prevailed. That's our story. But we built from within using the core values using the oldest forms of government, no constitution, unwritten, using our oral societies, its customs, its traditional laws and applying it outwardly and externally to protect our core values at every turn drawing from that source, of that spirit and prayer that comes with our connection to those core values. We prevailed in all that David and Goliath challenges.

I want to simply say to end this that the elders speak that along this journey for all of us as indigenous peoples, each generation is faced with incredibly profound challenges and sometimes for all of us its overwhelming. Where we are today in our journey collectively as indigenous peoples, we've never been. Right? We've never been faced with quite the same set of circumstances but all we have to do is to reflect upon what our forefathers overcame, to look at their courage, their vision, their resiliency that sometimes what we feel so overwhelmed with, at a time when all these federal polices and laws have resulted in fragile nature of our core values, but they have survived and they have survived as a result from all those who have gone before who were never willing to compromise, all of that because that is what defines who we are as Indian people. The question becomes how will in a hundred years from now, how will those great, great grand-children reflect upon this time? And how...and will they be as kind as we are to our forefathers as they reflect what it is we did in this time that connected them to that time since origin, emergence or creation. That's our challenge today. But here you are in a very significantly profound time of stepping back and reflecting and asking, what am I contributing to? Am I contributing to sustaining and strengthening our core values in my community? Or are the decisions that I'm making taking us further away from our core values? And lastly, I just want to stop and ask, for all of us to ask this thought provoking question. What will our children inherit from us? What will your grandchildren inherit from you? And what will your community look like in the next one hundred years? These are all questions that you can't find anywhere else but within you. And you can be driven to connect them in this similar fashion if we hold strong to the core values.

And I really think as I was sharing with my good friend here that it is incredibly rewarding to know the courage that you all possess to simply be having this kind of discussion because it is a time in history, as long as we maintain and sustain this discourse, I think history will look kindly upon all of you and all of us as a time that we step back to reflect, to see where we've come from, to look at the complex challenges that have deep roots in the past but to be conscious in thinking of how I'm going to contribute to what those children of the future will inherit from us. And it truly is in time, I feel strongly, that will be represented by a definition that this really was a conscious time of a major renaissance of our people. That's how I look at this time. And I want to thank you for your courage and your own resilience because I know the difficulty in each one of our communities to be having the discussion that you all are. So thank you all and I hope this is a useful reflection in a very quick way."

Honoring Nations: Oren Lyons: The Challenges Ahead

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Onondaga Chief and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons briefly summarizes the critical, urgent challenges that global warming and resulting climate changes present to Indigenous people and all human beings, and stresses that the principles that traditionally nurtured the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the natural world can serve as a starting point to turning the tide against global warming.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Lyons, Oren. "The Challenges Ahead." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project for American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"[Onondaga Language] Thank you for being well. Thank you for being here. And as I was reminded last night by Miriam [Jorgensen] -- where is she -- it's 11 years. It's 11 years this program has been moving. It's fast and it continues. I'm always encouraged by the innovations and by the efforts out there by our people across the Turtle Island and how things are changing. Today, we're going to be hearing from one of our people who [has] been assigned to the White House -- really changing. It's been quite awhile. And I think we have to take advantage of the opportunities that are going to be presented to us. We have to be quick now and we have to move when the opportunity arises and we have to make our own innovations, as things will change.

This past May, there was a report given by MIT and MIT has -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- has been studying global warming, probably the most serious of the studies since 1860 to 2090, 2100. And when they first made the report, they predicted that global warming would raise 2.5 [degrees] Celsius by 2090 and that it was moving. And that was early report. I think it was only four or five years ago. And they've studied this from 1860. Now, they made another report in May -- having newer technology and better able to assess -- the very next report, which you should get and become aware of. They said, 'Oops, we were wrong. It's going to be anywhere from five to seven point Celsius warmer.' That's a big wrong. And that's science. And if science is so far behind, then we have to pay attention ourselves to what we see and what we know. I know in the prediction,s many of our nations have been given messages and they've been given predictions, and the Haudenosaunee is one of them.

We receive messages periodically; the last one 1799. And at that time, we were told that these things were going to happen. When the messenger that was receiving this said, 'Well, if that's the case,' he said, 'Well, why bother?' And they said, 'Tell your people that the generation that allows this to happen is going to suffer beyond all comprehension. Tell your people to work hard and not let it be your generation.' So in other words, what happens to us is in our hands; it's up to us. We will determine what our own fate is, no one else. That's across the country. So pay attention to your leaders, pay attention who you put into power and authority; see that they are recommending a positive future for your children. Pay real good attention, because times are shifting and they're going to be very, very rough and coming very fast.

So when they moved up that Celsius it also moved up the time. So we don't have the time that people think we have or talk about. It's very quick, it's compounding -- two compound actions going on right now, which is determining how things are going to go. One is the compounding of human beings; we're exponentially exploding. And we went from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 6.7 today and climbing very fast -- probably 6.8 now. And that's 59 years, 59 years and more than doubled the population of the world and it's going to do it again. That's water, land, food, security. Those are unsustainable figures, numbers. And the compounding, the other compounding is the ice melt. The ice cap in Greenland is melting and it's accelerating. Everything is accelerating and this is what we're not prepared for -- the acceleration -- and this is what the MIT report supports. Yes, there is an acceleration and it will continue, it will continue to accelerate. So just a reminder and something to think about, in the future, that our children, probably many people in this room, will be experiencing more than you thought you were going to experience. So leadership is important and fundamental principles of your nation are important and the relationship that we talked about, we heard in prayer this morning -- that relationship is fundamentally important to understand how closely we're connected with the earth. We're not separate. We're not separate. We're part of it and that's the message in these prayers, how close we are related, our relatives, our relations.

So in our efforts to maintain and raise the standards of our own living and our own territories and so forth, also pay attention to the spiritual side of things, because that's where your strength is going to be, that's where you're going to rely. It's going to be the knowledge of your grandfathers and your grandmothers -- powerful. It's now being asked around the world, people are now talking about Indian wisdom. Well, they come up to Onondaga and they say, 'Tell me some of your wisdom.' I say, 'Well, I don't know.' 'I'm Episcopalian, all I can tell you about Episcopalians,' is what they told me. But no, over the long hauls we've kept our ceremonies. We just finished the green corn, and I know in your areas you've taken care of that. And you want to do that, that's really important. That's our relationship, that's what's important. So with that I welcome you and we're looking at another year. It's a good fight, we're on the right side and I'm up for it."

Anthony Pico: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians Chairman Anthony Pico reflects on his experiences as leader of his nation, and stresses the importance of Native nations strengthening their systems of governance in order to protect and strengthen their cultures and ways of life. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Pico, Anthony. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

"First of all, good morning to all of you here! It's an honor and a privilege to be here before you, because I know that there literally has been 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 leaders that have come before you -- if you think about the history of your people and your Aboriginal histories. I'd also like to thank the Tohono O'odham Nation for allowing me to be here on their land. And I'm very grateful to Native Nations Institute, the University of Arizona and Ian Record for inviting me here today. And I'd also like to thank my people -- the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay -- and our tribal council and the honorable Bobby Barrett -- our chairman -- for making it possible for me to be with all of you. I'd like to introduce to you the Vice Chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay, the honorable Raymond {Coy) Hyde. Also, my good friend and childhood friend and one of the ones -- he and his mother approached me many years ago to run for tribal chairman. I remember that. (You're going to get it.) And I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the University of Arizona, the Morris K. Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, Native Nations Institute and its founders and directors and its staff for their continuous and social and economic progress for America's Indigenous peoples. I'd like to particularly extend my gratitude to Manley Begay, Stephen Cornell, Joseph Kalt, Miriam Jorgensen and Joan Timeche and others who have tirelessly advocated for tribal sovereignty and self-governance.

I recently recalled with a friend, the early days in Viejas -- at a time when about 152 impoverished citizens shared the land with an equal number of dogs and cats and frogs and coyotes. There was little economic development then on the res. And for young men and women -- mostly young men I guess at that time -- without a job there wasn't much to do except play baseball and pitch horseshoes. I remember at nighttime, with a star-filled sky, and you could still hear the clanging of horseshoes on iron pegs. I served more than two decades as the elected leader of my people and there were many on the reservation who contend my greatest accomplishments during those days was my ability to pitch horseshoes in total darkness. As in the case with many American Indians, I was raised poor in an abusive and alcoholic family, and were it not for res adoptive parents -- and this was before the Indian Child Welfare Act -- and the support of a nurturing spirit of our community, I'm convinced that today I'd either be dead or I'd be wasting away in some prison, as was the fate of many of my contemporaries. I eventually received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane letters from Long Island University in New York, but I wasn't a good student in my early years. I was continually put in remedial classes, and halfway through high school [I was] still in those remedial classes. And I was really convinced that I was stupid. But there were exceptions, in the fourth grade and the seventh grades, I remember the teachers who expressed an interest in me and my grades soared from Ds and Fs to Cs and Bs. And so I learned then, in retrospect, that such is the power of the caring spirit. I battled alcoholism from when I was a young man, and it's a struggle that continues with me today. It's a struggle that I will continue for the rest of my life, but I am surviving this and I even thrive under those conditions. And why am I so sure? Because I've always been a firm believer of the strength of the human spirit; I've always maintained that the Creator instilled in every man, woman and child the ability to rise above the fray and to succeed where others have failed and to achieve what others may view as unachievable.

Leadership, in my experience, is defined and created by adversity; and I know this to be true. I saw it in Vietnam when I served as a paratrooper in the United States Army infantry, where I witnessed young and normally docile men who in combat reached down deep within, and grasping the courage that they never dreamed that they even had, overcoming fears and leading our comrades to victory or safe haven. And I've seen it here in the United States with American Indians' struggle for social and economic justice and the protection and preservation of sovereignty and self-governance. Our tortured history since European settlement is, of course, a saga of loss and struggle, death, poverty and disease, war and suppression, misguided federal policy, racism and neglect. We've been able to hold onto what little that we have only through the courage of our elders and our ancestors who rose above the turmoil and reached down deep within themselves to surface as warriors and scholars and diplomats and prophets. They were all leaders.

The title of this seminar is 'What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office.' Who thought that up? Huh? Where is Mr. Kalt? I had some difficulty with the topic, largely because I'm not at a place in my life where I harbor any great deal of regrets. I can say, however, that I went through a transformation of sorts. It occurred later in my second decade of my nearly 24 years as tribal chairperson. I was not so much groomed for leadership as I was influenced by the caring spirit of my people at Viejas -- citizens of Viejas who freely gave of their time. And it's the Kumeyaay way to share and to care for other people as it is I know for your people. Even when we were poor in finances, we were and are rich in spirit and our sense of community of family has always been strong. That's why I've always given freely of my time. As I said earlier, were it not for the community of Viejas I would be dead or in jail, I have no doubt about that. When tribal leaders in 1983 asked me to seek public office, my response was of course to say 'yes.' They knew me. They saw me growing up as a boy to manhood. They had confidence in me, and suffice to say their belief in the human spirit was perhaps greater than mine. And the fact is that they really pulled me up out of the gutter and asked me to lead them.

Our tribal government budget deficit at the time was $3,000. My elders wanted me to create an economy there at Viejas and that was my focus for the first 15 years as elected tribal leader of my people. Viejas is recognized today for its success in creating a strong and diversified tribal economy. We have of course a casino, we own our own community bank, a shopping center, two RV parks, an entertainment business, and we created tribal partnerships in the development of the Marriott Residence Inn in Washington, DC -- a block and a half from the capitol, from that museum, and actually on the capitol mall in Sacramento. And one of our partners is Oneida. And we today are planning to build an $800 million casino resort. I can't take the bulk of the credit for my success. The strategies and policies that paved the way to progress on Viejas was largely the achievement of a competent staff under the direction of able leadership from the Viejas tribal council and our general membership.

Viejas also benefited from the leadership of California tribes during the gaming wars of the 1990s that resulted in landmark ballot initiatives in tribal-state compacted gaming. And again, it was adversity that brought out our leadership qualities of Indian tribes. When we were fighting the gaming wars, California tribal leaders walked in lock-step unity. We knew how to manipulate the press and we were savvy in our public relations. We learned the political game and played it like a drum and we were a formidable coalition. When the war was over we became complacent; we forgot what made us so formidable. With the leadership of four tribal governments rose yet again in referendum success earlier this year and that allowed us to expand the casino operations. It was late in the gaming wars of 1990 that I went through a transformation as I mentioned earlier. Danny Tucker, my good friend and mentor and chairman of the Sycuan Band of Kumeyaay hired a brilliant tactician -- former chairman Larry Kinley of the Lummi Nation -- to assist us in developing strategy in our ongoing political confrontation there in California. The Lummi and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest fought the landmark legal battles with Washington State and the federal government over the fishing rights. The battles resulted in the victorious 1974 decision by U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt affirming tribal rights to 50 percent of the salmon and the harvest of Washington State. The landmark Boldt decision was later upheld in the United States Supreme Court. The Lummi later were among several tribes that adopted newly elected federal policies of self-governance, embracing self-determination -- independence from the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Lummi Nation has never accepted money from the federal government paid to them for their land and despite crippling poverty and desperate needs, it sits in a bank untouched. To take the money, the elders taught, would be an erosion of their sovereignty. The Lummi have never signed a treaty and to this day they say would be a violation of that sacred right. I've always embraced a vague notion of sovereignty and its importance to Viejas and other tribal nations.

The Lummi Nation taught me that sovereignty was the journey -- it was a long and never-ending trek. That through a hurricane of rival interests, competing political agendas, and a greed for power, the Lummi ignited a fire in my belly and it still burns to this day. It's not economic progress that will sustain Native America for the next seven generations and beyond; it's sovereignty and the strengthening of our governments that will insure that future generations will continue to live what you consider, a Native way of life. That is in fact, what is put forth by Native Nations Institute -- that only by strengthening our governments and non-economic institutions can we build a foundation for long-term economic and social progress.

As you know, times have changed. Tribes are changing. Our children are changing, subject to the influence of the modern world in which we all live. Our languages are dying and so are those who practice and teach us the old traditions and values. We need to see, feel and imagine and reinvent Indian sovereignty into what it is. And we need to do this within each tribe within all Indian Country, and there are different paths and future emphasis for tribes to take. Some tribes will strengthen heir sovereignty through spiritual and religious beliefs and practices; some will provide new modern and strong 21st-century tribal governments. Others will focus on economic development as they build the infrastructure. I hope the tribes will focus on healing the pain of the past and the psychological damage of poverty and social disintegration that haunts each generation. Each can and will carry us to a new place if we continue to share and learn from each others' experiences and examples. It's critical that we find ways to free ourselves from the patterns of self-destruction, the unrecognized anger we have, the abuse and racism that drives so many to alcohol, to drugs and suicide. We have to learn to live life again not deaden ourselves to it. If not for ourselves, then we must learn to be life-affirming for the sake of our children and those children that aren't born.

It's an incredible challenge to break new ground in Indian Country. It's an ever greater challenge to find and forge a path that preserves our roots while accommodating the demands of today's world. The moment has come to exercise and claim such a place for modern Indians. Can we seize this opportunity and create a renaissance for our tribe and people in the present? What we and our elders and those of us before have struggled so hard to hold onto, our sovereignty and our right to self-governance, we can so easily lose. The greatest and most important legacy that we leave our children, grandchildren, and those generations to come is the opportunity to live a Native way of life. We can only keep that promise if we grasp our sovereignty tightly and not let it gradually slip away as grains of sand through a clenched fist.

Am I worried about the future? No. There will be struggles, there will be adversity, but the struggles will make us strong and diligent. From the seeds of adversity will grow our future leaders. Struggle and adversity can bring the best in the individual. I know this to be true and it can do the same for tribes. I have a concern and it rests with the United States Supreme Court and its ability to strengthen or erode sovereignty and our right to govern our own lands. This is where our focus must be, in my opinion, in protecting our shield of sovereignty from attack by the nation's highest court. I have a wish that tribes embrace transparency in governance, openness with both tribal citizens and non-Indian governments. Truth is our most important and powerful ally and I strongly advocate that tribes look carefully at their image with the non-Indian public. How we are perceived by the public and elected officials and policy makers will define our future. We are increasingly being perceived not as nations and governments, with a stalwart and culturally rich past, but as businesses and corporations, purveyors of gambling and that is a dangerous trend. Openness in public relations is an arrow in our quiver, which we have not successfully used. We must sharpen it and aim it to where it does the most good. Make no mistake, I believe -- and I've been criticized for saying this -- but I firmly believe this: when push comes to shove, it's the voting public of this country that will determine the fate of Native Americans.

I'm in the autumn of my years now; my days in public office are over.* But I look over the audience today -- and speaking to others while I've been here at today's and tomorrow's leaders -- and I take great pride and comfort knowing that the future of Native America is in competent and capable hands. I will not chart your future; that's for you to decide. You must look to yourself, to your tribe, to your Creator and just as important, to your ancestors who have gone before you and communicate with them, through prayer or however ways you can do that. They are there and they're willing and they're able and they will listen to you. And in conclusion, never, never forget the blood of our ancestors have blessed the continents of North and South America. That blood runs in your veins right now as I speak. To not do the best that we can and are capable of would be an insult to the suffering and their pain that they had to endure. Fight as fiercely and as wise as you can and deliver Native America to the next generation. Thank you." 

* Anthony Pico was elected to another term as Chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay in December 2010.

Honoring Nations: Oren Lyons: Rebuilding Healthy Nations

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Onondaga Chief and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons urges Native nations to continue sharing their stories of success, learning from each other, and working towards creating a better future for the next seven generations.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Lyons, Oren. "Rebuilding Healthy Nations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Amy Besaw Medford:

"Welcome! My name is Amy Besaw Medford and I'm the Director of the Honoring Nations program. I'm Brothertown Indian from Wisconsin and Korean. I come from two wonderful, beautiful cultures and I'm very happy to serve in the function as director here. I work under Professor Joe Kalt, who's the Director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. That's the home for the Honoring Nations program. All of you, the honorees, create the raw material with which the Harvard Project produces research. You also impact the lives of the students here at the [John F.] Kennedy School of Government and the greater Harvard community, as being opportunities for them to hear on-the-ground examples of good governance practices, particularly in the fields of health and education and justice. So you've reached a broader audience than you possibly could imagine, and we thank you from the Harvard community.

Before we begin the day, we'll have a series of folks to start the general conversations about tribal governance. We don't say 'tribal government' in just the hard sense because a lot of the things that happen here are about governance, about community-driven models, about things that come from citizens' involvement. But then the key piece of it is is that it's coming through government function, that you're building stable institutions of good governance practices, that you're serving the needs of your citizens. And so tonight we celebrate, or today we celebrate governance. I hope you all will join me in welcoming our fearless, fearless leader, Chief Oren Lyons, who -- what do you say about a man who is known throughout the world for his Indigenous leadership, for his thinking, for his advocacy work, and for his lacrosse playing? Rumor has it he's also wearing the new Nike© shoes. So without further adieu, Chief Oren Lyons."

Oren Lyons:

"Thank you, Amy. Indeed, I have the new Nike© shoe on, and we'll talk about that. This is the important gathering where we celebrate the accomplishments of the Native people of North America, your accomplishments. It's all positive. It's a recognition of the abilities of our people to meet the problems of the day, these contemporary times. And it's important when we come to a new land -- the Wampanoags are the leaders here. They had to deal with the English the first time, the great leader Massasoit, [King] Philip (Metacom). There's a great history here that a lot of people don't know. You hear about Thanksgiving. There was, there was a great meeting once, and then it seemed to disappear. And then Colonel Bradford, sometime later after the Wampanoag Wars and after they had killed Metacom in a swamp with 16 men fighting to the end, he declared that day a Day of Thanksgiving. So the history here is the first in the old, in the westward movement of our Brothers from across the water, engulfed all of us sooner or later, from here to the West Coast. And our Brother kept going. He went on to the Philippines and he was stopped there. Later on, he went on to Vietnam and he was stopped there. Now he's gone east, having quite a bit of trouble.

Meanwhile, here we are. We're still here, we still have our nations, we still have our leaders and certainly, we accomplish things. Our young people are struggling in these times, as all the young people are in this world. It's not an easy time for anybody. And in Indian Country we can name the problems, but today we're going to celebrate the positives and what we can do and what we accomplished and what you have done for your nations, for you have represented them very well. Honoring Nations is a very difficult program to choose winners. I always feel bad because of the many programs that come forward and we wind up with 14. But it was so difficult for all of us to come to these 14 because they're almost all equal. And it's a tribute to our people, to our resiliency and to our ability to adapt and at the same time keep our traditions, keep our cultures, which is our identity. That is our identity -- cultures, the language. That's your best issue of sovereignty. You keep your cultures and your language, remain who you are, they can't beat you, no matter what. You remain to be who you are. In these times, we have land rights, land claims. We have battles going on on a daily basis. From every nation that we come from, you know what the problems are as leaders. When that phone rings, you just never know who's going to be on the other end of it. Nevertheless we prosper and we're -- you, I would say, are the living proof of the abilities of Indian nations in this country today. They're turning back to us now. International leaders are now reaching for the philosophies of the Native people. And why? Because we have a long-term perspective, as we have on this Nike© shoe, N7©. That's the seventh generation. That's a very direct relationship with one of the largest corporations in the world, and they have now espoused the philosophy of all of our nations, seven generations. From our directions and from the instructions given to the leaders of the Haudenosaunee when they say -- among many other instructions -- we are reminded and the words are direct, 'When you sit and you counsel for the welfare of your people, think not of your children, think not of yourself, think not of your family, not even your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of seven generations coming.' Now that's an instruction on responsibility, a very serious instruction on responsibility. Peacemaker said that, I don't know, a thousand, maybe two thousand years ago. It resonates today. Today it resonates. Be concerned about the seven generations and how we are going to survive and we survive by doing on a daily basis. So that's what your accomplishments are. You have proved to everybody that you can do and you will do, and serve as an example to the rest of the Indian nations and share. Probably one of the most important instructions that we have is to share. They've tried and tried and tried to beat the Indian out of us, which is to share, but we still continue to do it, because that's our fundamental survival basis. And now it's starting to resonate around the world. It's no longer business as usual. That's over because of global warming. We are now facing very, very serious times and we're dealing with a timeframe which is quite short, a lot shorter than people are talking about. We have to be ready. So programs like yourself and what you've produced are how we prepare ourselves and instruct ourselves. And remember the instructions of all of our leaders. Every one of our leaders always looked out for everybody. That was the quality of the leadership that we had. Every single one of them stood for the people.

And so here we are today in a great program, the Harvard program Honoring Nations, and I'm honored to be serving with an amazing board who gives of their time. There's no remuneration here for this board. The only thing that we receive, I think, is to see the accomplishments and to promote that. And we're going to have to step up, too, as we move along. We're going to have to take charge ourselves. Our nations are going to have to own this business. It's up to us. It's an amazing thing. And I just take my hat off to the leadership here, Joe [Kalt] and our staff, tireless staff, and then our board of governors, a tremendous group to work with. So it's a privilege for me actually to be here. I don't know -- you can be pretty fearless when you've got help like that I think. So I think today this is celebration time, presentation time. Tell the world what you've done, explain to the world what you've accomplished and say, 'We're here to share.' That's what I have to say. Thank you."

Regis Pecos: The Why of Making and Remaking Governing Systems

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Cochiti Pueblo Governor Regis Pecos shares his thoughts about the ultimate purpose of constitutions, governments and governance from a Pueblo perspective, and argues that constitutional reform presents Native nations with a precious opportunity to reclaim and reinvigorate their cultures and core values.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pecos, Regis. "The Why of Making and Remaking Governing Systems." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 1, 2012. Presentation.

Regis Pecos:

"Good morning. In my language of the Cochiti people, [Cochiti language]. I am of the Sun Clan, my given name is [Cochiti language], which is translated as 'antelope.' [Cochiti language]. How are you, my Elders? [Cochiti language] -- our leaders? [Cochiti language]. How are you, my brothers? [Cochiti language]. How are you, my sisters? [Cochiti language]. How are you, my relatives? [Cochiti language]. I give thanks to the Creator, as our brother from their homeland here welcome us -- to give thanks for our Creator and those who've gone before us who have answered our prayers, prayers of many that we might have this opportunity for dialogue. [Cochiti language], to have this discussion with regard to how we carry forward. [Cochiti language], how we carry forward what the Creator gave to our people. We all have stories of our migration. We all have stories of our origin, of our emergence, of creation, how we continue to sustain the gifts of the Creator, so that -- as we have been blessed and fortunate to inherit from all those who have gone before through their sacrifices -- that they maintain the vitality and the vibrancy of the gifts of our Creator. The question today becomes a very profound question and that is, what will future generations of our people from all of our respective areas inherit from us? It's a question that we must ask [Cochiti language] for the sake of the people and for the sake of the children. I begin this way to help put into context, and to put into some proper perspective, the incredible responsibility that we collectively have as we engage in the deliberations on this discussion about governments and governance.

I want to share with you a Pueblo perspective, but I want all of you to keep in mind that your people, your communities and your nations -- that you represent here today -- have their own story to reflect upon their journey through many generations of our people since the time of emergence, origin or creation. And I want all of you to keep in mind these reflections. Why did we start this morning with a prayer? We start with a prayer because it is recognizing our Creator. One of the great gifts of our Creator is all that we were given for the maintenance of a healthy mind, body and spirit that we define as a way of life. It is incredibly resilient that after hundreds and hundreds of years of an onslaught to disconnect our people from our lands, from our mother tongue, from our way of life, from our governance, from the language and traditions and customs of indigenous law, defining our jurisprudence, the institutions of family, the spirit of community, the gifts of resources with which to sustain us -- all of these are the gifts of the Creator. Sometimes we do not reflect upon the past to make sense of where we are today. As we talk about how we move forward, where I want to begin is this recognition that who we've become today, where we are today have very deep roots in history. That in all of your relations, generations of your people -- from Indigenous country, from this end to the east coast, around the world -- generations of our people have been engaged in a struggle to sustain all that our Creator gave to us for the maintenance of a healthy mind, body and spirit. Governance, Indigenous laws, customs and traditions are at the heart and the soul of our people. What I want to share with you is a recognition of what our forefathers -- all those who have gone before -- have sacrificed in their time to sustain the gifts of the Creator. Governance -- the spirit with which we maintain the collective wellbeing of our people, the spirit with which we maintain the wellbeing of our people. Indigenous laws, customs and traditions are the gifts of the Creator with which we are to use, that when individuals are in conflict -- out of balance in their relationships -- that these tools were provided to bring us back together for the maintenance of balance and harmony among individuals, among families, among clans, among members of our community.

About ten years ago we [founded] the New Mexico Leadership Institute, which is a convener of Pueblo people -- of young people, college students, young professionals, established professionals, community leaders, spiritual leaders -- all that represent who we are as Pueblo people. And over the course of the last ten years, we have engaged in bringing people together, creating a safe environment where we can have the frank and honest discussions of those things that challenge us within our communities, realizing and appreciating that sometimes we cannot have that frank and honest discussion in our own communities. And at the first of last month was the culmination of ten years of work across all areas that reflected upon where we are with regard to sustaining our last remaining homelands upon which are the gifts of the Creator -- places of worship where we go to draw upon the spirituality and connection of our people and all those who've passed, all of the living things that are a part of this environment, the state of where we are in the maintenance of language. Language is what gives us meaning to understand our purpose in life and our role in all of humanity, where we are with regard to the gift of governance, the gift of the tools of our customs and traditions and laws, the health of our family, the place where we learn our core values; where we are with the maintenance of the spirit and vitality of our community as an institution; and where we are in the protection of all that sustains us as a people -- our resources, the precious spirit of water, the giver of all life. And this is what we reflected upon -- a Pueblo convocation that brought 400 Pueblo people of all ages that I just shared with you -- one, to reflect upon where we've been, where we are, and where it is that we're going, understanding that the challenges we face today are deeply rooted in history.

And I want us to think about this context and this perspective -- that over many, many years this has been our fight and this has been our struggle. I shared with you the gifts of the Creator. From those gifts of the Creator come our core values. If we went around this room and I asked each and every one of you to share what has been a core value that has guided your passion in your life and all that you are engaged in -- and we could fill a huge circle to add to just the few that are here. But the principles of these core values is what brings to life our relationship with the gifts of the Creator. Every one of us from where we come -- whether we're Pueblo, whether we're Oneida, whether we're Sioux, whether we're Diné, whether we're Cherokee, whether we're Choctaw -- at the time that the Creator gave us these gifts, the Creator also provided to us pathways to maintain our connections to these precious gifts from which come to life the core values that guide our relationships.

In Pueblo worldview and in our existence we have a traditional calendar -- from winter to spring to summer to fall. Daily we engage, as I did this morning, to give thanks to our Father Sun that, as he travels the course of today, that we might be blessed -- that our minds and hearts could be opened that we can absorb all that is shared in our contributions to sustain our connections to these gifts and to these core values as we examine the governance of our people at a critical time in our journey. So daily -- if we maintain our connection to our Creator -- daily as we wake up, we think. And as we pray, we verbalize and articulate in prayer, asking our Creator, all those who have gone before, to guide us in all our engagement for the sake of the people in the work that all of you are involved in -- that our actions may demonstrate our convictions in how we relate to one another in this process of defining expectations -- as we define the values and principles of relations that come through the process of governance of our people. So we get up, we have these thoughts, we put them into words. And at the end of the day, as we pray and retire, we reflect upon what we have done that day. So daily, weekly, monthly, annually is this cycle of engagement that connects us to the core values, to the gifts of the Creator -- that is a validation, a reaffirmation that these are the values that guide our lives and our people since the time of origin, of creation, of emergence. That is our connection to that time that we continue in our daily contributions to this purpose, or we wouldn't even be having this discussion. But here is what has happened over time.

Among Pueblo people, upon first contact -- as you all in your respective history reflect upon contact with the English, with the French, with the Spanish, as you reflect upon your own histories -- for us as Pueblo people, our first contact was with Spanish. And as the Spanish colonizers imposed their will, or attempted to -- threatening the gifts of the Creator, our core values, our way of life, our lands, our language, our families and communities -- what happens? What happens to a people when they are afraid, faced with the threat of something so precious that defines who they are and their connections to a way of life? It results in resistance. And classically, the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 demonstrated what people will do in the face of threats to a way of life, to their values, to the gifts of the Creator. And in each one of your own respective histories are the classic examples of Indian history of resistance because of those threats to the gifts of the Creator, to our core values, to a way of life. Ours moved from that period --through the impacts of Mexico and the debates about whether or not Indian people were human beings -- moving quickly to the impact of the time that I want to focus in on, are the years of our collective experience and struggles with all of the impositions of one of the most powerful countries, if not the most powerful country in the world.

And as you reflect upon your own histories, all of these impositions -- over generations of our people -- results in who we have become, the personalities that have been defined that we can understand. Because none of this has ever been part of our own inquiry -- with regard to the history and the impacts -- because nowhere in our educational system provides us that opportunity. Federal policies and laws that dealt deliberately with efforts to disconnect us from our lands, to kill our Native languages by prohibiting the speaking of Native languages [with] the policy creating boarding schools, resulted in a mission of this country that the way you kill a culture is to take the children from that culture and deny those children their culture. Does that make sense? A deliberate process to disconnect us in that process -- after they were unsuccessful in their practices of genocide and extermination -- that a more humane way was to try to assimilate us as a way to become visible in this society, in this country, disconnecting us from the gifts of the Creator, from those core values. So as we move through history of genocide and extermination, through assimilation, the forced segregation of children in an educational process -- the effort to kill a culture by removing its children and denying those children -- they removed their culture. And as we move through that process using education -- the effort of the policies articulated, delineated, implemented -- that tried to change the governance systems of our people. And now, 75 years later, many are struggling with the impositions of a form of government imposed that we have not properly engaged in a dialogue -- with regard to how do we deal in the aftermath. Seventy-five years later to examine and reflect: How have these impositions taken us further away from the core values, our connections to the gifts of the Creator, incompatible with fundamental core values of our people?

And as we move from that period, obviously the impact of many men and women who were engaged in military experiences -- and how that experience changed many people becoming quiet agents when they returned -- ways in which, following that period, the policies of termination, the policies of relocation added a whole other layer of impact to many generations of our people. Conscious or unconscious decisions, in this time of relocation, that many made to follow the American dream for their children -- and how for many following that American dream really became an American nightmare -- and the further victimization that we in our communities inflicted on those who tried to come home. Another layer of victimization that we imposed on our own and the painful human emotions -- those experiences compounding the way in which many dealt with that -- reflect an inability to deal with these impositions and the way it led to dysfunction in their lives and in their communities. That created the struggles and challenges we face today -- as a result of many people engaging in self-hatred and self-destruction that still haunts us today in our communities -- only we never traced the deep roots of those experiences and how they shaped and formed many people in our communities.

And as we moved into a period today -- that will be defined as a period of self-determination -- we have to be mindful, that over the course of 30 years, to ask the question, have we simply just been engaged in replicating programs that people before us were critical of? Questions like: What are we doing differently in this time of self-determination when supposedly we're in control? What are we doing differently from those times when others were in control and we were critical of? We so embraced accessing resources for Head Start in the late '60s and early '70s that we forgot to ask where is this a head start to, if not to an earlier and a more aggressive pursuit of acquisition of language proficiency? And now in our communities, programs that engage children even younger than Head Start age children? But that's not a criticism, that comes with new ways in being places we've never been before.

Housing development -- and the way in which in many communities but particularly, fundamentally important in Pueblo society -- is the way in which homes and the community are built to complement our social organization. And the way that we embraced HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] homes and the development that was cost effective -- it was argued to create subdivisions -- that over time, we reflect how disruptive these subdivisions were to our social organization. What have we done differently in the education programs that we are now in control of at the elementary, mid and high school levels? We operate a school of 800 Pueblo students at the Santa Fe Indian School created in 1890. I was chair of that school for 15 years, and I often asked this question of our board and faculty and our leaders: What are we doing differently today, different from those times when education through boarding schools were imposed upon our children? If we're not doing anything differently, then why do we continue to take children away from the families and communities for nine months out of the years in similar ways as the government took our children?

I take you through this timeline very quickly to understand and appreciate that where we are today -- as we move towards this discussion specifically on governance -- is to ask those same questions. It really is ironic that in this time period, as treaties and other obligations were being made, that the whole issue of blood quantum was introduced. And as we move into other parts -- through the land allotment, the Dawes Act, and all of these other imposed policies and laws meant to disconnect us from our lands -- that the whole issue of blood entered the debates to define who was civilized and who was uncivilized. And yet today, one of the most conflicting issues in our communities are those who argue that we should keep policies that have been imposed upon us through laws imposed upon us -- that over time has caused incredible disconnect from the core values and the gifts of the Creator. And yet, we are now in control but arguing to keep those things that cause conflict and division in our communities, as blood quantum haunts us today and, in many cases, threatens our own demise. And as we look at constitutions, if we're not asking questions with regard to, what must we change in this time that we are in control and create something that is compatible with our core values? Think about the way in which elections in our communities have become so disruptive, that it results in -- as we see the Republic and Democratic parties play out daily, the ugliness of that divide that threatens the demise of the most powerful country in this world from within -- and think about our own communities of that overlay and that supposedly democratic process threatening -- as long as there are winners and losers -- the kind of tremendous internal conflict of our people.

Our elders teach us that along our journey we must always be mindful of our collective past experiences tied to the gifts of the Creator -- our core values -- and when we disconnect from that consciousness -- driven by our core values -- that we can become our own worst enemy. And sometimes we think that where we are in the journey are those times that we can self-destruct from within. Now here is a thing to appreciate -- that with colonization and impositions brought by different representatives from around the world, depending on where we live -- that each generation over time has been faced with these challenges. And through all of the generations before us -- reflected in our history and in our stories -- there was never a willingness on their part to compromise our core values and our gifts of the Creator that defined our inheritance today. The question becomes, what will future generations of the Cherokee and the Choctaw and the Oneida and the Sioux and the Hopi and the Diné inherit from us? These are incredibly challenging times, but these are incredibly important times in the maintenance of these connections.

Here we are in this middle circle today. We're connected through our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. That arrow moving in that direction is a personalized experience of these inflictions that I've just briefly gone over with all of you. We are personally connected to that history of infliction of impositions -- that defines who we are as individuals, that defines our families and our communities -- but we never take those into consideration, as we assess where we are today in the challenges that we face, because none of this is a conscious part of our thinking. And think about the next 100 years. We're in the middle. How many have children? Raise your hand. How many have grandchildren? How many have great-grandchildren? So we have in this gathering here individuals personally connected already to the next 100 years. All dictated by the decisions we make today that 100 years hence, will be a discussion among future generations of our people. How will they reflect upon this time? Will they be as kind as you reflect upon your history and you reflect upon the heroes and the champions that have let the fight in your struggles to retain your identity, your connection to the gifts of the Creator to those core values? How will future generations reflect upon all of us, upon all of you as parents, as grandparents, as great-grandparents? How will they reflect upon this time? Will they say [that] we were blessed, that in that time of incredible challenge and struggle of our people, that they rose in equal and honorable ways -- as all generations before them -- that defined our inheritance? Or will they reflect, "˜If only great-grandpa, if only great-grandmother, if only grandpa, if only grandmother, if only my parents had the courage and the strength to rise to the challenge that we might still have connections to our lands; that we might still have a language, our mother tongue; that we might still have a way of life connected to the core values and our Creator; that we might still have our own governance systems; that we might still reflect upon the incredible gift of the tools of the Creator of our traditional laws, customs and traditions; that we would still have the vibrancy and the vitality of family teaching core values and the vitality and the vibrancy of a community fully engaged in one mission toward the same vision.' How will they reflect upon this time, that history will define as your time, as our time? And that becomes the really profound nature of your discussion.

Grandfathers and grandmothers have always prayed that sometime in our journey that we could be blessed with the minds and hearts represented in this room and represented back home. That they would be wise, that they would have the courage and the strength driven by their core values and their conscious connection to the gifts of the Creator; that they would find balance for the first time in our history to use an education and a process intended to disconnect us -- to use the skills that finally struck the elusive epiphany of a balance between the two. Our communities, the communities where you come from, are richly blessed with individuals like you, who are having this dialogue. That after 70-plus years of an imposed system of governance, that you would have the courage and the wisdom and the strength -- that as fragile as the connections to the core values might be, the fragileness in the connections to the gifts of the Creator might be -- that there still is a connection that takes us all the way back to time immemorial when those gifts were provided to our people for the maintenance of a healthy mind, body and spirit. Who are we as a people? What is our mission?

Now here's something that we have to think deeply about. And that is, we are at all points on the spectrum driven by the many differing experiences by way of contact with other sovereigns -- through their own impositions -- that created challenges of our people in their struggles to maintain their connection. Some have been affected more significantly and dramatically -- that sometimes we hear the criticism of over engagement in development generating money and revenue -- but for them we have to say that it's their way perhaps, of never being threatened in ways that almost decimated them from this earth. And there are many on the other opposite end of the spectrum.

In my community, we're blessed that we still have a traditional governance system, that people rise to the level of leadership -- largely through the recognition of spiritual and medicine people -- as the ultimate gift of service to their people. And in those times when leadership changes, it is a time of reunification and a reaffirmation to our core values, to our connections of the Creator. In Pueblo governance, culture deeply matters because that is the soul, that is the heart and the soul to the vitality and the vibrancy of our governance system -- but it permeates throughout all of our society. Language is a critical part in the maintenance of that spirit of vitality in Pueblo governance. It drives our decisions with regard to protecting the gifts of the Creator, lands upon which there are places of worship from where we draw our sense of spirituality and connection to those gifts. Governance and our way of life are inseparable -- there is no separation of church and state in our government and in our governance system -- but we represent only one point on the spectrum of many other points on the spectrum.

So as you engage in your own reflection of where you are in your journey, at this part and time in history, think about the incredible opportunity that you have knowing all that you know of the collective experiences of many of your brother and sister nations across this country. As we reflect and share how people are responding -- always in contact with other sovereigns -- the strength and the powerfulness of their impositions have always dictated our responses. And sometimes they've been so powerful we've succumbed and they've taken it all to transform us. Sometimes we stood up to those challenges and in our response we adapted, striking a balance. In this time of self-determination we have to ask, are we simply replicating programs that further undermine the fragile systems and institutions that nurture and nourish our core values and our connections to the gifts of the Creator? If we didn't believe that we are still connected in this spiritual way, that our responsibilities -- as politically as they might be defined -- that at the very core and the heart of what we do, is driven with an understanding of a sense of sacredness of that responsibility and that obligation all toward answering the question, what will future generations inherit from me, from you, from all of us? So this is a time of important sharing and if we're not mindful -- that what we do today has a profound impact in the future -- the question becomes, whether we will maintain that connection we have had as Indian people since time immemorial or will this happen? Will future generations be disconnected from the gifts of the Creator and our core values? And when that happens, is there ever a time that we can reconnect? And so as you deal with the issue of governance, think about what you're blessed with. Think about this time in history, that we can actually revisit with the powers and authorities that have been retained with tremendous sacrifice something that makes sense to us. Or will this time be no different than the plus hundreds of years that -- even in the sacrifices of our own people in our own communities, families -- that we're going to internalize this imposition in ways that results in the contributions to our own demise? That's the question. And what will your contribution be towards that effort, is how profound this time is.

An important part in the maintenance of the core values, affects decision-making at every level. In all the decisions we make, we ought to be asking, how are the decisions we're making today strengthening our core values? Or, how are the decisions we're making today taking us further away from our own core values? And if we're not consciously making decisions with regard to that basis and analysis, then are we really finishing what the most powerful in the country in this world could never do -- destroy us as Indigenous peoples, disconnect us from our lands, kill our languages, kill the oldest Indigenous religions in this world, destroy our governance systems, destroy the oldest Indigenous customs and laws in this world, destroy the institution of family, destroy what is beautiful, that is rare in this country, the spirit of community that we still have that drives our passion to sustain and maintain, protecting our resources to provide future generations their sustenance, mind, body, and spirit. And how will we do that if we're not more consciously articulating a vision, delineating our strategies and using education where there is a complement between the formal education and a rich cultural education? And then lastly, who will be your caretakers? Will your caretakers be loving, respectful and compassionate? And who will define that if not each and every one of you in what you do?

So governance, to close, is not something to be treated in isolation of everything else. Governance must be connected to all of the other realms that contribute to the maintenance of our core values for the collective well being of our people. And it can only be engaged in that fashion to produce leaders conscious of that connection -- driven by their core values for the collective well being of their people -- because it's also a connection to the gifts of the Creator. What will be your contribution?"