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Original subtitles

Our memory is deep and proud, and the eagle holds it.

This is the story of the American continent and its original people.

Across the Northeast, it is written on the shores of great lakes, and in our

forests, and along our rivers.

This is a story of the Woodland Tribe.

The Delaware, Pequot, and the Montauk, the Confederacy of the Iroquois, Mi

'kmaq, and Huron, and many other nations.

Our histories are a deep map of this land, rich with detail.

The integrity of our beliefs and our will to survive have shaped American

history.

Like the eagle, our people have known terror at the edge of extinction.

This is a story of our survival in the words of our people.

This is a story of the first Americans.

In 1992, a group of Mohawk Indians purchased 350 acres of fertile land in

Mohawk Valley in upstate New York.

Ghana Johale, in the heart of ancestral lands, seemed an appropriate place to

bring together our first council.

Individuals living in today's world committed to the values and lessons of

past.

I'd like to welcome all of the delegates here, and my interest is always that we

may preserve our tradition and custom in our language and make it a living thing

every day.

For Chief Tom Porter, the move to Gunajohale was a return to the sacred

of his people, the completion of a 200 -year journey.

The responsibilities given to human beings was to care for this land.

And because I'm here in this valley of our people, our original home, I can

almost feel the spirits of our ancestors.

I can hear their children with their laughter in those times.

The river itself could tell many stories.

The trees and the birds have seen many things.

Our ancestors await our return.

Jake Swamp is a sub -chief of the Wolf Clan for the Mohawk Nation at

He has traveled throughout the world planting trees for peace.

and teaching about the culture of the Haudenosaunee.

We have always had a battle to remain who we are, to keep what is ours

as Haudenosaunee, as an original people of this land.

Audrey Shenandoah is a teacher at the Onondaga Nation School in New York and

secretary for the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee, the people of the

Longhouse.

Nothing really has changed fundamentally.

in this underlying structure of how our white brothers think about us.

Oren Lyons is a faith keeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation.

He works for the United Nations Global Forum and traveled the world on an

Iroquois passport.

My grandparents married at the turn of the century.

They went through a lot, but my grandmother was a very small woman.

She had an inner strength.

that she passed on to her children and her grandchildren.

And I try to pass it on to my grandchildren.

Paula Dev Jennings is a member of the Niantic Narragansett tribe in Rhode

and the curator of the Tomaquag Indian Museum.

My name is Ayanguia Nick Clark, and I'm chairman of the Miniaturistic Council

for Great Lakes Native American Studies, which is a consortium of 23 woodland

nations. who at one time lived between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.

Before 1492, the Mohawk Valley, for example, it might not have been a

might not have been quite a Garden of Eden. But, you know, it was reasonably

close. This was the world's largest hardwood forest.

They say at one time a squirrel could climb a tree in Maine, and you never had

to come down again until you hit the Mississippi River.

It was one huge canopy of virgin forest.

John Mohawk is from the Seneca Nation.

He is a professor of history at the State University of New York in Buffalo.

This whole northeast was heavily populated. There were villages all over,

very far from each other. All easily within a day's walking distance, right

across this land.

The Atlantic seaboard was home to tribes who spoke 70 distinct languages.

We stayed close to the river valley, rich with many grasses, fruits, nets,

and game.

We cultivated corn, potatoes, wild rice and several varieties of beans.

We traded from coat to coat, but we left a gentle footprint on the land.

The early colonists came in and were amazed because they said the native

drank water.

What was so strange about that?

The strange part was that they had polluted their waters in their country.

Every stream in North America was unpolluted. And in those streams, they

fish were so thick that in some places you couldn't even see the bottom of the

stream because of the fish, not because of the mud or the pollution.

We used more than 200 plants for our medicines.

We boiled sagebrush for rheumatism and influenza and used the bark of the

tree to cure our headaches.

We had spiritual people. We had people that took care of our medicines. We had

agriculturists that grew our food.

We had hunters and trappers and fishermen.

We had everything we needed.

We had skilled laborers.

architects to design and build our wigwams and our longhouse.

For many eastern tribes, the longhouse was the center of community life.

Framed with saplings and covered with bark, each longhouse was home to the

families of a clan.

Our clans were large and far -flung matriarchies.

Children were raised by their mothers with the help of her brothers.

Our fathers helped raise his own sisters' children.

Our fires were tended by clan mothers who helped set the agenda for our

the candidate for leadership.

And she also can depose a leader if he's not doing the

right things, if he's not perpetuating the way of our tradition.

For some reason, my people have let the men stand in the forefront.

My grandmother always said it was right for the men to stand in the forefront.

And she said it was right that the women stand behind the men.

And it was right so that the women could tell the men where to go.

And I think that needs to happen again.

Our long health came to symbolize a communal way of life that leaves its

even today.

I remember my mother saying, well, go over next door and borrow a carrot, or

over and borrow a couple of potatoes. So kids used to come knock at the door,

they want to borrow this, they want to borrow that, and you would always have

another potato, you always had another carrot, you always had something.

And you knew what was going on. They were going to get enough so that they

stew by the time they went around and got everything.

And nobody ever thought about anything. And when you said borrow, everybody

always said borrow, but that never meant pay back.

As far as I know, nobody ever kept track of what you borrowed.

And sometimes, you know, if you borrowed a shovel, you might get it back two

years later by borrowing it from somebody else.

We were told that we're all equal, we're all related, we're all one race.

There's only one race, that's the human race.

We did not come to this view easily.

Once, our tribes were trapped in a cycle of blood feud and revenge.

We also, as a race of people, made some very big mistakes before there was a

European to blame.

Our ancestor became a cannibalistic people, and there was war and bloodshed

there was all over the world. But we realized that that was a mistake, and we

admitted that.

And only when we admitted that and thoroughly discussed that were we able

do that again.

Into this world of violence and intertribal war, a legendary peacemaker

His name was Daganawida, and he had a vision of democracy and unity that

promised peace.

Daganawida was a stutterer and sought an ally to win the tribes to his vision.

One day he found the great Onondaga chief, Hiawatha, alone in the

grieving the murder of his wife and three daughters.

Hiawatha was a great orator, and the peacemaker knew he was the one to carry

message of peace and reconciliation.

Legend tells of a demonic shaman named Atadola, who refused to bring the

Onondaga into the Confederacy.

Hiawatha soothed the salmon's rage by combing the snakes from his hair and

making him guardian of the council fire.

Hiawatha recorded the great law of peace in the shell beadwork of a wampum belt,

which is now known as the Hiawatha belt, and ordered the five tribes to take

their place under the protective roof of a longhouse.

The tradition of blood feud was abolished.

The Great Council met frequently and became a forum for great orators.

Democracy and individual rights within a union took root in this first American

republic.

We had no written language, but from this point forward, our laws and the

records of our treaties were recorded with symbols in our wampum belts.

Negotiations were not considered complete or binding without the

presentation of a wampum belt.

In these belts are laws, and these belts, I believe, will be recognized in

as the fundamental beginning of Western democracy as we know it.

This was the prosperous world the Europeans found on the rocky shores of

Atlantic, but it was not the world they brought with them.

From the time that Columbus landed, carrying two flags, one the flag of

Spain, two the flag of the Roman Catholic Church, carrying the theory of

doctrine of discovery, which is to say that if there were no Christians on the

lands that they came upon, they would declare them vacant.

Because we were not Christian, a pot of a very new.

very recently formed religion, were considered savages.

To the Europeans, their society was the embodiment of civilization, while we

were seen as primitive creatures of the new world.

The Indian was either a violent savage or a noble savage, a citizen of the

wilderness who needed to be civilized or conquered.

We were considered heathen souls to be saved and brought to salvation or wiped

out.

In exchange for giving us their religion and culture, they would take our lands

and destroy our way of life.

They came over here for religious freedom, but we know they came over here

occupy land.

They came over here to colonize land.

And so in their search for religious freedom, we lost ours.

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Now back to the Native Americans on TVS.

At the dawn of the 17th century, Jamestown, Plymouth, New Amsterdam, and

settlements hugged the eastern shore.

We extended the hand of hospitality, and the colonists gained a precarious

foothold on the continent.

We taught them how to cultivate local foods and how to gather medicines.

For many, it meant the difference between starvation and survival.

For those who survived, it meant growth and expansion.

For us, it meant a new and constant struggle to protect our lands and way of

life.

Up from the south came the Spanish expeditions, bringing with them disease.

Fifty percent of our people died in a torrent of smallpox, cholera, typhoid,

diphtheria, and measles that wrecked our villages.

From the east came the persistent settlements of the English, the hunger

land and more land.

and from the north french explorers like samuel du champlain settled on the

banks of the saint lawrence river to fish and trap and build a fur trade

when

champlain came into the great lake Our oral tradition and the written record

indicate that there were 80 or 100 ,000 people living in the western Great Lakes

and between the Ohio River and what we today call Michigan and Wisconsin.

And within 30 years, because of disease and because of warfare, that

population had dropped by about 30 ,000 people. And within 100 years...

it had dropped from 100 ,000 to 30 ,000 altogether.

Nowhere was the gap between Native American values and the Europeans

than in the concept of land.

We never understood how one could own the earth, who is our mother.

The taking of the continent was based on the inconceivable notion of buying and

selling her.

Manhattan was a beautiful place.

It was the best fishing and hunting ground in the East.

People came here in the seasons to hunt and fish.

And you could in a day or two get enough game to last you for the winter.

If there was a gift that we gave to the white man, it was the concept of free

and how to be free.

That's what they found here.

When they asked if they could buy Manhattan, well, of course, how could

a concept of buy and sell with the people who didn't have that concept?

All of the native people understood that this was a neutral ground and a ground

where people shared that the idea of our white brothers coming across

the sea would be welcome here.

And if they chose to give a small gift, for that that was fine that was nice

with an appreciation and so the consequence of that was what they called

sale of manhattan and we still hear about that today uh there's a lot of

laughter involved that you sold manhattan you know for 24 guilders and

say well well we don't understand that but nevertheless we think

at the time What was struck was an agreement to share something.

When the Indians returned the next year, they found fences.

And they said, what is this?

We're coming back to fish and hunt. They said, well, you sold it.

What do you mean we sold it?

This was once covered with great pines.

There was great forest here.

We had a meeting at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and I reminded them

that there was a cathedral which was much larger here, and that was the

Cathedral of the Pines.

The tower 200, 250 feet into the air, that was the cathedral, if you will, of

how Indians think.

The sky is our roof.

The earth is our floor.

And everything in between is bountiful for us.

Manhattan began to signify for Indian nations and people another idea, and the

idea was conflict.

This is, in fact, American history, that the expansion across the continent,

went like this they went settlers showed up shortly after the settlers came

somebody built a fort some settlers had some conflict with the indians on the

land the soldiers attacked the indians the indians were defeated their lands

were forfeited as a result of the war then they moved the fort over 40 miles

more warfare sees their land moved the fort 40 miles and that was how the

progress across north america went the colonists were indifferent to last

treaties or last month's boundaries They competed for land and trade privileges

with the tribes and with each other.

Each new wave of settlement undercut the inner confederacies.

In frustration, the Iroquois chief, Ganas Adego, met with colonial leaders

admonished them to follow the example of the Iroquois and to make a permanent

peace so that the tribes could deal with one government.

Ironically, his speech was on the 4th of July.

We are a powerful confederacy.

and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you

acquire much strength and power.

Therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another.

Chief Ganasadego.

Actually, the chiefs suggested at a meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in

and they said, you're never going to get anywhere until you learn how to work

with one another. Why don't you make a union like ours?

And this was all documented by Cadwalader Colden.

The five nations have such absolute notions of liberty that they allow no

of superiority of one over another and banish all servitude from their

territories.

Cadwalader Colden.

So they sent all of the minutes back to Philadelphia.

And who was it that was printing the minutes? None other than Benjamin

And Benjamin Franklin, looking at these words, really became the father of the

country known as the United States.

I am convinced that those societies as the Indians, which live without

government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of

happiness than those who live under European governments.

Thomas Jefferson.

It might have been possible that the group of people who met in Philadelphia

Boston and here and there in 1774, 1775, 1776 would have arrived at

Confederation as their form of government had there been no Indians in

America. It might have been possible.

But the fact that they chose that form when they were in fact surrounded by a

sea of Indian Confederacy from New England all the way down to Georgia,

was Indian Confederacy after Indian Confederacy after Indian Confederacy.

Important symbols of the original confederacies, like the eagle and the

became icons of American democracy, reminding us that a single state like

a single arrow is weak, but when joined together, they have a strength that

cannot be broken.

We bound ourselves together for many purposes so that our people and our

grandchildren shall remain free in the circle of security.

Peace and happiness.

Our strength should be in union in our ways, the ways of reason.

Righteousness and peace.

The kind of way to peacemaker.

The United States grew strong, but we were forced into a crippling dependency

government reservations.

In 1869, President Grant developed the so -called peace policy.

to force our assimilation into white society.

The peace policy included a program that removed our children from our homes and

forced them into a system of boarding schools throughout the country.

It really developed clearly in the latter part of the 19th century

when a man by the name of Colonel Pratt established in Pennsylvania a school

called the Carlisle Indian School.

His inspiration was to start a school and get the children.

And if you can get the children, and you can take the language out of the

children, and you can take the Indian out of the children, then you would have

all of these attributes that the Indian had, which they admired, which was his

courage, which was his stamina, which was his ethics.

You know, honest Indian, they said.

Honest Indian has a sword. You know, it means he was honest.

Francis Pratt was the military garrison commander at the Florida prison that

imprisoned Geronimo.

He invented military prison for Indian children.

They brought them in, they cut their hair off, they put them in uniforms,

lined them up in files, they made them go to school according to the bell and

the clock.

They were basically trying to train Indian children to become...

more or less servants of the white people.

In fact, one of the objectives of bringing Indian girls in was to teach

so -called domestic arts so that they could go back and be house servants to

middle -class white people.

But there's hardly an Indian family in North America that doesn't have a

It wasn't touched by the boarding school system.

Just a few years ago, we had a chance to go to the place where they sent the

children for punishment.

And it really was a dungeon. It's a little stone building, and we'd go

and then there were cells.

And the room was just big enough for a cot in there and their toilet.

And then the door was a heavy, heavy wooden door, and just a little bit of an

opening big enough for a bowl to fit inside.

After we had seen them, we asked, you know, what kind of infractions did the

children,

have to be guilty of in order to warrant this kind of a punishment.

And one of them was speaking their own language persistently.

When we came out of there, we went and visited the graveyard.

There were just rows and rows of children who had died there, some from

loneliness and some from just a broken spirit with no more will to live.

The boarding school system would be considered today criminal child abuse.

They not only beat them for speaking their language, but it was their

effort to break the Indian extended family.

So they didn't really want all that sort of bonding that goes on among people

about extended families, about aunts and uncles and all of that stuff. But the

real objective was to beat the culture out of the children.

And after they've done that, of course, what they also beat out of the children

were the nurturing skills, the child -rearing skills, all the things that you

need from your parents and your grandparents and your relatives, the

internetworking of stuff that make us full human beings. That's what they beat

out of people.

I had a grandfather, several grandfathers, actually, who went to

Carlisle. One, his name was Paul Biro.

He died somewhere about 25 years ago, maybe. He said there was Indians coming

from other places in the country, little kids, all by the train. Everything was

by the train.

He said there was this big Indian chief from the west where the sun sets. He's

coming here to Kerala. And so they had an assembly.

He said they were sitting there on the ground somewhere, all the kids from the

different nations.

They're only little guys, six, seven -year -old guys, you see.

And then when he did come, this big chief, he had long hair.

And his face right here, his cheekbones were real like this, he said.

It was like two mountains sitting on his face.

As he wove himself in and out of the children of all the nations, he would

their head.

And my grandfather looked up when he touched his head.

And he said, that man was that big chief was crying.

Great big tears coming over his big cheekbones.

And he took a leap, six foot on top of that stage.

And he didn't speak English all that good. But he said, my children, remember

one thing.

We are us.

We are the real, the red, the white, the blue, not those people.

My children, don't ever forget.

I become angry as well as sad at the things that happened to our children

the years. But I also have a great sense of pride, the fact that we survived and

our children are surviving and our grandchildren will survive in spite of

the things that have been put on us, in spite of all the abuses that have taken

place over the years.

In my own nation,

The last fluent speaker of the language died when I was a teenager.

Many times when we go to other nations, they say we've lost our culture because

we don't have our language.

But we haven't lost what's in here in our hearts or what's in our minds. We

haven't lost our oral history, even if it isn't as beautiful as it could be

because we're saying it in American English and not in our own language.

We survived.

We continue to survive because you're doing something to assure that your

children's culture will survive forever.

The Native Americans will continue on TBS.

Now back to the Native Americans on TBS.

As we adapted to life in the 20th century, a prosperous white America had

control of our lands.

The General Allotment Act had reduced our reservations from 150 million acres

60 million, parceling out small homesteads to individual families and

our common lands to speculators.

Once a formidable enemy, we became a mere nuisance.

Once a million strong, there were only 25 ,000 Indians left in the Northeast.

From the time of the first chop of the forest to the end of the last patch of

virgin timber in all of North America, it's hard to believe all the number of

species that could have been extinguished.

And that the process of that is not only accelerating, it's accelerating

worldwide. Trees are disappearing.

Species of fish are disappearing.

Frogs are disappearing.

Salamanders are disappearing.

Mammals, birds, microbiotics are disappearing.

I mean, the world is in a crisis.

And we are part of the human representation of the nature of the

nature of the crisis is symbolized, really, by what has happened to the

Indians and the Indians in the Northeast.

i propose are among the clearest examples of how that has worked itself

how it's still working itself out without land we were forced west or into

big cities albany boston new york montreal and philadelphia became our new

but lost to us were the places where we honor the spirit

it was a time of winter when we were not honored for who we were or who we

had been.

We had no resources and were encouraged only to assimilate and adopt American

values.

But in the 1950s, we began to rediscover our original treaties and a new form of

battle took shape.

We would learn to fight in the United States courts.

The Seneca people, whose lands had been reduced to just 30 ,000 acres, were

confronted in the 1950s with an Army Corps of Engineers proposal to build the

Kinsua Dam on the Allegheny River.

The dam would flood a third of the reservation, destroying sacred burial

and the best agricultural bottomland on the reservation.

Although the Seneca's hired a noted engineer who proposed an alternative

it was rejected.

A lot of people felt that they had been pushed as far as they could be pushed,

that the relationship with the United States really was as bad as it could

The Seneca Nation mounted one of the most extensive and one has to say one of

the most effective public relations campaigns

to call attention to the dam to the American people. They opposed it for a

number of reasons, but primarily they opposed it because, A, it was going to

flood Seneca land, B, it was going to violate a treaty that was made between

Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, of which the Seneca Nation is one of the

signing nations, and the United States government.

In 1794, trying to nurture a struggling new nation, And anxious to build a

lasting peace with the Iroquois, President George Washington signed the

Pickering Treaty.

In English and in the form of a wampum belt, the treaty guaranteed the Iroquois

sovereignty over their lands.

Almost 200 years later, the Seneca Nation tried to assert its claim on the

Allegheny.

But neither Congress nor the Supreme Court would support the tribe.

In a final effort, the Seneca turned to the young, newly elected president who

had campaigned throughout New York for Indian rights.

The Army engineers are about to build a huge Kinsua Dam on the upper Allegheny

River, which will flood a third of a western New York Indian reservation in

direct violation of a treaty that was signed by George Washington with the

Seneca Indians.

Have you any inclination at all to halt that project in favor of the so -called

Morgan alternate project, which would not violate the treaty?

It's my recollection that this matter has been tested in the courts, has it

Yes, it has. The Supreme Court is upheld it.

Well, I'm not... I have no plans to interfere with that action.

This dam sent a signal to the Indians, which was that treaties, even those made

with George Washington and the most solemn of promises that the United

government ever made to anybody, could be just brushed aside for a pork barrel

project to keep a few politicians in Pennsylvania and a couple of

happy.

Bulldozers leveled barns and homes were burned.

The longhouse at the center of community life was destroyed.

and the fertile valley of the Allegheny was flooded.

The impact was especially strong among the older people there, who 130 families

or so were forced to relocate.

The United States took what they wanted and they did it without.

and they did it by telling you that they were doing good for everybody in the

world and you need to get out of the way of progress.

And it was as mean -hearted, one has to say, and as insensitive to people of a

different culture as it could get.

Other legal battles turned out more successfully.

In 1954, an old Passamaquoddy elder in Maine died.

And while cleaning out the papers in the trunk of his car, his widow found a

1794 treaty.

The tribe petitioned the state of Maine for their original land, comprising two

-thirds of the state.

In 1980, the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot were awarded over $80 million

300 ,000 acres.

Today, the Passamaquoddy tribe is one of Maine's largest landowners.

They invested in several businesses, including the state's third largest

blueberry farm.

These blueberry fields have brought more than financial success.

Each year, the cooperative picking effort with the neighboring Mi 'kmaq

brings together distant relatives.

Today there is a new sense of pride in our nations.

It is expressed beautifully as we create new songs and dances, art, literature

and music.

A long time ago, ancestors, we had all this. We had the drumming, we had the

dancing. We had the respect for Mother Earth. We had all our ceremonies.

And our people here in the East, we had to borrow a lot of our ways from out

West, a lot of our songs, a lot of our...

We don't preach to the children. We try to share what it is in here, in our

circle. And after a while, when those children, they see us, and when they get

older, even though they might stray to the teens, a lot of them will come back

because they've seen a good way of life and they've felt it.

Like the last song that I sang was the Kitbu song. It's an honor song for the

eagle. And if we continue to honor, The eagle, he will continue to protect us

and to teach us and to fly with us in our spiritual soar with the eagle.

Financial independence is renewing our ability to negotiate as sovereign

and promises a solution to widespread poverty.

But grafted as it is on the values of modern American society, it threatens

traditional ways and forces us to reflect on our future.

Gambling has become our most successful economic enterprise and the most

controversial. When Benjamin Franklin was asked who he was as ambassador from

the new United States now to France, he replied, I am an American savage.

And from that time to where they were killing us and

they were destroying our languages.

Our lives have been controlled from birth until death.

So I think it's time that this side of the story gets told.

And before we get overrun with casinos and before our lands are decimated by

chicanery and the manipulation of states and governments, and before our people

again are usurped, I think Indian nations better wake up.

And be clear about what is the reality of future for their children.

Because land is the issue. Land has always been the issue. And when we lose

land, and you lose the land by losing the jurisdiction on the land, then

lost everything.

Reweaving the traditional relationship with the land is the idea that will

the development of the Mohawk community at Ghana Johali.

To live as the ancestors lived, governed by the cycles of nature, will be the

fulfillment of Tom Porter's dream.

But one time they said, our elders, our old people used to say, one day...

We go back home where we came from, where our villages were. One day our

grandchildren will do that. Everything will be traditional, our clans and

grandmothers and chiefs. What is really our government and our way?

Start brand new.

Part of the decision of us selecting this site to build a new community, a

traditional Mohawk community, was due to this water from the underground spring

waters, an artesian well. And it has no bacteria in it, and it's perfectly

clear, fresh water, also with the tall trees.

who are so tall that they reminded us as if it was the creator or many creators

standing just everywhere.

And so it was kind of a feeling of sacredness or if you want to say

Now our children will have a place where they can grow and have hope for

tomorrow so that we will always live and we won't become extinct.

In my own assessment of the world, I truly believe that 80 % of the

world's people are living in grief.

And I think that we can share what has happened to our people in our early

development. So during the time of the peacemaker, when they devised a way to

come out of this grieving.

And if we can do this,

to remove the tears which will be able to replace the vision of the

people, to wipe away the dust of death from the people's ears

so that they can hear properly again, and to remove the

lump from the throat of the people so that their voice can be returned.

And the words can be spoken again.

Even though you and I are in different boats, you in your boat and we in our

canoe, we share the same river of life.

What befalls me befalls you.

And downstream,

Downstream in this river of life, our children will pay for our selfishness,

our greed, and for our lack of vision.

Five hundred years ago, you came to our pristine lands of great forests,

rolling plains, crystal clear lakes.

And we have suffered in your quest for God, for glory, for gold.

But we have survived.

The Native Americans will continue on TBS.

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