The Urgency of Indigenous Values

Every year, members of the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Onondaga nations come together to recount the story of how, more than a millennium ago, their ancestors united under the Great Law of Peace and became the Haudenosaunee: the “People of the Longhouse.” In this story, a figure known as the Peacemaker sailed across Lake Ontario in a canoe carved from white stone, determined to end all conflict between the warring nations and restore what the Onondaga call Skä•noñh, a word that means both “peace” and “well-being.”

For much of the previous century, the designated birthplace of the Haudenosaunee—dubbed the “Iroquois Confederacy” by French colonizers—was marked by a reconstructed fort where visitors could learn about the lives of Jesuit missionaries and fur traders. In 2015, the fort was replaced by the Skä•noñh—Great Law of Peace Center, which explores the history of the Haudenosaunee from an exclusively Indigenous perspective.

The Center’s founding director, Philip P. Arnold, is a professor of religion and Indigenous studies at nearby Syracuse University, located like the Center itself on ancestral Onondaga land. His latest work, The Urgency of Indigenous Values—available via JSTOR’s Path to Open program—not only examines the origins, wisdom, and pertinence of Haudenosaunee beliefs, but also confronts the inherent limitations of such examination. Accepting the claim of Orientalism author Edward Said that we cannot accurately describe “the other”—and that any attempt to do so is doomed to read “like a Rorschach test, telling us more about the ethnographer than the people they purported to be studying”—Arnold advocates for a “shift from an expert model of knowledge production to a collaborative model,” one which treats subjects not as sources providing information for projects irrelevant to them, but as partners in addressing “issues of mutual concern.”

Following this approach, Arnold also concludes that we should not speak of Haudenosaunee religion—a concept for which the Onondaga and other nations have no word, and which was forced upon them by white settlers as a means of subjugation and extermination. Instead, it would be more appropriate to speak of Haudenosaunee values, many of which stand diametrically opposed to those held by white Europeans and the settler colonists from whom they descend. As Arnold writes:

As the Haudenosaunee conceive it, a coequal residency on the earth is shared with nonhuman beings of the natural world. This was clearly outside the purview of the colonizer, who saw land as a resource held under his dominion. This notion of “dominion” carried over into intercultural relationships, reflecting that of a “father and son” as opposed to an Indigenous sense of “brothers” living side by side, moving parallel along the river of life.

Equally striking are the differences in values related to peace. According to the story of the Great Law, only one person refused to accept the Peacemaker’s offer of unity: the cannibalistic sorcerer Tadodaho, so they went to confront him. They did so not to destroy him but to win him over to their side. “Without Tadodaho joining,” Arnold writes, the Confederacy would fall apart. “The Peacemaker explained that one nation alone is like an arrow: it can be easily broken. However, if you take five arrows, bundled together with the sinew of a deer, they will not break.” Together, they “used the power of their good minds to transform Tadodaho’s thinking from sorcery and death to the protection of peace. United, they were able to comb the snakes from Tadodaho’s hair and strengthen his twisted body.”

“The recognition of grief,” Arnold notes, “was seen as not only fundamental in helping to clear hearts and minds but also vital to restoring Skä•noñh.” Social peace and individual well-being were two sides of the same coin and remain so to this day.

In addition to acknowledging the Haudenosaunee’s long-ignored impact on American society—with the Great Law of Peace having influenced both the US Constitution and the women’s rights movement—The Urgency of Indigenous Values presents an escape from the Western world’s path toward self-destruction. In a time of accelerating climate disaster and mounting global turmoil, the Haudenosaunee show that “no matter how dysfunctional a society can be, there is a way back to peace.”

You argue for an approach to ethnography that treats people from different cultures and communities as collaborators rather than subjects. What do you respond to concerns about independence and bias that such an approach raises?

There are always biased results in any research. The quest to create an unbiased research project when dealing with “human subjects” has been debunked long ago. In fact, the anthropological literature is full of examples where academics claiming such a triumphal godlike position really just foster a neocolonial project.

In my discipline of the History of Religions we understand that there is always bias, so we search for other ways to engage one another. Some might call it allyship, but I choose the term collaboration. Not just to know one another, but to also work together on issues of “urgent mutual concern.” In that environment, we come to understand one another as well as work together.

I have found that this is an Indigenous perspective also. Indigenous peoples are very good at navigating differences. Their ceremonies are based on interacting with nonhuman persons. The Haudenosaunee have navigated distinctive languages for each nation of the Confederacy. Maintaining a respectful distance from one another is part of an Indigenous protocol. Rather than assuming I know another person or culture, why not just assume that I can’t know them?

You discuss at length how researchers can best approach the study of a group of people to whom they are an outsider. But what about the reader? What considerations should they keep in mind? What previously held assumptions should they reject?

I think the reader is in the same boat as the researcher. Engaging Indigenous values, one must consider the origin and formation of one’s own values. Are these cultural in origin, familial, religious? Maintaining the otherness of different people is a mark of dignity and respect for them and for oneself. The exploration of others is simultaneously a self-exploration.

Why talk of Indigenous values as opposed to Indigenous religions? Where does the framework of religion as used by scholars of religion fall short, and what can be gained by thinking about values instead? To the uninitiated, the distinction may seem insignificant. Why does it matter?

Values is a category that resonates cross-culturally. There is no word for “religion” in Haudenosaunee languages. It is much more a lifeway that we are discussing. Additionally, religion, particularly Christianity, has been used to destroy Indigenous traditions. It has justified genocide and the destruction of their lands. There is too much baggage.

The period of regional stability created by the Great Law of Peace lasted for more than a thousand years—longer than most any other in recorded history, anywhere on Earth. How was this possible, and what can international governing bodies learn from it?

The Great Law of Peace continues to stabilize the Haudenosaunee, and their influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States has been traced throughout the 18th century. Because they are governed by matrilineal clans (tracing descent through the mother) as opposed to the patrilineal traditions of Europe and elsewhere, they influenced the Women’s Rights Movement of the nineteenth century. So we have learned a great deal from the Haudenosaunee.

The question is, however, why don’t we know this? I think it has something to do with the fact, as Oren Lyons says, that you can’t take land from the “good guys.” Indigenous peoples have to maintain their place as the “primitive savages,” opposed to the “civilized Europeans.” Our national mythology requires us to see Indigenous peoples as obstacles to progress. They are present in Native American mascots which emphasize their warlike, aggressive attributes. In reality, they had millennia-old processes of peace. American history either ignores or stereotypes Indigenous peoples for the purpose of legitimating the US. If the true story of land theft and genocide were to be accepted, that would change who we are.

Reading about the history and mythology of how the Great Law of Peace came to be, one is struck by the importance the Haudenosaunee attributed to things like processing grief and personal transformation, such as those of Hiawatha and Tadodaho. Looking at Indigenous values, is peace a prerequisite for well-being, or well-being a prerequisite for peace?

The core value of raising leadership into their positions is through the “Condolence Ceremony.” As you say, this goes back to the origin story of Hiawatha, Jigonsaseh, the Peacemaker and Tadodaho. It demonstrates that grief, when unchecked and dismissed, is a powerful destructive force in human life and culture. There is much to think about here, for all of us to learn, because we all carry grief to one degree or another.

People too often imagine the Church as having played second fiddle in colonial history, jumping on opportunities opened up by the actions of kings, navigators, and merchants. Does the Doctrine of Christian Discovery demonstrate that Christianity was in fact the driving force behind the colonization, exploitation, and eradication of Indigenous peoples around the world?

This requires too much historical background for this discussion. However, from the fifteenth century onward, the Vatican put out a series of papal bulls (letters to monarchs and aristocrats) that justified the enslavement, land theft, and appropriation of goods from all Indigenous peoples, called “non-Christians.” In 1823 the Doctrine of Discovery was codified as the basis of property law in the Johnson v. McIntosh decision and continues as a basic principle today. It moves from religion to law over a more than 500-year period.

When you write about the “urgency” of Indigenous values, you often do so in relation to white westerners. Does this sense of urgency have the same meaning to Indigenous peoples, who have in many ways already experienced the destruction of their world?

Absolutely. We are all facing destruction by the excesses of our modern world. We are all in this together. My suggestion is that we listen to Indigenous peoples for possible solutions because they have been in this land for millennia.

Why, as you write, does equating Indigenous values with environmentalism diminish the value of both? Why is it useful, as you mention while writing about “humble environmentalism,” for environmentalists to continue to acknowledge the “mystery of the world”? What happens when we don’t?

As one Haudenosaunee leader told me, “We are not environmentalists, we are the environment.” Of course he was right. We require clean air, water, and food for flourishing. The issue is: why are we bent on a suicidal mission of self-destruction? As another Haudenosaunee elder told me, “The earth does not need saving. In fact it will be better off without us. We need to save ourselves.”

How do you envision the adoption of new values leading to widespread societal change? Many of your readers likely already espouse Indigenous values—or would claim to—yet their own lives and the world at large remain largely unchanged. Shifting a society’s core beliefs is a slow and subtle process, while urgency implies a sudden, radical, potentially combative shift—the kind that arguably goes against the Indigenous values you outline.

It is up to us, what we do and how we engage a new set of values. According to scientists, the world is changing rapidly and so it might just come to a point where we have to change what we value. It is not a matter of “seeing the light” or some such transformative moment, but rather a realization that we are all in this together, with all the non-human life forms that we depend on. Re-read the “Thanksgiving Address,” and you will appreciate the importance of respecting all life, including our own.

You argue that white westerners should take an interest in Indigenous values because they can save us from our self-destructive ways. Yet a major part of these Indigenous values is the diminished role of the self and self-interest. Is there a contradiction here?

Not at all. We are completely dependent on the world around us. We are not “self-made” in any sense of the term. Life is very simple, as said above. If we can agree on what supports life, then we can agree on what supports each other. For the Haudenosaunee, peace (Skä·noñh) is only achieved when people are in proper relations with the natural world. That’s all.

Your book is based on decades of work and research—the Center, which features so prominently in it, opened more than a decade ago. What makes this inquiry into Indigenous values especially relevant today, more so than 10 years ago?

We are saddled today, even more than in 2015 when we opened, with climate change, religious nationalism, frameworks of domination, oppression and war. Indigenous peoples have something to say to all of these matters, or deficiencies of our moment. It is a good time to hear them.

The post The Urgency of Indigenous Values appeared first on JSTOR Daily.