The oldest democracy.
Before the quill
Of Jefferson had scratched its founding creed,
Before the English colonists would fill
The parchment rolls with liberty's bright seed--
The Haudenosaunee had already made
A union from the warfare of five nations,
A Great Law spoken underneath the shade
Of the white pine, the Tree of Peace's stations
Rooted in the earth of Onondaga,
Where Deganawidah the Peacemaker came
Across the waters with a light like saga
And planted peace where blood-feud was the name
Of every season. Five, then six: the Mohawk,
Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga,
Seneca--and Tuscarora's long walk
North to join the league--a federation, a
Covenant of condolence, not of war,
Where fifty chiefs sat in their council ring
And the clan mothers chose who would speak for
Each nation and could strip a faithless king
Of his antlers. Women held the fire.
The longhouse stretched from east to west--
The Mohawk at the eastern door, the dire
And watchful Keepers, and the Seneca blessed
As Keepers of the Western Door, and all
Between them bound by wampum belts that told
The story of the peace, the protocol
Of consensus, the refusal to be bold
Without agreement--every voice must speak,
No nation overruled, no war declared
Without the council's sanction, the technique
Of governance that later centuries stared
At and called democracy's first proof.
But now
The English colonies had risen in revolt
Against their king, and underneath the bough
Of the white pine came the thunderbolt
Of a war that split the world in two--
And asked the Haudenosaunee to choose.
The Americans came first. They sent men who
Spoke of brotherhood and asked the crews
Of the longhouse council for neutrality:
Stay out, they said. This is a family quarrel,
A war among the English--the polity
Of the Six Nations need not risk its laurel
In a fight between a father and his sons.
But the British came with different gifts:
With muskets, blankets, promises, and guns,
And the argument that cut through all the rifts
Of diplomacy: the Americans want your land.
Whatever words of brotherhood they speak,
Their settlers push the frontier, hand by hand,
Into the hunting grounds--and week by week
The longhouse country shrinks. The British crown
At least has drawn a line--the Proclamation
Of seventeen-sixty-three that handed down
The law: no settlement, no confiscation
West of the Appalachians. Choose the king,
And the line holds. Choose the rebels, and the flood
Of settlers will devour everything
Between the Mohawk Valley and the blood
Of the western rivers.
Thayendanegea chose.
Joseph Brant--war chief of the Mohawk, bred
In the English school of Eleazar Wheelock, those
Corridors of Connecticut that fed
A Mohawk boy the language of the crown--
He chose the British. Not from servile love
Of kings, but from the calculus that a town
Of settlers was a deadlier thing than the glove
Of a distant monarch's rule. The Seneca
And Cayuga followed Brant to war,
And Onondaga's fire-keepers drew the day
Toward the British side--but at the core
The League was cracking. For the Oneida
And Tuscarora chose the other way:
The American alliance, the cedar
Of a different calculation--that the fray
Would end with American victory, and those
Who stood beside the rebels would be spared.
The Great Law said: decide by consensus. Those
Who disagreed should not be forced. But dared
The council hold when half its nations fought
Against the other half?--the covenant
Of condolence broken, and the rot
Of Europe's war inside the parliament
Of the longhouse, splitting beam from beam.
At Oriskany the nightmare became real:
Oneida warriors fought Mohawk in the steam
And blood of an August ambush--the ordeal
Of brothers killing brothers in the name
Of European kings and European rebels,
The Great League's children burning in the flame
Of a war that was not theirs--the pebbles
Of a European quarrel that crushed the stone
Of the oldest peace.
Then came the burning time.
Washington dispatched his generals--the tone
Of his orders cold as Valley Forge's rime:
"Total destruction and devastation."
Sullivan and Clinton marched through the land
Of the Seneca and Cayuga nation
With the methodical and iron hand
Of a scorched-earth campaign--forty towns
Put to the torch, the orchards cut, the corn
Destroyed in the granaries, the gowns
Of harvest ripped apart, the children born
That autumn born to famine. Not a battle--
A systematic destruction of a world:
The longhouses collapsed, the starving cattle
Slaughtered, and the smoke of centuries unfurled
From every Haudenosaunee village burned
In the autumn of seventeen-seventy-nine.
The Seneca gave Washington a name, and turned
The word to prophecy: Town Destroyer--the sign
And title that would pass from president
To president, from one destroyer to the next,
Each administration's westward bent
Fulfilling the first general's scorched pretext.
The war ended. The British lost. The peace
Was signed at Paris--and the Haudenosaunee
Were not mentioned. Not one line for the release
Of their sovereignty, not one attorney
For their cause. The British ceded land
That was not theirs to cede--the hunting grounds
Of the Six Nations, drawn by a foreign hand
On a foreign map within the foreign bounds
Of a treaty that erased them from the page.
And those who chose the American side?
The Oneida, who had bled at every stage
Beside the rebels?--they were cast aside
With equal coldness. Within a generation
The Oneida homeland shrank from six million
Acres to a fragment--the American nation
Rewarding its allies with a reptilian
Ingratitude that proved what Brant had known:
It did not matter which side the Haudenosaunee chose.
The settler wanted land, and land alone,
And neither crown nor congress would oppose
The hunger of the frontier.
Brant led his people north
To Grand River in the British province,
A reservation granted for the worth
Of their alliance--the scant evidence
That loyalty to empires buys a home.
The fire at Onondaga dimmed but did not die.
The council yet would meet beneath the dome
Of the longhouse sky, and the white pine's high
And patient branches still would shelter those
Who kept the wampum belts and spoke the Law--
But the Great League that Deganawidah chose
To build from the wreckage of an older war
Was broken by a newer one, and the peace
That had held five nations in its careful ring
Was shattered by the empires whose caprice
Could break a continent and call it a blessing.
Honor the Haudenosaunee--who built
A league of peace before the word republic
Had entered Europe's lexicon, who spilt
Their blood on both sides of a war barbaric
And foreign to their law--and learned too well
That no alliance with an empire saves
The people from the empire's clientele
Of settlers and surveyors digging graves
Where longhouses had stood. The fire still burns.
The council still convenes. The Great Law turns
In the memory of the clan mothers who chose
The chiefs--and the white pine forever grows.