Working Together
Monday, January 31st, 2005The Iroquois Confederacy long ago devised the rules of peace-making and negotiation after centuries of war and vengeance. What crucial lessons can we learn from them as we face a world torn apart by hatreds? … Reposted from Lapis Magazine.
Learning from our Elders
John Mohawk
Bear with me while I take some words that have established usage in English and bend them a little to make them fit where I want to go with this.
I’d like to begin by saying that if we were to put into English the philosophical tradition of the native peoples, especially the native people of the Northeast woodlands, we would probably have to call it a form of progressive pragmatism. The whole tradition of pragmatism actually found its roots in Native America, and the way it is practiced in contemporary America has lost its way from where it came from. But without going too much into how it lost its way, let me go back to where it came from. Why is it relevant today?
We don’t know exactly where it came from; it goes beyond history, way beyond, actually. In the beginning of the story of the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was discussion about a time prior to the existence of states. Before there were states, there was war. In a way, we would probably describe it as blood feuding. What was peculiar about it was that people had the capacity to make war but did not have the capacity to make peace.
This is the case of warlords. A warlord can essentially initiate violence, but he can’t guarantee the cessation of violence for the most part. He certainly can’t guarantee it on the part of a nation. Before you could have peace, you had to have the formation of something larger than the unit capable of striking; you had to have some cohesion.
I was very struck with that because I think what happened in the prehistoric past of the northeast woodlands was that at one point there was internecine warfare going on everywhere. It was led by what we would call today warlords, although they were actually warrior chieftains. At some point people began discussions about how do you stop it once it gets started. I imagine that those conversations took quite a bit of time. In any case, they began developing a way of thinking about war and peace, which actually turns out to be quite relevant to our time.
Here’s what they thought, roughly. They began by thinking that peace would be a positive thing if we could achieve it. But in order to achieve it, we would have to have a sort of critical mass, a number of people who were brought into the theory that violence could be brought to an end. And then they asked the question, what would take its place? There was no event that could be pointed at to say, “this is the event that started this violence.” In some cases, no one could remember what started the violence. They had been at war, revenge war, for so long that some people were born knowing they had enemies and not knowing why they had enemies.
I propose to you that this condition of pre-state warfare has always existed, continues to exist and will always exist. There will always be people who have the capacity to organize violence, who work outside of a framework of states; who do this violence and adhere to no real coherent rules about when to end the violence. I propose to you that that has always existed in our lifetime and is taking place now and will take place in the future in cultures that find the idea of revenge to be very attractive.
How the Iroquois Made Peace
In the Iroquois culture, they found revenge to be very attractive and they had to find two routes to stop it. This is where things got to be on two tracks: the track of how to stop violence inside the groups that are committed to ending violence, and the track of addressing violence in those groups that are not. This is why one of the things that came out of this was entirely made up of what we call pragmatism. We only have a few quotes from the Indians. They were basically ignored from the time of the Puritans who assumed that the Indians were an inferior group and that the Indians didn’t have anything to say.
By the time the British military came along and had to engage in the peace making conferences and truce making conferences, the British adopted some of the Indian protocol on how you have meetings and discussions. In the British adoption of that kind of protocol, you’ll notice that in historical records, the British stand astonished at the quality of oratory that was set forth by the Indians. Almost all the Indians that they met exhibited a kind of oratory that left the British somewhat amazed. The reason, I propose, for that is that the Indians had devised a structure of how to think about the project that they were addressing.
Their structure required that the combatants, the people on opposite sides, had to acknowledge the other side. Whenever two sides came in contact with one another in some form of conversation, there was a protocol to it. The protocol was preceded by a condolence. This was an interesting idea. A condolence was a ceremony, usually short, in which the two parties who were about to have a conversation had a preliminary meeting, in which they acknowledged that each side had suffered as a result of the conflict they were in.
In short, they did a ceremonial acknowledgment of each other’s humanity and of the losses and sacrifices that had been made on both sides. It’s quite an elaborate conversation actually. When the two sides would meet, they passed strings of wampum to one another and each string of wampum carried with it a sort of preset message. And when you sent one of your sets of messages to your enemy, they acknowledged by repeating it back to you, what you had said. The idea of it was to set the stage for things that had to be discussed.
Here was a period of time when people made wars with clubs and bows and arrows and traps and not with so-called weapons of mass destruction. Actually at one time, a good solid club was a weapon of mass destruction wielded by the proper parties. In any case, there was going to be a lot of conversation going on when they actually got to the peacemaking part about the idea of casting their weapons beneath a tree and burying them. This is of course, entirely symbolic, just like modern disarmament is entirely symbolic. The next time you get a paycheck, you go out and buy some more.
The same thing was true with the Indians. They could always go home and whittle some more of those weapons. In any case, they couldn’t give up weapons entirely because they depended on them for hunting and for food supplies. So when they say they are putting the weapons of war under the tree, the conversations is just symbolic language meaning that they are not going to use them on each other anymore.
They put together this idea of seeking peace and they had to make it practical. So there is an attention to practice, to what’s pragmatic, to making promises to one another that are likely to be kept. So you’re going to have a peacemaking process that begins with some principles, which are just symbolic, one of which is the destruction of weaponry. The second one is that we are now going to put our minds together to create peace.
Of the quotes you can think of about the Indians, the most famous ones are the one from Sitting Bull. “Now let us put our minds together to see what kind of world we can leave for our children.” And the other one out of The Great Law, “Now we put our minds together to see what kind of world we can create for the seventh generation yet unborn.” Both of these are pragmatist constructions. They lay out the idea that we are now going to put our minds together to create some kind of desirable outcome. And pragmatism is entirely about outcome. To begin with, you lay out the outcome and then you step back and negotiate the steps to go from here to the outcome that you want.
I want to point out that Northern America has only given one single philosophical tradition to the world, and that single philosophical tradition is pragmatism. But pragmatism, in order for it to follow the principles of the Iroquois Great Law, has to be progressive pragmatism as opposed to regressive. First, it lays out desirable outcomes that both sides can agree upon, and second, that these were going to be adhered to through a set of protocols. It acknowledges on some level that it is not possible to create peace by force. Peace has to be arrived at, and there’s really some conversation here about what peace is in the first place. Peace is not the cessation of violence, it turns out.
The Meeting Between the Warring Parties
The two parties meet in the middle of the forest, and they address the first thing, which is each other’s humanity. And they address it in a very interesting way. In the beginning, they set the stage by paying attention to the people. The one side says to the other side something like this. “Well we’ve been engaged in combat and you’ve come out of the forest and you’re covered in the bracken of the forest; we see that on your clothing. So the first thing we do is brush your clothing off, and clean off all the stuff that shows that you’ve been in a war. The next thing they do is they brush off the bench that the man is going to sit on and make it clean and ready for that. Then they begin addressing a series of things.
These are symbolic. They say stuff like this: “With this wampum, I release the pressure in your chest. You’re feeling tightened in your body from the struggle, so I release you from that. With this one, I take the tears out of your eyes that you’ve been crying because of the people you lost in your war. And with this one, I release your vocal cords. I release your voice so you can speak strongly.” What they are basically addressing is that things have to be done symbolically to prepare both sides to talk. The first thing that is there in the tradition has to do with the concept of what conditions actually lead to peace.
According to the Great Law, peace is arrived at through the exercise of power, righteousness, and reason. I always thought these were interesting because translated into action, what does it mean? Power, your power to act, depends on your capacity to believe that what it is that you set about doing can be done. In other words, you won’t do what needs to be done if you think it is a futile gesture. You can’t acquire power to deal with an enemy unless you acknowledge that the enemy is a rational being who has wants and desires, who wants to live and who wants his children to live, who wants to live in peace. To acknowledge that they are human gives you the capacity to speak to them. If you think they are not human, you won’t have that capacity. You will have destroyed your own power to communicate with the very people you must communicate with if you are going to communicate with your enemy.
Just to bring this into contemporary thinking, you can’t say we don’t negotiate with terrorists. They are the people who are trying to kill you. You have to negotiate with them, but to negotiate with them, you have to do something that is trickier: you have to acknowledge that they’re human. Acknowledging that they are human means also acknowledging that they have failings. But you don’t concentrate on the failings; you concentrate on their humanity. You have to address their humanity if you’re going to have any hope of stopping the blood feud.
Second, remember, there is peace in which there is no state, no government. There is nobody on the other side who can actually surrender; nobody on the other side who can guarantee anything by law. We’re looking to make peace between peoples in which the foundation of the peace is the tradition to which they agree and which they embrace, and it’s held up by their honor and nothing else. This is important because the people who are at war now are not states and there is no way to stop them unless they agree to stop.
Power was the first word. Righteousness is the second. Righteousness is a very dangerous word in English. It’s a very dangerous word in English history. But let me just give a sense of how it was used. Righteousness means that almost all of us agree that some things are right, correct, positive, which is to say that they might not all agree that some things are obviously right and wrong. But there are some things that they will agree on. So those are the things you start to build on. You have the conversation and your negotiations until you hit the rock hard things.
That takes us to the third and last section, which is reason. Reason means that you’re going to do the rock hard things. You’re not going to settle them really, but you’re going to do the best you can with them. You’re going to move them as far forward on as many points as possible. The Iroquois law of peace assumes that you will not achieve peace. You will not achieve a perfect agreement between two warring sides about how the world ought to be in the future. But it also assumes that you can reach enough of it to have something to work on so that you can take the conflict from physical warfare over to a place where, as they used to say, thinking can replace violence.
So the purpose is reach a place, where you can actually work on it and get it done. But you’ll never achieve it because peace is not achievable as a static condition. Because relationships between human beings are not static. Relationships between human beings one might say, are left undone, unfinished. They continue to be unfinished business so it’s assumed that peace can’t be concluded. You can get toward a place where the conversation about peace is ongoing and continuous and continues to replace the violence.
Points of negotiation can be worked on. It is important to find out why the two parties continue to have conflict and try to remove those irritants that have caused the violence.
Now for the most part, the thing about blood feuding is that it’s often built on injuries, damages, and things that happened to people in previous generations. It didn’t happen to the people sitting at the table, it happened to their fathers or their grandfathers. It happened a long time ago. And they’re still carrying that injury. They’re bringing that injury with them as a real injury. And I propose to you that the world is full of this.
Relevance to the World Today
In the contemporary world, there is a certain dismissal of this. We look at these people and say, “Wow, sure. But that happened in 1952 and you were only two in 1952.” The pragmatic people, however, think that you still have to address this. You may have done something that you can undo. If you can’t undo it, at least you can address it. So the purpose of having the negotiations is to address old injuries as well as new ones.
The other reality is that revenge is very, very hard to address. Some people only live for revenge. They have no other purpose. In fact, the old Iroquois stories tell story after story about people who were like that. They lived for the purpose of revenge. The story of The Great Laws is the story of a guy who comes along and he does a certain amount of combing of their hair. He speaks to them and addresses their issues. And there is a constant and relentless conversation going on about the whole issue of righteousness, about what’s right and what’s wrong. What works and what doesn’t work. What might work if we tried it or not work if we didn’t try it. The point of the project is the process and not the end of the process because it is assumed that there will never be an end. It’s an endless process and it wants to engage the next group. So they’re setting the stage for the next generation to carry on the process.
Hopefully, the process of maintaining peace. Or actually, the process of talking and thinking instead of shooting and blowing each other up. Hopefully, this process will continue on long enough until it becomes normal that we don’t blow each other up.
Which gets me to my final and last point. People are starting to talk about a war on terrorism. Well some cultures haven’t realized that there’s always been a war on terrorism. Forever, as long as human memory has existed, there have been assassinations and harm done from group to group, on and on, endlessly. And sometimes they had some sort of claim to a religious foundation, sometimes it was just things that happened as a result of battles. But whatever it was, it would have been an interesting thing, in my opinion, if the contemporary war on terrorism had been built on principles of pragmatism, of coming to ways of sorting out whatever it is that people are saying was done wrong to them, and making proposals about how to make it right. That would have been interesting.
There will never be an endgame to the war on terrorism. What we need to do is a beginning game in the process of peacemaking. As far as I can see in pragmatic terms, we haven’t begun that yet.
Progressive pragmatism seems to have lost its strength in American culture. But I think it would be a good thing if we could have a conversation to bring it back. And bring it back in its full and complex glory because pragmatism, progressive pragmatism, is ultimately the most complex process devised so far by people who play politics.
This article is adapted from a talk given at a conference on American Spirit and Values organized by The New York Open Center and City University Graduate Center.
John Mohawk is a member of the Seneca Nation and the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy Grand Council. A spokesman for the preservation of indigenous values and culture, he has authored a number of books, including Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World, Exiled in the Land of the Free, and A Basic Call to Consciousness. He has contributed essays on Native American culture and affairs to many books and has published articles in such journals as Akwesasne Notes, Indian Times, and Northeast Indian Quarterly.
