Related Topics
Related Stories
Once a year, a special society of Iroquois women gathered to mourn their war dead and urge their warriors to avenge the loss.
Which, of course, led to more war dead.
The cycle stopped centuries ago when the Iroquois nations ceased feuding. According to legend, the Indians buried their weapons under a white pine tree.
Jacob Swamp is a modern-day champion of burying the hatchet.
"It gives people new ideas about peacemaking," said Swamp, a former Mohawk Indian chief who founded the nonprofit Tree of Peace Society in 1984.
The Mohawk peacemaker will visit Elizabethtown College Wednesday, Nov. 4, to share his vision of tolerance among cultures and plant a white pine tree outside Esbenshade Hall.
His free public lecture at 11 a.m., in Esbenshade's Gibble Auditorium, is part of a "Heritage of Peace" symposium. The program continues Nov. 19 in the Young Center with two panel discussions examining the college's peace tradition and pacifist Brethren background.
All of which dovetails with the college's American Indian Heritage Month celebration, said Robert Wheelersburg, who teaches anthropology at the college.
One intriguing thread tying it all together is the old Susquehannock village site at Washington Boro, where Wheelersburg and his students have unearthed four 1600s-vintage ax heads.
No one will ever know if villagers planted those hatchets as a peace ritual, Wheelersburg said. But the concept is central to American Indian and frontier mythology.
In matrilineal Iroquois society, "the women are the key" to peace, added Wheelersburg, reconstructing what they might have said to turn the tide: "We've got to stop it. We've got to forget last year's deaths ... to prevent next year's deaths."
The mighty Iroquois confederation included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations and was centered north of New York's Adirondack Mountains. The confederation controlled much of the Northeast by the 1600s.
But truce was a relative term in those days, pointed out Wheelersburg, who titled the scholarship proposal for his dig "Murder and Mayhem, Indians and Europeans in the Lower Susquehanna Valley During the 17th Century."
"[The Iroquois] might have made peace among themselves, but it was like NATO; they became quite a formidable force," Wheelersburg said.
Powerful alliances that extended to the Mississippi Valley began fragmenting, however, when whites arrived and embroiled Indians in their conflicts.
Native survivors ended up on St. Lawrence River area reservations contaminated by PCBs and fluoride from aluminum plants, said Elizabeth Hoover, an Elizabethtown College visiting scholar who will be introducing Swamp.
Hoover, who is descended from Mohawks and Germans, said red and white peace traditions have long mingled here.
The pacifist Quakers helped Indians interpret Colonial-era treaties. Half a dozen leaders from the Iroquois nations witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence, according to Swamp. "Nobody knows that today."
The Society of Friends still funds environmental cleanups in the Akwesasne Iroquois community in New York, Hoover said.
A native group she worked with last summer, We Are Planting Good Seeds, aims to rekindle the community's farming and gardening traditions.
Swamp, meanwhile, who spoke last week from his home in upstate New York, has specialized in trees.
"I started around 1984," he recalled. He planted an olive tree in Israel. He helped green up the divide along the Berlin Wall. "And not too long after," he said, "the wall came down. That was a good feeling."
Swamp estimates that Tree of Peace has inspired people worldwide to plant 200 million seedlings.
But there is much cross-cultural hatchet burying still to do. Swamp learned that the hard way.
He started life as a Catholic kid on the reservation. Born into the wolf clan, he said, his Indian name was Tekaronianeken, which means "where two skies meet." But he went by Jake.
As a child, he said, he was taught that he'd "go to hell" if he followed "pagan" religious rites, such as celebrating the year's first food, the sap rising in maple trees.
"I was afraid of my culture," he said.
But, he noted, his wife, who was raised in the native tradition, steered him back to older, holistic ways. In his early 20s, he added, he embraced his culture's view that "water, trees, animals, birds, sun and moon, stars, everything, is a relation."
The message resides subtly in the trees Swamp has planted, and in those he has yet to plant.
"It's going to take a long time" to reach out, he said. Fortunately, he added, "I'm only 68. I'm still young."
Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.
(206)
