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Now
Sotisisowah, John Mohawk, a member of
the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians, Seneca elder
historian, died in his Buffalo home on December 10. He was 61.
He was buried six days later in the Seneca Nation Cemetery on
the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, next to his wife, Yvonne
Dion-Buffalo, a member of the Samson Cree Band, who died in June
2005.
Mohawk received his M.A. (1989)
and Ph.D. (1994) from the American Studies Program at University
at Buffalo and subsequently served as a member of the American
Studies Faculty and as co-director of the University's Center
for the Americas. At the time of his death, he was director of
the University's Indigenous Studies Program.
He was a vigorous advocate
of indigenous people's rights and a prolific author and lecturer.
He wrote scores of articles on the environment, racism, climate
change, indigenous rights, colonization, the Iraq war, violence,
globalization, and foodways. He was a founding board member of
the Seventh Generation Fund and the Indian Law Resource Center,
a negotiator for the Mohawk Nation at the crisis at Racquette
Point in 1981, an active member of the Seneca Nation's Salamanca
Lease Committee, and he helped to negotiate the settlement that
became the 1988 Salamanca Settlement Act. He served on the Seneca
Nation Planning Commission and its Investment Committee, was
a member of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy Grand Council
and represented the nation in negotiations to end conflicts in
Columbia and Iran.
He was editor of the news magazine
Daybreak (1987-1995) and founder and editor of the journal
Akwasasne Notes (1967-1983), both of which won journalistic
awards. Some of the books he wrote or edited are Basic Call
to Consciousness (1978), Exiled in the Land of the Free
(co-edited with Oren Lyons, 1992), Utopian Legacies: A History
of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World (2000), and
Iroquois Creation Story: John Arthur Gibson and J.N.B. Hewitt's
Myth of the Earth Grasper (2005).
"Change
the stories"
John Mohawk was "intensely
steeped in the spiritual ceremonial traditions of the Haudenosaunee
people through his foundational longhouse culture at the Cattaraugus
Reservation in western New York," wrote José Barreiro
in Indian Country Today, "Mohawk was one of those
rare American Indian individuals who comfortably stepped out
into the Western academic and journalistic arenas. He was an
enthusiastic participant in his own traditional ways, a legendary
singer and knowledgeable elder of the most profound ceremonial
cycles of the Haudenosaunee. As a scholar, he represented the
Native traditional school of thought in a way that was as authentic
as it was brilliantly modern and universal."
His longtime friend and former
student Lori Taylor wrote in an email a day after his death,
"John Mohawk talked about himself as a person who bridged
worlds. 'We need people who can bridge those worlds,' he told
me, 'and translate each to the other.' This is precisely what
drew me to study with him. I heard a tape of a lecture he gave-passed
hand-to-hand with whispers that this is the real thing. Who was
this guy who could explain the flow of world history, mediate
violent battles, and still talk to his neighbors on the reservation
about corn, beans, squash, and diabetes? I spent the next 15
years finding out at close range. At his 60th birthday party
we were talking about what it was like to look back. I mentioned
that I had seen his name that day in an encyclopedia article
as an ideologue of the American Indian Movement. He talked about
changes he had seen in radicalism. 'What,' I asked him, 'is
an aspiring radical to do today?' 'Change their stories,' he
told me."
The power
to make peace
One of his most frequently
reprinted and quoted articles was "The Warriors Who Turned
to Peace," which first appeared in the winter 2005 issue
of Yes!" In it, he tells how the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
through the mediation of the Peacemaker, changed their story
so they were able to stop killing one another. I wish George
W. Bush and all the other warmakers of this world would read
that article. Here's the part I wish they would read again and
again, until it began to make sense to them:
"According to the Great
Law, peace is arrived at through the exercise of righteousness,
reason, and power.
"You have the power to make peace with an enemy only if
you acknowledge that the enemy is human. To acknowledge that
they are rational beings who want to live and who want their
children to live enhances your power by giving 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 bring about peace.
"To bring this into contemporary thinking, if you say, 'We
don't negotiate with terrorists,' you have taken away your own
power. You have to negotiate with them; they are the people who
are trying to kill you! But to negotiate with them, you have
to acknowledge that they're human. Acknowledging that they are
human means 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. Thus, the first meeting, and
subsequent meetings, begin with an acknowledgement that people
on all sides have suffered loss and that their losses are traumatic
ones."
In that same article, Mohawk
writes about Righteousness in a way that reveals the hollowness
of the sanctimonious politicians eating up all the airtime on
Fox and CNN and NewsHour and White House Press conferences:
"Righteousness is a very
dangerous word in English and in European history. But here's
how it was used by the Haudenosaunee. Righteousness means that
almost all of us agree that some things are right, correct, and
positive. The list that we all agree on might not be long, but
those are the things to build on.
"That takes us to the
next element, which is reason. Reason means that you're going
to work on the rock-hard issues up to a point. You're not going
to settle them, but you're going to move them as far forward
on as many points as possible.
"The Haudenosaunee Law
of Peace assumes that peace is not achievable as a static condition,
just as relationships between human beings are not static but
are always unfinished.
"What you can do is reach
a place where you can work on resolving conflicts. You can find
out why the two parties continue to have conflict and try to
remove those irritants that have caused violence. You can reach
enough of an agreement to take the conflict from warfare to a
place where, as they used to say, thinking can replace violence,
and where the conversation about peace is ongoing."
John's telephone calls always
began the same way: the phone would ring, I'd pick it up and
say hello, and John would say, "Would this be Bruce?"
Not, "Hi, this is John," or "Hi, Bruce,"
but "Would this be Bruce?" At once subjunctive and
nearly surprised. Yes, he'd dialed my number and I had answered,
but surprises were always possible in this world. (His good friend
Oren Lyons, Onadaga Faithkeeper and SUNY Distinguished Professor
at UB, had been in Dubai when John died and he didn't learn of
John's death until his return to the U.S., only a day before
the funeral. "John was full of surprises," he said
after the burial.) The calls began not as if I were responding
to his call but rather as the two of us were happily encountering
one another.
After the subjunctive contact
was established, we would talk about this or that, the foolishness
of the world, an event, the war, this year's corn harvest, whatever,
and then, almost always, he would at some point say, "Oh!,"
as if something had just come to mind. That would always introduce,
I came in time to realize, not necessarily the thing he really
called about-he really called about everything he talked about-but
a thing that needed action or a decision or demanded a different
kind of thought that what had preceded it.
I have some white friends who
hold the real reason they've called until last, but what they're
trying to do is soften you up before they get to what they really
want. What John was doing was nothing like that. It was instead
getting us to the point where it was appropriate to talk about
things like that, whatever they happened to be, because it was
no more appropriate to jump to those things immediately than
it is to have an opera without the overture, sex without the
foreplay, a fine meal without conversation before it. You certainly
can do those things, but why would you want to? John's
"Oh!" was about order, about place, about balance,
which is to say, it was consistent with everything else he did.
Food
John was passionately interested
in food. He loved to eat and he loved finding ways to make eating
more rational. He became, wrote Pat Donovan, "a proponent
of the international 'slow-foods' movement, which promotes the
reintroduction of slowly digested, often ancient, foods as a
means of fighting heart and circulatory disease, tooth decay,
obesity and especially diabetes, which is rampant in many native
communities. To this end, he founded and directed the Iroquois
White Corn Project (IWCP) and the Pinewoods Cafe, located on
the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Irving. IWCP and the Pinewoods
Cafe are projects that promote and sell Iroquois white corn products
and foods to revitalize indigenous agriculture and to reintroduce
the traditional Iroquois diet and to support contemporary indigenous
farmers. Because of his involvement in this movement, he was
invited in 2002 to present the keynote talk at the 34th annual
commencement of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences
Center and School of Medicine"
He recently visited Vietnam
and Thailand and told everybody about his food experiences there,
the most notable of which seemed to be that he'd finally found
a cuisine some of which was entirely too hot for him. One of
his friends said she got the idea that making him give up had
become a challenge for his hosts and they'd liked him so much
they did their very best. He was planning another trip back to
eat there some more. I asked several people why he had gone to
Vietnam and Thailand and they all said the same thing: "To
eat." But what, I asked, was the ostensible reason for the
trip-an academic conference, research, the usual things academics
use to get themselves to places they really want to visit anyway?
"Maybe there was one," one of them said, "but
he never mentioned it. He said he loved Vietnamese and Thai food
so he thought he should go eat it at the place they really knew
how to do it best, that maybe he could learn something."
A few years ago he called to say he was going away the following
week to do some consulting for a tribe in the Canadian north.
They lived, he told me, in the most out-of-the-way place he had
ever been asked to go. I saw him a few weeks later and the first
thing he said was, "I found a great restaurant." "Terrific,"
I said, "let's you, me, Diane and Yvonne go." "We
can't," he said. "It's in that village. The most out-of-the-way
place I've ever been. Maybe they'll ask me to visit again."
When he invited me down to
his mother's house on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation for
the tenth day of his mother's funeral, he said, "You should
come. Somebody's bringing bear stew. You've probably never had
bear stew." Late that day he filled a plate with the bear
stew and lots of other things and he carefully carried the plate
into the woods behind the house, where he left it for her.
"Some
people say that"
When awkward things came up-someone
had accused someone of something, or a decision with no satisfactory
choice had to be taken, or something in progress was likely to
end badly-John would cross his arms over the top of his belly,
let his eyes go up toward the ceiling, get a slight smile on
his face, and then he'd cast the question or issue in the form
of "Some people say that"
And he would, thereby, place
on the table a question or subject no one wanted to talk about
but everyone knew had to be dealt with before we could move on.
He put it out there in a way nobody owned it and nobody, therefore,
had to be defensive about it. It was just out there for anybody
who wanted to talk about it to talk about it. Nobody was charged
with anything so no one was prosecuting anyone for anything.
You might feel guilty or responsible or prosecutorial, but that's
not what everybody else was up to; that was your personal problem
with yourself.
With just that simple utterance
and a benign smile and a look toward the sky, John could set
the most difficult and awkward conversations in useful motion.
This world
and that world
John Mohawk, as Lori Taylor
said, lived in two worlds. At the time of his death, he was planning
a very complex information retrieval project that would have
utilized University at Buffalo's supercomputer facility. He was
also involved in that project of slow-cooking and white corn.
In conversation he regularly talked of harmony and order, and
when he talked of politics, which was often, he would point to
the crime of despoiling the natural world. "We don't own
the Earth; we live on it."
After the funeral ceremony
in the Longhouse at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation and the
burial at the Seneca Nation Cemetery and the communal lunch in
the Versailles community hall, Tom Porter, a Mohawk who
had moved from Akwesanse to the Mohawk Valley, translated some
of the words that had been spoken.
His story began with a man
who, back in the time when people lived forever, fell down and
didn't get up. People picked him up but he fell back down. They
used sticks to prop him up, but he fell down anyway. So they
put him up on a scaffold and went about their business, figuring
that he might wake up. A few days later they went to check on
him and found only bare bones: the birds and animals had picked
him clean.
Then the same thing happened
to another man. And again the birds and animals picked his bones
clean.
And then it happened to a little
girl and that wasn't the same because everyone loved her because
she was a little girl and was happy. But, like the two men, she
fell down and didn't get up. They didn't want to put her up on
the scaffold for the birds and animals to pick at, so they went
to a certain man in the village and asked him what to do.
This was a man who was full
of questions. He asked why were there stars in the sky? Why did
the sun rise? Why did the flowers grow? Why did the rain fall?
He was, they thought, a wise man, and he might know why the two
men and little girl fell and didn't get up.
He didn't. He said he wondered
about that too. He said he would, that night, ask the Great Spirit
what it was all about and he could tell them the next morning.
The next morning the man told
them lots of things, and I can only summarize because the speaker
told of many things the Great Spirit said that the man reported
and I don't remember them all. I was an outsider to this explanation
and I know I can only approximate what he said.
For every one of us, he said,
the day of our death is determined at the day of our birth, and
nothing we can do will change it by a second. For every one of
us, he said, there is a stick with marks on it, each mark indicating
a day of our lives, and some of those sticks are long and some
are short, and nothing we can do will make them longer or shorter.
The Great Spirit, he said, hides those sticks behind his back
because humans very often don't tell the truth (how many small
deer become ten-point bucks by the time the hunter gets back
to the village? How many small fish become huge fish by the time
the fisherman gets back to the village?). Death comes, he said,
from Night, who has no eyes, no ears and no heart, so nothing
you do or say will influence him. Nor is there any point in the
living saying, "If only I had done this or done that."
Death operates on its own schedule, and it is important, he said,
that both the living and the dead understand that. The living
need to understand it so they can get on with living; the dead
need to understand it so they can get on with whatever they're
going to have to do now.
And about the little girl who
everyone loved: the Great Spirit said not to put her up on the
scaffold, where the birds and animals would pick her bones clean,
but instead to dig a hole in the ground and to wrap her in the
garden blanket of earth.
And now John Mohawk, our friend
and friend of the earth, is there as well, in the garden blanket
of earth.
Oh!
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor at
University at Buffalo and editor of the web journal BuffaloReport.com.
Temple University Press will publish his book "Telling Stories"
early next year.
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