Oren R. Lyons, a member of the Seneca Indian Tribe, is the Faith Keeper of the Turtle Clan, the Council of Chiefs of the Onondaga Haudenosaunee Nation (Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy). As Faith Keeper, he is charged with preserving the customs, traditions, values, and history of the Turtle Clan and upholding the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee; he also represents the message of this people to the World Community in all aspects that the Onondaga Nation deems necessary. For more than four decades, he has been actively engaged in international issues of indigenous rights and sovereignty at the United Nations and in other international forums. He is a key figure in the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders, a council of traditional rank-and-file leaders of North American Indian nations. Lyons is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and publisher of the national Indian magazine Daybreak and, together with John Mohawk, the editor of the book Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the US Constitution (1992). He was also a lifelong lacrosse player. He is a board member of Bioneers and chairman of Plantagon International AB, a leader in urban agriculture. This essay by the author was published under the title "Listening to Natural Law" in the anthology Spiritual Ecology / THE CRY of the EARTH (edit. L. Vaughan-Lee; The Golden Sufi center, Point Reyes 2013, pp. 7-11). Translation: Jiří Zemánek.
NEYAWENHA SKANNOH. This means: “Thank you for being okay.” This greeting in itself speaks volumes about how Native Americans think and how their communities function.
What is happening to you and the Earth is happening to us, so we have common interests. We need to somehow try to convince the people in power to change the direction they are going. We need to take a more responsible course and start dealing with the realities of the future, to secure a future for children and for the entire nation. That is what we are all about. Doing this is beneficial for both us and you.
In the concerns and problems that we face as ordinary people, as human beings and as a species, we must come together and do things like what we are doing now – to meet, to share, to learn. It all depends on the will, on what is in your heart. We Indians have survived until this time because we have a strong will. We do not agree that we should be assimilated. We do not agree that we should give up our way of life. And the same will should be in your heart – the will that you do not agree that there should be no future.
I personally don't think that in this situation that we are in right now, we have reached the point of no return, but we are getting closer to it. The further away you are from that point, the more options you have. But as we get closer to it every day, we lose more and more options. When we get to the point where we have no options left. There will be no more options. When that moment comes, people will complain and make a fuss. But as Chief Shenandoah told me, "I don't know what the big deal is. It's too late anyway." I said, "Uncle, what do you mean?" He said, "They've done a lot of damage. They're going to suffer." A simple observation, but very true. There's been a lot of damage and people are going to suffer, but Uncle didn't say at the time the idea that was told to us long ago in the prophecies was that the land would be degraded. We were told that the extent of Earth's degradation could be known by the fact that there would be two very important systems that would warn us.
One of them is the acceleration of the winds. It is said that the winds would accelerate and accelerate. When you see the acceleration of the winds increasing, then you are in a dangerous time. The prophecies say that another way to know if the earth is in decay is to watch how people treat their children; they say that it will be very important to notice how they treat their children; from that you will learn how the earth is damaged. If you open the newspaper today, there is talk of exploitative sex and children, and there are homeless children, and you can count them in the millions. That is a serious indicator of degradation for us. And society does not care.
So we have to take these indicators seriously and start organizing and doing the best we can. We have to come together and give each other moral support so that we can go back home and start again, because it all starts at home. It starts with you. It starts with you and then with your family. And then it goes out from your family and that's the way it's done, that's the way it needs to be done. It's from the bottom up. You go back and you start informing and you get a little more excited and a little more strict in your stances and you start insisting that people hear you, that they listen to you. Education is important, and how you can educate people about what we need is crucial.
The spiritual side of the natural world is absolute. The laws are absolute. Our instructions – and I am speaking of all human beings – are to get along. Understand what these laws are. Get along with the laws, support them and cooperate with them. We were told long ago that if we did this, life would be endless. It would just go on and on in great cycles of regeneration, great powerful cycles of life that is constantly renewed and renewed.
If you want to interfere with this regeneration, if you want to interrupt it, that is your choice, but the consequences that will come back to you can be very serious, because the laws are again absolute. There is no such thing as a law of Nature. habeas corpus1Habeas corpus – summons to court.. You either do it or you don't. If you don't, you pay. It's that simple. So we have to get our leaders to change, and if they don't, we have to raise new, better leaders. Raise your own leaders. Get them to the top. It's your responsibility to raise good leaders. Get them to where they can be effective and change the direction that things are going.
I come from Onondaga, and the thing I remember most about our country is how everyone used to plant. I was a boy behind one of those plows that was hitched to a horse. And at my age, when you hit a rock, you went right over the plow handle. It was hard to keep that plow in your hands. I remember that. It was hard work. Planting and farming is hard work. You have to get up early. You have to do a lot of things, but it's great character training. It's great training for maturity and responsibility, the best training, really. It's hard to go back to farming these days, but there's going to come a time when only those who know how to plant will eat.
That time is not far off. So all these Native American nations that have built entire civilizations around food, around thanksgiving, and around spiritual law, they need to wake up and remember how important this is. All the communities talk about prayer. We just don't call it prayer today, but we do it all the time. We sing songs, dawn songs, we do morning ceremonies, we sing songs of thanksgiving for coming early. All summer, all spring, we do Thanksgiving. All our ceremonies are thanksgiving. We give thanks twelve months a year.
In the spring, when the sap flows through the trees, we have thanksgiving ceremonies. For the maple tree, the chief of the trees, the leader of all trees, we give thanks. We give thanks for all the trees. We give thanks for the planting. We give thanks for the strawberries, these first fruits. We give thanks for the bees, for the grain, for the green corn. We give thanks for the harvest. The community, the process, the chiefs, the clan mothers, they're all involved. There are families. How do you give respect to something? By giving thanks, by doing this.
This is what we have to do. We have to be grateful. That's what we said. We were told two things: to be grateful, there are your ceremonies, your thanksgiving ceremonies. We have created nations around them, and you can do it too. And the other thing the prophets said was: enjoy life. That's the rule, the law - enjoy life - that's what's expected of you. I know you can only do as much as you can handle, and when you can handle it, you're supposed to go out and enjoy life. Don't take yourself so seriously. Do the best you can, but get involved. That's what your community is like and my community is like: I'll be down and I'll be struggling and I'll be picking my nose, but by meeting people, sitting and talking to them and listening to all this positive energy and intentions, like at Bioneers and other gatherings, that energy is renewed in me. I can go home and say, hey, look, there's a good bunch of people out there trying to help us. Tell our people to get up their lazy asses and do something. That's true. People are lazy these days. They don't know how to work anymore.
That's just the way it is, and that's what needs to be done. Hard work can do anything. It used to be common, customary law. So I would say that in the thought of rebuilding yourself and in the thought of finding peace in our community, you should tell your leaders and everyone else that world peace can never come as long as you wage war on Mother Earth. To wage war on Mother Earth is to destroy and disrupt, to kill and poison. If we do that, we will not have peace. The first peace comes with your mother, with Mother Earth.
Dahnayto (I'm done now).
