all photos (embiggenable)
Haudenosaunee symbols on the floor of the museum
TONIGHT I EMBARK UPON MY ANNUAL MIDNIGHT RUN, that is, a 426 mile thru-the-night drive from home to Stone Harbor, NJ. By making this drive at night, I avoid frequent, interminable traffic jams on the highway thru the metro NY area and on the NJ turnpike during daylight hours. However, in the deep of the night I rarely encounter more than 40-50 cars over the entire distance that are headed in the same direction as me.
That written, yesterday I made a very short drive–28 miles–to Onchiota for a visit to the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center, a museum dedicated to educating the general public about the Haudenosaunee (The People of the Longhouse), aka: the Iroquois Confederacy, heritage and culture. FYI, the 6 nations are the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Mohawk tribes. The museum is a place that I am drawn to time and time again.
Consider this:
A little known fact….Today many historians believe that Iroquoian ideas of unity, federalism, and balance of power directly influenced the United States’ system of government. Among the founding fathers, Franklin may best illustrate the influence the Iroquois had on Americans.
Franklin carried the Iroquois concept of unity to Albany in 1754, where he presented his plan of union loosely patterned after the Iroquois Confederation’s Constitution, aka: The Great Law of Peace. Several Iroquois leaders attended the Congress. An aging Mohawk sachem called Hendrick received a special invitation from the acting governor of New York, James de Lancey to attend the Congress and to provide information on the structure of the Iroquois government. After Hendrick spoke, de Lancey responded, “I hope that by this present Union, we shall grow up to a great height and be as powerful and famous as you were of old.”
During the debates over the plan for union, Franklin pointed to the strength of the Iroquois Confederacy and stressed the fact that the individual nations of the Confederacy maintained internal sovereignty, managing their own internal affairs, without interference from the Grand Council. His Albany Plan proposed that each colony could govern its internal affairs and that a Grand Council consisting of a different number of representatives from each colony would provide for mutual defense. This proposed council closely resembled the Grand Council of the Iroquois nations.
In 1775, treaty commissioners from the Continental Congress met with the chiefs of the Six Nations “to inform you of the value of the advice that was given about thirty years ago, by your wise forefathers.” And, in 1988, the 100th U.S. Congress passed a concurrent resolution acknowledging the contribution of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy to the development of the U.S. government.
FOOTNOTE: Franklin wrote:
“It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of Ignorant Savages* should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble…”
Despite his use of the phrase Ignorant Savages, evidence shows that Franklin had a healthy respect for the Iroquois, and his language seems intended not as an insult to the Six Nations but as a backhanded slap at the colonists—who, in Franklin’s opinion, could learn a lot from the Iroquois about political unity. In an essay four decades later expressing unabashed admiration for the Iroquois, Franklin wrote: “Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.”