An opinion piece by Peter Singer in the Globe and Mail. Patrick Wolfe photo.
The Peacemaker: Protecting the future with a thousand-year-old teaching[1]
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher of Ethics at Oxford University, “has systemically ranked existential risks.” Most dangerous, he believes, is A.I., to which he assigns “a one-in-ten chance of ending human potential or life in the next hundred years…. To nuclear technology, he assigns a one-in-a thousand chance, and to all risks combined a one-in-six chance.” Based on his belief in “our responsibility to the most poor and vulnerable,” he maintains that “safeguarding humanity’s future is the defining challenge of our time.” This conclusion springs from his realization “that the people of the future may be even more powerless to protect themselves from the risks we impose.”[2] This recognition echoes the teaching of the Peacemaker from almost a thousand years ago.
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” This adage has been identified as a Native American proverb. It has also been credited to Chief Seattle, among more recent individuals. What’s most interesting to me is that these words reflect the legacy of the Peacemaker whose 12th-century origin story[3] far pre-dates the founding of the United States and Canada, but who nevertheless is bound up in the history of both countries. Moreover, at a time when Canada is settling more and more First Nations’ legal claims,[4] the Peacemaker’s teachings could help shift our values and overcome the environmental challenges endangering humanity.
According to the Global Footprint Network, “Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. That’s equivalent to using the resources of 1.7 Earths.” Canada and the United States are major contributors to humanity’s sustainability problem, given that their rates of use, equivalent to 5.1 Earths, are among the highest in the world, based on 2018 data.[5] In addition, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change maintains that greenhouse gas emissions must “peak before 2025 at the latest and be reduced by 43% by 2030,” if we are to hold global warming to 1.5 C by 2100. But this is an exceedingly tall order as humanity, as a whole, is currently increasing emissions. At our current trajectory, the IPCC has forecast an end-of-century temperature increase of 2.4 to 3.5 C, while other experts say it could hit 4.8 C.[6]
In contrast to these problems of over-consumption and environmental imbalance, the “Thanksgiving Address,” passed down through the generations from the Peacemaker, propounds a philosophy of comparative simplicity. The address contains the “words that come before all others”: “that peace requires gratitude,” that “We are to be thankful for the living world…. Our Mother Earth connects us to a perpetual process of creation, and she continues to provide all we need to be happy and healthy.”[7]
An article in the December 2023 – January 2024 issue of Canada’s History examines how the five original Haudenosaunee (hoh-den-uh-SHOH-nee) nations united under the “Great Law of Peace.” Author Kelly Boutsalis writes that “the Peacemaker was born in a community on the north shore of Lake Ontario, near present-day Deseronto, Ontario. His destiny to be the Peacemaker was foretold to his grandmother in a dream that predicted he would bring good news of peace and power. In some stories, his mother was human, while his father was a non-human being.”[8]
Knowing that his mission was to bring peace to five warring nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca—he traveled south and first appeared, during a time of war, as “a beautiful youth in a white stone canoe” on Onondaga Lake, which abuts what is now Syracuse, New York.[9] That the stone canoe floated was “a sign that he was a special being whose words should be heeded.”[10]
According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the phenomenal bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, “the seminal Onondaga story of the Peacemaker” includes “Hiawatha—not Longfellow’s invention, but the real one.” Ms. Boutsalis notes that Hiawatha, in different accounts, “is either the Peacemaker’s right-hand man or his spokesman.”[11]
After many years and much travel, the Peacemaker brought together fifty reconciled chiefs and established the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (known historically to the English as the Iroquois Confederacy), “the oldest continuous democracy on Earth,” in Ms. Kimmerer’s words. Rick Hill, founding coordinator of the Indigenous Knowledge Centre at Six Nations Polytechnic in Brantford, Ontario, says the Great Law of Peace is “a series of lessons about how people transform their thinking.” Ms. Boutsalis states “it’s a series of values, rooted in a basic respect for all people’s rights, in democracy, and in using reason to ensure peace. These values should be applied to decision making and relationship building, with a focus on inclusion and collaboration. The Great Law doesn’t have police to enforce it or judges to rule on it.”[12]
Among his instructions, the Peacemaker, in the words of Onondaga faithkeeper Oren Lyons, told the chiefs: “Counselors, leaders, now that we have raised you here, now that you are who you are, when you counsel for the welfare of the people, then think not of yourself, nor of your family, nor even of your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming. You who see far into the future, that is your responsibility: to look out for those generations that are helpless, that are completely at our mercy. We must protect them.”[13]
When the confederacy was promulgated, the Peacemaker declared: “From here forward, you will be known as the Haudenosaunee, meaning that we built this house.”[14] To show what had been accomplished and the enhanced strength of the five nations, Hiawatha bound five arrows together. According to Ms. Kimmerer and others, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was a model for the American colonies when they joined together to become the United States: “the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows in its talons.”[15]
The Haudenosaunee, however, were drawn into conflicts among competing European colonies. In the early 17th century, when New France, under Samuel de Champlain, allied with the Haudenosaunee’s traditional enemies, the Algonquins, the Huron-Wendats and Innu (Montagnais) and attacked a Mohawk settlement at Ticonderoga, the Haudenosaunee sought covenants of peaceful co-existence with the Dutch and English. A “Two Row Wampum” belt testifies to such a covenant with the Dutch. The belt’s two parallel rows, which are said to reflect a teaching from the Peacemaker, “represent the Dutch people and the Haudenosaunee people existing side by side, without interfering in each other’s way of life,” according to Ms. Boutsalis. The parallel lines motif reappeared in subsequent agreements with the French, British and Americans.[16]
In 1722, the Tuscarora became the sixth nation to join the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Half a century later, they and the Oneida broke the confederacy by fighting for the Americans during their Revolutionary War, while the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga and Seneca fought for the British. When the Americans won, the Haudenosaunee lost most of their traditional lands in New York state.[17] In recompense, Frederick Haldimand, the British governor of the province of Quebec, granted, in 1784, to “his Majesty’s faithful allies,” the Mohawk, and to “others of the Six Nations,” approximately 3,844 square kilometres on either side of the Grand River, from its headwaters to Lake Erie.[18]
Although the grant said the Haldimand Tract was for the Haudenosaunee “to enjoy Forever,” the arrival of Canadian Confederation and subsequent “laws and policies meant to extinguish Indigenous governments and practices and to assimilate Indigenous people into Canadian society” superseded the former arrangement. Today, what was known as the Haldimand Tract has a population of about 800,000 and includes Brantford, Cambridge, Kitchner and Waterloo, and many smaller communities.[19]
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Chiefs Council (HCCC) fought back, however. In the 1920s, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh (a.k.a. Levi General) sought recognition from the League of Nations that the Six Nations of the Grand River was a sovereign nation. It’s no surprise that the claim was denied when Canada rallied Great Britain and other countries to its side. In September 1924, Canada also “stripped the HCCC of its authority.” Today, the HCCC continues to function in parallel to the Six Nations of the Grand River band’s Six Nations Elected Council decreed by government, which consists of a chief and twelve councillors. The HCCC’s chiefs are “appointed by clan mothers both from within the Six Nations of the Grand River and from other Six Nations bands in Ontario, Quebec and the United States,”[20]
Given our environmental challenges, it is tempting to ask “what if” the Six Nations of the Grand River had become a sovereign nation that showcased, on the world stage, the values with which they had been entrusted by the Peacemaker? How might humanity, or portions of it, have changed if, for one hundred years—for three to five generations—we’d had the example of a North American country based on radically different values related to consumption and sustainability?
Ms. Kimmerer asks, “what does it mean for an immigrant culture to start thinking like a native one? Not to appropriate the culture of indigenous people, not to take what is theirs, but to throw off the mindset of the frontier, the mindset that allows people to bury sacred sites under industrial waste, to fill a lake with mercury. Being indigenous to place means to live as if we’ll be here for the long haul, to take care of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, depended on it. Because they do.”[21]
It is notable that one of the sources for this essay, the international bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is centred on what they call the “indigenous critique” of European civilization in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.[22] The origins of this critique lie, they write, “with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk,” who ”the Jesuits considered to rank among the smartest people that ever lived” and who was a frequent guest of the Montreal-based, French Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac, in the 1690s.[23] Graeber and Wengrow add that Wendat and Haudenosaunee traditions are unusually “well documented” and maintain that the “ultimate question of human history” relates to our currently stymied “equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.”[24] Nonetheless, based on their reconsideration of history, they conclude that “the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”[25] That’s the encouraging news.
But the example of that briefly imagined sovereign Haudenosaunee nation probably would have made little difference to what, in 2024, is our growing environmental predicament. With the pell-mell nature of modern life, we react to technological and market-driven change more than we deliberate upon society’s needs and shape society, democratically and proactively, in the best interests of all its members. Unless we find the wisdom and will from the Peacemaker and others to live in harmony with the natural world, to recognize with Toby Ord our collective responsibility to the most poor and vulnerable, and to protect the future, humanity will be hard-pressed, over the next three to five generations, to recover from its present predicament.
This essay was originally published on LinkedIn on August 24, 2024. ↑
Rivka Galchen, “Are we doomed? A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through,” The New Yorker, June 10, 2024, 22-27 (26). ↑
According to Onondaga faithkeeper Oren Lyons (Barry Lopez, “The Leadership Imperative”—An interview with Oren Lyons, a member of the Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosauneee—Orion Magazine, circa 2006; reprinted online by DAILGOOD, August 8, 2021), “A thousand years ago, … the Peace Maker brought us the Great Law of Peace, Gayanahshagowa.” In their recent international bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow refer (483) to the Gayanashagowa as “an epic,” the main characters of which, Deganawideh the Peacemaker and Jigonsaseh the Mother of Nations, “are reincarnations of characters from the creation myth.” (The conflicting spelling of “Peacemaker” and “Gayanashagowa” are as they appear in the referenced sources.) Graeber and Wengrow note (484) that although “The Peacemaker vanishes from the earth” when his work is finished, his influence continues to be felt insofar as “Forty-nine sachems, delegated to convey the decisions of their nation’s councils, continue to meet regularly” and “(the fiftieth, the Peacemaker himself, is always represented by an empty place).” They add (486): “The exact time and circumstance of the League of Five Nations’ creation [attributed to the Peacemaker] is unclear; dates have been proposed ranging from AD 1142 to sometime about 1650.” In “They made the house: Many generations ago, five Haudenosaunee nations united under the Great Law of Peace,” in the December 2023 – January 2024 issue of Canada’s History, Kelly Boutsalis states (32) that “some historians have proposed the years 1451 and 1536” for the League’s creation, but notes that a case has been made “for the much earlier date of 1142 CE.” ↑
Ken Coates, “An era of justice is quietly delivering huge payback to Indigenous communities,” The Globe and Mail, Saturday, September 30, 2023, O4. ↑
Frank Jordans and Seth Borenstein, “UN warns Earth ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world’” – https://apnews.com/article/climate-united-nations-paris-europe-berlin-802ae4475c9047fb6d82ac88b37a690e (The quote is from the IPCC report’s co-chair, James Skea of Imperial College London). Thomas Homer-Dixon, “We should listen to renowned scientist’s warning about climate change,” The Globe and Mail, Saturday, November 25, 2023, O3 (“around 4.8 C”). ↑
Boutsalis, 31. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Rights of the Land,” Orion Magazine, December 2008 – reprinted online by DAILYGOOD, November 30, 2022 (white stone canoe). ↑
Protecting the future with a thousand-year-old teaching: The enduring relevance of the Peacemaker
An opinion piece by Peter Singer in the Globe and Mail. Patrick Wolfe photo.
The Peacemaker: Protecting the future with a thousand-year-old teaching[1]
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher of Ethics at Oxford University, “has systemically ranked existential risks.” Most dangerous, he believes, is A.I., to which he assigns “a one-in-ten chance of ending human potential or life in the next hundred years…. To nuclear technology, he assigns a one-in-a thousand chance, and to all risks combined a one-in-six chance.” Based on his belief in “our responsibility to the most poor and vulnerable,” he maintains that “safeguarding humanity’s future is the defining challenge of our time.” This conclusion springs from his realization “that the people of the future may be even more powerless to protect themselves from the risks we impose.”[2] This recognition echoes the teaching of the Peacemaker from almost a thousand years ago.
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” This adage has been identified as a Native American proverb. It has also been credited to Chief Seattle, among more recent individuals. What’s most interesting to me is that these words reflect the legacy of the Peacemaker whose 12th-century origin story[3] far pre-dates the founding of the United States and Canada, but who nevertheless is bound up in the history of both countries. Moreover, at a time when Canada is settling more and more First Nations’ legal claims,[4] the Peacemaker’s teachings could help shift our values and overcome the environmental challenges endangering humanity.
According to the Global Footprint Network, “Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. That’s equivalent to using the resources of 1.7 Earths.” Canada and the United States are major contributors to humanity’s sustainability problem, given that their rates of use, equivalent to 5.1 Earths, are among the highest in the world, based on 2018 data.[5] In addition, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change maintains that greenhouse gas emissions must “peak before 2025 at the latest and be reduced by 43% by 2030,” if we are to hold global warming to 1.5 C by 2100. But this is an exceedingly tall order as humanity, as a whole, is currently increasing emissions. At our current trajectory, the IPCC has forecast an end-of-century temperature increase of 2.4 to 3.5 C, while other experts say it could hit 4.8 C.[6]
In contrast to these problems of over-consumption and environmental imbalance, the “Thanksgiving Address,” passed down through the generations from the Peacemaker, propounds a philosophy of comparative simplicity. The address contains the “words that come before all others”: “that peace requires gratitude,” that “We are to be thankful for the living world…. Our Mother Earth connects us to a perpetual process of creation, and she continues to provide all we need to be happy and healthy.”[7]
An article in the December 2023 – January 2024 issue of Canada’s History examines how the five original Haudenosaunee (hoh-den-uh-SHOH-nee) nations united under the “Great Law of Peace.” Author Kelly Boutsalis writes that “the Peacemaker was born in a community on the north shore of Lake Ontario, near present-day Deseronto, Ontario. His destiny to be the Peacemaker was foretold to his grandmother in a dream that predicted he would bring good news of peace and power. In some stories, his mother was human, while his father was a non-human being.”[8]
Knowing that his mission was to bring peace to five warring nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca—he traveled south and first appeared, during a time of war, as “a beautiful youth in a white stone canoe” on Onondaga Lake, which abuts what is now Syracuse, New York.[9] That the stone canoe floated was “a sign that he was a special being whose words should be heeded.”[10]
According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the phenomenal bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, “the seminal Onondaga story of the Peacemaker” includes “Hiawatha—not Longfellow’s invention, but the real one.” Ms. Boutsalis notes that Hiawatha, in different accounts, “is either the Peacemaker’s right-hand man or his spokesman.”[11]
After many years and much travel, the Peacemaker brought together fifty reconciled chiefs and established the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (known historically to the English as the Iroquois Confederacy), “the oldest continuous democracy on Earth,” in Ms. Kimmerer’s words. Rick Hill, founding coordinator of the Indigenous Knowledge Centre at Six Nations Polytechnic in Brantford, Ontario, says the Great Law of Peace is “a series of lessons about how people transform their thinking.” Ms. Boutsalis states “it’s a series of values, rooted in a basic respect for all people’s rights, in democracy, and in using reason to ensure peace. These values should be applied to decision making and relationship building, with a focus on inclusion and collaboration. The Great Law doesn’t have police to enforce it or judges to rule on it.”[12]
Among his instructions, the Peacemaker, in the words of Onondaga faithkeeper Oren Lyons, told the chiefs: “Counselors, leaders, now that we have raised you here, now that you are who you are, when you counsel for the welfare of the people, then think not of yourself, nor of your family, nor even of your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming. You who see far into the future, that is your responsibility: to look out for those generations that are helpless, that are completely at our mercy. We must protect them.”[13]
When the confederacy was promulgated, the Peacemaker declared: “From here forward, you will be known as the Haudenosaunee, meaning that we built this house.”[14] To show what had been accomplished and the enhanced strength of the five nations, Hiawatha bound five arrows together. According to Ms. Kimmerer and others, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was a model for the American colonies when they joined together to become the United States: “the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows in its talons.”[15]
The Haudenosaunee, however, were drawn into conflicts among competing European colonies. In the early 17th century, when New France, under Samuel de Champlain, allied with the Haudenosaunee’s traditional enemies, the Algonquins, the Huron-Wendats and Innu (Montagnais) and attacked a Mohawk settlement at Ticonderoga, the Haudenosaunee sought covenants of peaceful co-existence with the Dutch and English. A “Two Row Wampum” belt testifies to such a covenant with the Dutch. The belt’s two parallel rows, which are said to reflect a teaching from the Peacemaker, “represent the Dutch people and the Haudenosaunee people existing side by side, without interfering in each other’s way of life,” according to Ms. Boutsalis. The parallel lines motif reappeared in subsequent agreements with the French, British and Americans.[16]
In 1722, the Tuscarora became the sixth nation to join the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Half a century later, they and the Oneida broke the confederacy by fighting for the Americans during their Revolutionary War, while the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga and Seneca fought for the British. When the Americans won, the Haudenosaunee lost most of their traditional lands in New York state.[17] In recompense, Frederick Haldimand, the British governor of the province of Quebec, granted, in 1784, to “his Majesty’s faithful allies,” the Mohawk, and to “others of the Six Nations,” approximately 3,844 square kilometres on either side of the Grand River, from its headwaters to Lake Erie.[18]
Although the grant said the Haldimand Tract was for the Haudenosaunee “to enjoy Forever,” the arrival of Canadian Confederation and subsequent “laws and policies meant to extinguish Indigenous governments and practices and to assimilate Indigenous people into Canadian society” superseded the former arrangement. Today, what was known as the Haldimand Tract has a population of about 800,000 and includes Brantford, Cambridge, Kitchner and Waterloo, and many smaller communities.[19]
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Chiefs Council (HCCC) fought back, however. In the 1920s, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh (a.k.a. Levi General) sought recognition from the League of Nations that the Six Nations of the Grand River was a sovereign nation. It’s no surprise that the claim was denied when Canada rallied Great Britain and other countries to its side. In September 1924, Canada also “stripped the HCCC of its authority.” Today, the HCCC continues to function in parallel to the Six Nations of the Grand River band’s Six Nations Elected Council decreed by government, which consists of a chief and twelve councillors. The HCCC’s chiefs are “appointed by clan mothers both from within the Six Nations of the Grand River and from other Six Nations bands in Ontario, Quebec and the United States,”[20]
Given our environmental challenges, it is tempting to ask “what if” the Six Nations of the Grand River had become a sovereign nation that showcased, on the world stage, the values with which they had been entrusted by the Peacemaker? How might humanity, or portions of it, have changed if, for one hundred years—for three to five generations—we’d had the example of a North American country based on radically different values related to consumption and sustainability?
Ms. Kimmerer asks, “what does it mean for an immigrant culture to start thinking like a native one? Not to appropriate the culture of indigenous people, not to take what is theirs, but to throw off the mindset of the frontier, the mindset that allows people to bury sacred sites under industrial waste, to fill a lake with mercury. Being indigenous to place means to live as if we’ll be here for the long haul, to take care of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, depended on it. Because they do.”[21]
It is notable that one of the sources for this essay, the international bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is centred on what they call the “indigenous critique” of European civilization in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.[22] The origins of this critique lie, they write, “with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk,” who ”the Jesuits considered to rank among the smartest people that ever lived” and who was a frequent guest of the Montreal-based, French Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac, in the 1690s.[23] Graeber and Wengrow add that Wendat and Haudenosaunee traditions are unusually “well documented” and maintain that the “ultimate question of human history” relates to our currently stymied “equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.”[24] Nonetheless, based on their reconsideration of history, they conclude that “the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”[25] That’s the encouraging news.
But the example of that briefly imagined sovereign Haudenosaunee nation probably would have made little difference to what, in 2024, is our growing environmental predicament. With the pell-mell nature of modern life, we react to technological and market-driven change more than we deliberate upon society’s needs and shape society, democratically and proactively, in the best interests of all its members. Unless we find the wisdom and will from the Peacemaker and others to live in harmony with the natural world, to recognize with Toby Ord our collective responsibility to the most poor and vulnerable, and to protect the future, humanity will be hard-pressed, over the next three to five generations, to recover from its present predicament.
Copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved. Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.
Patrick Wolfe is a writer and historian based in Victoria, B.C., Canada.
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