Fw: War and Peace

> Subject: [CarlislePeaceCollege] WHAT CAN WE LEARN
> FROM NATIVE AMERICA ABOUT WAR AND PEACE?
>
> WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM NATIVE AMERICA ABOUT WAR AND
> PEACE?
> JOHN MOHAWK
> The Progressive Pragmatism of the Iroquois
> Confederacy
> http://www.lapismagazine.org/mohawkprint.html
>
> The Iroquois Confederacy long ago devised the rules
> of peace-making and
> negotiation after centuries of war and vengeance.
> What crucial lessons can
> we learn from them as we face a world torn apart by
> hatreds?
>
> Bear with me while I take some words that have
> established usage in English
> and bend them a little to make them fit where I want
> to go with this.
>
> I'd like to begin by saying that if we were to put
> into English the
> philosophical tradition of the native peoples,
> especially the native people
> of the Northeast woodlands, we would probably have
> to call it a form of
> progressive pragmatism. The whole tradition of
> pragmatism actually found
> its roots in Native America, and the way it is
> practiced in contemporary
> America has lost its way from where it came from.
> But without going too
> much into how it lost its way, let me go back to
> where it came from. Why is
> it relevant today?
>
> We don't know exactly where it came from; it goes
> beyond history, way
> beyond, actually. In the beginning of the story of
> the formation of the
> Iroquois Confederacy, there was discussion about a
> time prior to the
> existence of states. Before there were states, there
> was war. In a way, we
> would probably describe it as blood feuding. What
> was peculiar about it was
> that people had the capacity to make war but did not
> have the capacity to
> make peace.
>
> This is the case of warlords. A warlord can
> essentially initiate violence,
> but he can't guarantee the cessation of violence for
> the most part. He
> certainly can't guarantee it on the part of a
> nation. Before you could have
> peace, you had to have the formation of something
> larger than the unit
> capable of striking; you had to have some cohesion.
>
> I was very struck with that because I think what
> happened in the
> prehistoric past of the northeast woodlands was that
> at one point there was
> internecine warfare going on everywhere. It was led
> by what we would call
> today warlords, although they were actually warrior
> chieftains. At some
> point people began discussions about how do you stop
> it once it gets
> started. I imagine that those conversations took
> quite a bit of time. In
> any case, they began developing a way of thinking
> about war and peace,
> which actually turns out to be quite relevant to our
> time.
>
> Here's what they thought, roughly. They began by
> thinking that peace would
> be a positive thing if we could achieve it. But in
> order to achieve it, we
> would have to have a sort of critical mass, a number
> of people who were
> brought into the theory that violence could be
> brought to an end. And then
> they asked the question, what would take its place?
> There was no event that
> could be pointed at to say, "this is the event that
> started this violence."
> In some cases, no one could remember what started
> the violence. They had
> been at war, revenge war, for so long that some
> people were born knowing
> they had enemies and not knowing why they had
> enemies.
>
> I propose to you that this condition of pre-state
> warfare has always
> existed, continues to exist and will always exist.
> There will always be
> people who have the capacity to organize violence,
> who work outside of a
> framework of states; who do this violence and adhere
> to no real coherent
> rules about when to end the violence. I propose to
> you that that has always
> existed in our lifetime and is taking place now and
> will take place in the
> future in cultures that find the idea of revenge to
> be very attractive.
>
> How the Iroquois Made Peace
>
> In the Iroquois culture, they found revenge to be
> very attractive and they
> had to find two routes to stop it. This is where
> things got to be on two
> tracks: the track of how to stop violence inside the
> groups that are
> committed to ending violence, and the track of
> addressing violence in those
> groups that are not. This is why one of the things
> that came out of this
> was entirely made up of what we call pragmatism. We
> only have a few quotes
> from the Indians. They were basically ignored from
> the time of the Puritans
> who assumed that the Indians were an inferior group
> and that the Indians
> didn't have anything to say.
>
> By the time the British military came along and had
> to engage in the peace
> making conferences and truce making conferences, the
> British adopted some
> of the Indian protocol on how you have meetings and
> discussions. In the
> British adoption of that kind of protocol, you'll
> notice that in historical
> records, the British stand astonished at the quality
> of oratory that was
> set forth by the Indians. Almost all the Indians
> that they met exhibited a
> kind of oratory that left the British somewhat
> amazed. The reason, I
> propose, for that is that the Indians had devised a
> structure of how to
> think about the project that they were addressing.
>
> Their structure required that the combatants, the
> people on opposite sides,
> had to acknowledge the other side. Whenever two
> sides came in contact with
> one another in some form of conversation, there was
> a protocol to it. The
> protocol was preceded by a condolence. This was an
> interesting idea. A
> condolence was a ceremony, usually short, in which
> the two parties who were
> about to have a conversation had a preliminary
> meeting, in which they
> acknowledged that each side had suffered as a result
> of the conflict they
> were in.
>
> In short, they did a ceremonial acknowledgment of
> each other's humanity and
> of the losses and sacrifices that had been made on
> both sides. It's quite
> an elaborate conversation actually. When the two
> sides would meet, they
> passed strings of wampum to one another and each
> string of wampum carried
> with it a sort of preset message. And when you sent
> one of your sets of
> messages to your enemy, they acknowledged by
> repeating it back to you, what
> you had said. The idea of it was to set the stage
> for things that had to be
> discussed.
>
> Here was a period of time when people made wars with
> clubs and bows and
> arrows and traps and not with so-called weapons of
> mass destruction.
> Actually at one time, a good solid club was a weapon
> of mass destruction
> wielded by the proper parties. In any case, there
> was going to be a lot of
> conversation going on when they actually got to the
> peacemaking part about
> the idea of casting their weapons beneath a tree and
> burying them. This is
> of course, entirely symbolic, just like modern
> disarmament is entirely
> symbolic. The next time you get a paycheck, you go
> out and buy some more.
>
> The same thing was true with the Indians. They could
> always go home and
> whittle some more of those weapons. In any case,
> they couldn't give up
> weapons entirely because they depended on them for
> hunting and for food
> supplies. So when they say they are putting the
> weapons of war under the
> tree, the conversations is just symbolic language
> meaning that they are not
> going to use them on each other anymore.
>
> They put together this idea of seeking peace and
> they had to make it
> practical. So there is an attention to practice, to
> what's pragmatic, to
> making promises to one another that are likely to be
> kept. So you're going
> to have a peacemaking process that begins with some
> principles, which are
> just symbolic, one of which is the destruction of
> weaponry. The second one
> is that we are now going to put our minds together
> to create peace.
>
> Of the quotes you can think of about the Indians,
> the most famous ones are
> the one from Sitting Bull. "Now let us put our minds
> together to see what
> kind of world we can leave for our children." And
> the other one out of The
> Great Law, "Now we put our minds together to see
> what kind of world we can
> create for the seventh generation yet unborn." Both
> of these are pragmatist
> constructions. They lay out the idea that we are now
> going to put our minds
> together to create some kind of desirable outcome.
> And pragmatism is
> entirely about outcome. To begin with, you lay out
> the outcome and then you
> step back and negotiate the steps to go from here to
> the outcome that you
> want.
>
> I want to point out that Northern America has only
> given one single
> philosophical tradition to the world, and that
> single philosophical
> tradition is pragmatism. But pragmatism, in order
> for it to follow the
> principles of the Iroquois Great Law, has to be
> progressive pragmatism as
> opposed to regressive. First, it lays out desirable
> outcomes that both
> sides can agree upon, and second, that these were
> going to be adhered to
> through a set of protocols. It acknowledges on some
> level that it is not
> possible to create peace by force. Peace has to be
> arrived at, and there's
> really some conversation here about what peace is in
> the first place. Peace
> is not the cessation of violence, it turns out.
>
> The Meeting Between the Warring Parties
>
> The two parties meet in the middle of the forest,
> and they address the
> first thing, which is each other's humanity. And
> they address it in a very
> interesting way. In the beginning, they set the
> stage by paying attention
> to the people. The one side says to the other side
> something like this.
> "Well we've been engaged in combat and you've come
> out of the forest and
> you're covered in the bracken of the forest; we see
> that on your clothing.
> So the first thing we do is brush your clothing off,
> and clean off all the
> stuff that shows that you've been in a war. The next
> thing they do is they
> brush off the bench that the man is going to sit on
> and make it clean and
> ready for that. Then they begin addressing a series
> of things.
>
> These are symbolic. They say stuff like this: "With
> this wampum, I release
> the pressure in your chest. You're feeling tightened
> in your body from the
> struggle, so I release you from that. With this one,
> I take the tears out
> of your eyes that you've been crying because of the
> people you lost in your
> war. And with this one, I release your vocal cords.
> I release your voice so
> you can speak strongly." What they are basically
> addressing is that things
> have to be done symbolically to prepare both sides
> to talk. The first thing
> that is there in the tradition has to do with the
> concept of what
> conditions actually lead to peace.
>
> According to the Great Law, peace is arrived at
> through the exercise of
> power, righteousness, and reason. I always thought
> these were interesting
> because translated into action, what does it mean?
> Power, your power to
> act, depends on your capacity to believe that what
> it is that you set about
> doing can be done. In other words, you won't do what
> needs to be done if
> you think it is a futile gesture. You can't acquire
> power to deal with an
> enemy unless you acknowledge that the enemy is a
> rational being who has
> wants and desires, who wants to live and who wants
> his children to live,
> who wants to live in peace. To acknowledge that they
> are human gives you
> the capacity to speak to them. If you think they are
> not human, you won't
> have that capacity. You will have destroyed your own
> power to communicate
> with the very people you must communicate with if
> you are going to
> communicate with your enemy.
>
> Just to bring this into contemporary thinking, you
> can't say we don't
> negotiate with terrorists. They are the people who
> are trying to kill you.
> You have to negotiate with them, but to negotiate
> with them, you have to do
> something that is trickier: you have to acknowledge
> that they're human.
> Acknowledging that they are human means also
> acknowledging that they have
> failings. But you don't concentrate on the failings;
> you concentrate on
> their humanity. You have to address their humanity
> if you're going to have
> any hope of stopping the blood feud.
>
> Second, remember, there is peace in which there is
> no state, no government.
> There is nobody on the other side who can actually
> surrender; nobody on the
> other side who can guarantee anything by law. We're
> looking to make peace
> between peoples in which the foundation of the peace
> is the tradition to
> which they agree and which they embrace, and it's
> held up by their honor
> and nothing else. This is important because the
> people who are at war now
> are not states and there is no way to stop them
> unless they agree to stop.
>
> Power was the first word. Righteousness is the
> second. Righteousness is a
> very dangerous word in English. It's a very
> dangerous word in English
> history. But let me just give a sense of how it was
> used. Righteousness
> means that almost all of us agree that some things
> are right, correct,
> positive, which is to say that they might not all
> agree that some things
> are obviously right and wrong. But there are some
> things that they will
> agree on. So those are the things you start to build
> on. You have the
> conversation and your negotiations until you hit the
> rock hard things.
>
> That takes us to the third and last section, which
> is reason. Reason means
> that you're going to do the rock hard things. You're
> not going to settle
> them really, but you're going to do the best you can
> with them. You're
> going to move them as far forward on as many points
> as possible. The
> Iroquois law of peace assumes that you will not
> achieve peace. You will not
> achieve a perfect agreement between two warring
> sides about how the world
> ought to be in the future. But it also assumes that
> you can reach enough of
> it to have something to work on so that you can take
> the conflict from
> physical warfare over to a place where, as they used
> to say, thinking can
> replace violence.
>
> So the purpose is reach a place, where you can
> actually work on it and get
> it done. But you'll never achieve it because peace
> is not achievable as a
> static condition. Because relationships between
> human beings are not
> static. Relationships between human beings one might
> say, are left undone,
> unfinished. They continue to be unfinished business
> so it's assumed that
> peace can't be concluded. You can get toward a place
> where the conversation
> about peace is ongoing and continuous and continues
> to replace the
> violence.
> Points of negotiation can be worked on. It is
> important to find out why the
> two parties continue to have conflict and try to
> remove those irritants
> that have caused the violence.
>
> Now for the most part, the thing about blood feuding
> is that it's often
> built on injuries, damages, and things that happened
> to people in previous
> generations. It didn't happen to the people sitting
> at the table, it
> happened to their fathers or their grandfathers. It
> happened a long time
> ago. And they're still carrying that injury. They're
> bringing that injury
> with them as a real injury. And I propose to you
> that the world is full of
> this.
>
> Relevance to the World Today
>
> In the contemporary world, there is a certain
> dismissal of this. We look at
> these people and say, "Wow, sure. But that happened
> in 1952 and you were
> only two in 1952." The pragmatic people, however,
> think that you still have
> to address this. You may have done something that
> you can undo. If you
> can't undo it, at least you can address it. So the
> purpose of having the
> negotiations is to address old injuries as well as
> new ones.
>
> The other reality is that revenge is very, very hard
> to address. Some
> people only live for revenge. They have no other
> purpose. In fact, the old
> Iroquois stories tell story after story about people
> who were like that.
> They lived for the purpose of revenge. The story of
> The Great Laws is the
> story of a guy who comes along and he does a certain
> amount of combing of
> their hair. He speaks to them and addresses their
> issues. And there is a
> constant and relentless conversation going on about
> the whole issue of
> righteousness, about what's right and what's wrong.
> What works and what
> doesn't work. What might work if we tried it or not
> work if we didn't try
> it. The point of the project is the process and not
> the end of the process
> because it is assumed that there will never be an
> end. It's an endless
> process and it wants to engage the next group. So
> they're setting the stage
> for the next generation to carry on the process.
>
> Hopefully, the process of maintaining peace. Or
> actually, the process of
> talking and thinking instead of shooting and blowing
> each other up.
> Hopefully, this process will continue on long enough
> until it becomes
> normal that we don't blow each other up.
>
> Which gets me to my final and last point. People are
> starting to talk about
> a war on terrorism. Well some cultures haven't
> realized that there's always
> been a war on terrorism. Forever, as long as human
> memory has existed,
> there have been assassinations and harm done from
> group to group, on and
> on, endlessly. And sometimes they had some sort of
> claim to a religious
> foundation, sometimes it was just things that
> happened as a result of
> battles. But whatever it was, it would have been an
> interesting thing, in
> my opinion, if the contemporary war on terrorism had
> been built on
> principles of pragmatism, of coming to ways of
> sorting out whatever it is
> that people are saying was done wrong to them, and
> making proposals about
> how to make it right. That would have been
> interesting.
>
> There will never be an endgame to the war on
> terrorism. What we need to do
> is a beginning game in the process of peacemaking.
> As far as I can see in
> pragmatic terms, we haven't begun that yet.
>
> Progressive pragmatism seems to have lost its
> strength in American culture.
> But I think it would be a good thing if we could
> have a conversation to
> bring it back. And bring it back in its full and
> complex glory because
> pragmatism, progressive pragmatism, is ultimately
> the most complex process
> devised so far by people who play politics.
>
> John Mohawk was for many years editor of the seminal
> magazine, Akwesasne
> Notes. A strong voice for the Iroquois peoples, he
> is a university
> professor of Native American Studies.
>
> This article is adapted from a talk given at a
> conference on American
> Spirit and Values organized this year by The New
> York Open Center and City
> University Graduate Center.
>