Uneasy in US, Iroquois believe survival’s at stake

Associated Press

ONONDAGA NATION, N.Y.

A group of young men has gathered in the longhouse for the feather dance, and the sounds of their singing filter outside, where Mohawk Chief Howard Thompson sits.

His people call him Onerekowa, the name his predecessors have borne for a thousand years. Each month, when he gathers with the 49 other chiefs from the six Haudenosaunee nations, he stands to speak in the language of his ancestors. And when the 50 come to a decision, they don’t take a majority vote. Instead, as it has for a millennium, the leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy decide by consensus.

Today Thompson awaits the start of a meeting of the Haudenosaunee Peace and Trade Committee, where tradition will grapple with the outside world. The issue is passports.

Last month, the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team missed their world championship in Britain rather than travel overseas under U.S. or Canadian passports. Their Haudenosaunee passports were deemed inadequate in a post-9/11 world — partly handwritten, lacking in high-tech security features.

Haudenosaunee Documentation Committee chairman Karl Hill peers fiercely from behind wire-rimmed glasses as he explains how the confederacy has spent upward of $1 million to bring their identification into line with the U.S. government’s new standards. For now, the handwritten Haudenosaunee passports still can be easily counterfeited, he says.

But, he adds, that would never be reason enough for the lacrosse players to travel on another nation’s document. Such a choice would be a betrayal of their national identity — an identity he says is as valid as ever, even though his people shop in American malls and watch American television and study at American colleges.

We are a nation, he insists, and it matters.

“It means that we’ve survived,” he says.

“The fact that we’re still here is a testament to our survival. Now why on earth would we give that up and call ourselves U.S. citizens?”

Unless someone told you, you might not even know you’d driven into Onondaga Nation.

On this dusty, four-lane road, the border is invisible. There’s no fence, no painted line and no one to stop and ask you for ID.

But though the gas station accepts only U.S. currency, children in language classes here are taught a different name for the man featured on the dollar bill. In the Onondaga tongue, George Washington is still called the “Town Destroyer.”

For many Americans, the brutal past has become little more than a historical footnote covered briefly in school. But no one here has forgotten the killings, the disease and the forced marches that scholars believe reduced the native population in what came to be the United States from more than 4 million in 1492 to just a quarter-million 400 years later.

There are no fences marking the borders, residents say, because they are a people that does not believe in fences. Any built by outsiders serve only as a reminder of internment camps.

Today, the question of identity for the estimated 5 million American Indians and Alaska Natives within U.S. borders is complicated. About one-third identify themselves as being more than one race. Some serve in the U.S. military. Whether you use the word “integrated” or “assimilated,” many have blended into American life.

And though all Native American tribes defend their right to independence, many see that autonomy as limited, their role akin to that of a U.S. state.

But here in Onondaga Nation, many feel deeply that this place is in no way a part of the United States of America.

Residents still talk about the tour bus that pulled up to the longhouse, its occupants asking, “Where are the tepees?” But it’s rare for outsiders to venture past the smoke shop, drive the unmarked roads, be invited into people’s homes.

Conversations with leaders and residents quickly reveal that many believe they have the same central concerns their ancestors did. There are those here who remain uneasy when they head out into the world built by the people some here still call “the Europeans.”

It’s not simple being a nation within a nation.

U.S. law is very clear on the topic of sovereignty: The Native American nations are defined as “domestic dependent nations,” and the Supreme Court has always affirmed Congress’ right to make decisions for the nations — and to break treaties when doing so is in the interest of the U.S., says professor Eric Cheyfitz, director of the American Indian Program at Cornell University.