(upbeat music)
-: Hello, my name is Fern Naomi Renville.
I'm a teaching artist, I live in Seattle.
I'm also an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.
We're in eastern Dakota band from South Dakota,
which is where I'm from originally.
I'm also a member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribe
and the Omaha nation through my grandmother
and great grandmother.
This story is called "The Great Law of Peace."
There was a time a long time ago
when the nations of the Hudna Shawnee Alliance were at war,
not just with one another,
but within each of those tribes there was terrible conflict
and people were fighting with one another.
They say it was a dark time in which women and children
cowered in fear of their own men.
In this dark time, a young man appeared.
This young man came to be known as the peacemaker.
The peacemaker wondered why people couldn't stop fighting.
The peacemaker worked to bring understanding and peace,
and to put an end to all the violence and conflict.
Now, this peacemaker was staying
in kind of like a boarding house.
There was a lodge.
This lodge was run by a woman known as Jakunsasa.
Jakunsasa was well-known,
because she alone ran a boarding house for travelers.
Now, she didn't charge money either.
Anyone at all who needed or wanted a safe place
to lay their head and be fed at night,
she would give them a place in her lodge, but she had rules.
You may come into my lodge and you'll receive hospitality,
but first you must leave your weapons outside the door.
And that's what happened.
No matter if people were at war outside of her lodge,
inside her lodge, they enjoyed meals together
and slept next to one another
and were safe in Jakunsasa's lodge.
Well, the peacemaker was very impressed
by Jakunsasa's wisdom and he took note.
He took note.
Now, the peacemaker was having difficulties
convincing everyone to agree to peace,
to lay down their weapons,
to decide that the things they were fighting over,
were not as important as the things
that they could fight for together.
Now, there was a leader at the time of the Onondaga.
This leader was called Tadodaho.
Tadodaho was the angriest, and they say the meanest
of all of these warring tribes, their leaders.
Tadodaho had committed so many terrible crimes
that they say that his hair was replaced by snakes.
Snakes grew out of his head and replaced his hair.
And his face had no humanity in it.
Also, he lived in the swamp.
Tadodaho was more comfortable in the swamp with his people.
The peacemaker went and visited Tadodaho.
The peacemaker said, "Look, look at this arrow,
"see this one arrow?
"It is so easy to break,
"and a bundle of arrows together,
"they are strong and cannot be broken.
"The Hudna Shawnee Alliance needs to work together
"for all of our good."
But Tadodaho could not be swayed, could not be convinced,
he did not want to leave his warring ways.
And so the peacemaker decided to asked for advice
from Jakunsasa, the woman who ran the boarding house.
"Jakunsasa, what do you do?
"What should we do?
"Do you have any wisdom?
"Anything that you can help, any ideas?"
Oh, she did.
"It's funny that you should ask," she said.
"It's funny that you should ask
"because recently the birds have been coming
"to me every morning and singing a song,
"a new song I've never heard before.
"This song is beautiful
"and I can't get it out of my mind."
And Jakunsasa sang the song for the peacemaker.
And when he taught everyone else to sing that song,
together, together the people went into the swamp
and they appealed one last time to Tadodaho
who said no again.
And then they sang to him.
The people sang the song that Jakunsasa had taught them
that she had been given by the birds.
They sang that song and Tadodaho started to get drawn
out of the swamp almost against his will.
they pulled him out of the swamp with that song,
and has he got closer, his snakes on his head,
they started to fall out.
They fell off!
His face started to soften.
As Tadodaho came out of the swamp,
as the song brought him closer,
he returned to himself.
He returned to his own humanity.
He returned to his humanity and he agreed to listen.
Tadodaho, if you agree to this law of peace,
the Onondaga nation will be the keepers of the faith
and you will always have a special place.
Tadodaho agreed.
Tadodaho agreed, and then the peacemaker
directed that everyone should find the tallest pine tree,
the tallest white pine tree, which they did,
and at the roots of that pine tree, they dug the big hole.
They dug a big hole and they threw all their weapons
in that hole and then they covered them up.
And then the peacemaker gave
the Hudna Shawnee people the laws
that are the reason that they're now called
the Hudna Shawnee people,
because that means the people of the long house.
The long house that's been described
is the house of law and justice and health
that is described in the law of peace.
Now, the peacemaker said, "The first thing
"that we must establish is that the wisest people
"are the women.
"The women are the wisest among you
"and the women are also the keepers of the earth,
"and so we must respect the women."
And the peacemaker created the council of grandmothers.
This council of clan mothers or grandmothers
were the wisest oldest women in the villages,
the ones agreed upon by all that they had the longest
demonstrated track records of working for their people
and caring for their people.
Those were the wise grandmothers who oversaw everything
in Hudna Shawnee society.
The peacemaker created the elder brothers council
or the grand council.
The grand council included two representatives
from every village, or every council.
In those villages, or clans,
the people chose these two representatives.
They sent them with a consensus message
from the village overseen by the council of grandmothers,
the wise clan mothers.
There was also, created by the peacemaker,
a younger brothers council with the Onondaga and the Oneida.
Now, this younger bothers council was just the same.
There were two representatives from each clan or village
who were sent to represent
the consensus opinion of their village.
Now, this method of democratic governance
did not go unnoticed by the colonists
who arrived in 16th century in Hudna Shawnee lands.
The people who arrived from Europe
had never experienced democratic governance.
The colonists were familiar with monarchy.
The colonists remarked on and noted
and were deeply influenced by Hudna Shawnee culture,
by this representative governance that they could see
for themselves in the communities around them.
Keeping in mind that there was some pretty intimate contact
between the colonists and the Hudna Shawnee people,
pretty much the survival of the colonists
was dependent on tribal peoples,
and it wasn't just about how to grow food and eat
in the New World that was being learned by the colonists.
Now, fast forward a hundred years,
in 1776, a gentleman by the name of Benjamin Franklin
who is described as one of America's quote unquote
founding fathers was intimately familiar with,
deeply influenced by
and fascinated with and a big booster of
what was known as the Iroquois Law of Peace,
because he could see for himself
what a unique form of government this was
that the Hudna Shawnee people were practicing.
And Benjamin Franklin absolutely was directly inspired
in building the U.S. Constitution
by the Iroquois Law of Peace.
Now, you could say that they elder brothers council
is the U.S. Senate and you may remember that we still
send two people from each state to the Senate.
We have a House of Representatives,
a younger bothers council,
and our U.S. Supreme Court is surely supposed to be
the council of clan mothers or grandmothers.
In 1987,
skip forward another hundred odd years,
under the leadership of Senator Daniel Inouye,
the U.S. Congress past resolution number 76,
which recognized and acknowledged
the debt of the U.S. Constitution
to the Iroquois Law of Peace.
And on the day that this was signed into law and passed,
Oren Lyons, who's the chief of the Onondaga nation,
made an appearance in Congress and opened the session up
with the telling of The Peacemaker, which just, it does,
it gives me chills when I think about that.
He'd been asked there by his friend Vine Deloria,
a prominent Dakota thinker and professor,
who created, for Congress, a 400-page document
that is a side-by-side comparison
of the Iroquois Law of Peace and the U.S. Constitution
and takes a deep dive into the scholarship
that documents the interest of Benjamin Franklin
and other of the founding fathers in the political processes
of the Hudna Shawnee and the Iroquois Law of Peace.
That document is still there, it's still available.
All you have to do is go to the U.S. Congress website,
you can download it in PDF form.
It's an incredible piece of scholarship
and it's really fun to look at the particulars
and I'm encouraging everyone to go do that.
This is a story I haven't told a ton of times,
because I'm not as familiar
with my Seneca-Cayuga heritage, as I am my Dakota heritage.
I was raised in South Dakota in a Dakota family,
so my Hudna Shawnee roots are,
I'm less in touch with, less knowledgeable about.
And this is a part of me learning my own culture
and thank you, Creative Advantage and Tina LaPadula
for inviting myself and Roger Fernandez
to share these stories.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)