Opinion: The Peacemaker’s cry
By Danny Beaton
Our stories, passed down for hundreds of years, tell us that after the Peacemaker came to our territories, he convinced the five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (or Iroquois Confederacy) to bury their weapons of war beneath the roots of the Great White Pine known as the Tree of Peace.
After years of unity among the Nations, another tribe joined the Confederacy, forming what became the Six Nations Confederacy. These Nations were among the great Indigenous Tribes of the Woodlands and Great Lakes region, which contains the largest body of freshwater in the world. Life became very peaceful until the arrival of the Settlers, our demanding non-Indigenous brothers. They wanted so much of the homeland of the Six Nations people and our neighbours, the Ojibwa, Algonquin, Cree, and other Nations.
All the Great Tribes in the Woodlands of Ontario and New York nurtured themselves by living around the Great Lakes. After the Great Law and the Six Nations became the Iroquois Confederacy, villages and tribes began to farm and trade more. Indigenous people could see Settlers pouring onto their territories and outnumbering them; they started taking more space and land than they had asked for. Soon, all the land became a place of liars and corruption. Because this has never stopped, Mother Earth has suffered from mismanagement and pollution: the ones claiming to own the Indigenous territories want to pave more roads and highways to eradicate anything of value from Mother Earth’s body.
After all these years, we must repeat our messages and concerns to the visitors who have come for shelter and peace. This is still the Peacemaker’s home in the Northeastern Woodlands of the Great Lakes. Our Elders, Chiefs, and Clan Mothers are forced to go to non-Indigenous courts to prove that this is our homeland, and we are not asking for something that is not ours. We did not come from elsewhere; we have been here since the beginning of time. We are not savages, heathens, or lost; we are Indigenous to these lands. The courts need to know this, and our future generations need to know the truth because many foreign companies come here and extract our resources like minerals through mining or harm our environment by exploiting our lands by building on our marshlands and boreal forests. We are still fighting for Mother Earth, just like we did 500 years ago. Sometimes, our Chiefs and Clan Mothers are forced to attend court for the protection of forests, rivers, and life species that should be protected under common sense or natural law, but corporations want to exploit Indigenous homelands for profit, even when it is causing Climate Change and contamination of our water. Our people, like all Indigenous people, are fighting urban sprawl, mismanagement of natural spaces for life-giving species, plant life, and water.
Corporations and governments see Northern Ontario as a profit-seeking venture, spending over $7 million in campaign ads in one year for creating the Ring of Fire mining mega-project. Many First Nations people up north have been convinced that this is important for future generations, but many First Nations disagree with developing the north with extended roads. Engineers and architects are working for corporations and governments to achieve short-term profits from a natural world economy, but people’s eyes and minds are closed to the consequences of profit. The natural world cannot take the same insanity that architects and military engineers created in deserts throughout the United States, building dams in deserts and turning rivers and forests into sand. Canada used their engineers and architects to build the Tar Sands in Alberta, the largest contributor to Global Warming and Climate Change in the world, with contamination running into groundwater and all the way to our ocean. Killing species from unimaginable contamination is all documented by Amnesty International and Cultural Survival. Propaganda, spin doctors, and publicists use rhetoric and lies to convince society that mega projects that make short-term profits are good, ignoring the long-term side effects.
If society works and learns from conservation and Indigenous environmentalists and lawyers, even positive engineers and architects, there is hope for Mother Earth.