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Hiawatha - II: Government for the People - Extra History (Patreon)

Published:
2016-09-01 17:02:06
Edited:
2018-05-15 02:03:05
Imported:
2022-01

Content

Hiawatha had a plan to bring the last nation into the Great Law of Peace. Warily, the envoys put their faith in him.


Files

Hiawatha - II: Government for the People - Extra History

*Sponsored* by DomiNations! Check it out here: http://smarturl.it/DOMHistory After getting the Seneca to join the Great Law of Peace, Hiawatha came up with a plan to convince Tadodaho. But it took Jigonsaseh to confront him and make him become a true leader. Now united, the Five Nations created a participatory democracy rooted in the Peacemaker's ideals, one that still lives on today. Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon Grab your Extra Credits gear at the store! http://bit.ly/ExtraStore Subscribe for new episodes every Saturday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC Learn about Odenathus, the Middle Eastern leader who saved Rome to protect his people: http://bit.ly/2bk1qPr Play games with us on Extra Play! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ____________ Three nations had united under the Great Law of Peace, but the Seneca and Onondaga remained outside it. Both nations relied on war for their power - but also for their safety. Hiawatha and the Peacemaker came to the Seneca expecting an argument, but Jigonsaseh had already convinced them since she was Seneca herself. All but two of the chiefs were ready, but those two chiefs feared what would happen if other nations brought war to their borders. The Peacemaker called a council to discuss their concern, but it quickly dissolved into in-fighting and arguments. To solve it, he established a bicameral legislature where each tribe had a turn to speak. Hiawatha joined the Mohawk and helped legislate a solution, putting the Mohawk and Seneca in charge of the borders with the authority to call the tribes together in war if outsiders threatened the confederacy. The envoys also agreed to follow his plan for Tadodaho. They returned to the Onondaga nation and offered to make Tadodaho their leader, with veto powers over every law. He immediately saw the potential to grow his power, but Jigonsaseh confronted him for his greed and cruelty and convinced him to use his power responsibly. With him, the Onondaga joined the Great Law of Peace. Now Jigonsaseh sat with the women's councils and selected the League representatives, for the women owned the council positions and chose the men who served in them. Those representatives met the Peacemaker on the shores of Onondaga Lake, where he demonstrated how a bundle of five arrows, like the five nations, could not be broken. Then he had them bury their weapons under a white pine tree guarded by an eagle. Those symbols would later be adopted by the United States, whose Founding Fathers studied the Great Law of Peace and adopted many of its principles into their own Constitution. The original Haudenosaunee League drafted laws based on the Peacemaker's teachings, creating a government that served the will of the people. Hiawatha commemorated each of these laws with a series of wampum belts, most notably the Hiawatha Belt which symbolized the five nations coming together in peace. The government they created has lasted for centuries, making it one of the longest lasting participatory democracies in the world. ____________ ♪ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1EQA5N7 *Music by Demetori: http://bit.ly/1AaJG4H ♪ Get the outro music here! http://bit.ly/23isQfx *Music by Sean and Dean Kiner: http://bit.ly/1WdBhnm

Comments

ExtraCredits

As we wrap up this short series, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens the sacred ground (and treaty land) of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The US Army Corps of Engineers issued permits for a private company to build this pipeline without consulting the tribe, and the tribe has stepped up to oppose this decision both in court and through ongoing protests on the construction site. Many of the First Nations, including many among the Haudenosaunee, have voiced their support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The United States once again stands at a precipice of history: whether they will stop and listen to the indigenous people who have held this land in their care for generations, or whether they will continue to put current interests ahead of treaties signed and laws passed to protect America's environment and heritage. If you enjoyed this series, then I urge you to carry that appreciation forward to learn about the Dakota Access Pipeline and listen directly to the voices of native communities about this and many other issues they face today. History does not only lie behind us. You can donate to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's Support Fund here: <a href="http://standingrock.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://standingrock.org/</a> You can read about the official statements of support from other First Nations here: <a href="https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/08/23/native-nations-rally-support-standing-rock-sioux-165554" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/08/23/native-nations-rally-support-standing-rock-sioux-165554</a> Thank you. -Soraya

Anonymous

It would be nice if modern leaders really looked back at our founding members. These were men who clearly saw another nation, no matter how primitive technologically they may have appeared, and saw that they had a legal system that worked well across several other nations. Rather than building walls between them they attempted to build bridges between people to bring them together to make them all stronger instead of dividing and making them all weaker for it.

Anonymous
>>2445223

Failing that, it'd be nice if they'd at least respect their treaties. It's pretty basic: You do what you said you would in the treaty, or people stop trusting you. You'd think at minimum self interest would cause that to happen... but no.

Anonymous

Excellent. A peace of human history I'd have never come across :) I guess there will be no Lies video for this one, so would you guys mind telling us a bit about how much of the story is speculation and how much of it is based, and what on?

ExtraCredits
>>2445376

Oh I would LOVE to. Thank you for giving me the invitation, you poor, poor, about-to-be-spammed human! To talk about the historical accuracy of this series you HAVE to start with the oral record. I've seen a lot of people dismissing this out of hand because they assume all oral records are unreliable, and while we are going to have to address the specific reliability of THIS oral record in a moment, that attitude as a base assumption is remarkably incorrect. Oral traditions and records were not just stories told to pass the time: they were history kept by a culture that had no way to write it down, but valued their history enough to make every other effort they could think of to keep it. Every culture with an oral history has a very rigorous method of keeping it accurate. In the case of the Haudenosaunee, children who displayed good memory skills were chosen at a very young age and trained deliberately and carefully in the sacred stories. Not only would they have been corrected by their teacher if they got something wrong, they would been corrected by members of their tribe who *also* heard these stories every year (or season or etc.) and would have recognized when the storyteller changed an important element. This is not the "game of telephone" that I've winced to read so many YouTube comments describing, because in a game of telephone, nobody checks your work. That's not to say there are no changes made ever, but they are far less likely than people think to alter the fundamental points of the history. So how do mystical (and probably not literally true) elements get introduced to these stories? The same way they get introduced to (written) European records that talk about angels coming down from the heavens to literally fight alongside God's chosen warriors: that's the way people knew how to interpret things in the world at that time. Whether it comes from a place of genuine belief guiding them to see the world differently in that moment, or whether they meant it as an allegorical statement which they trusted their audience to interpret correctly, these inventions are much more the product of the original storyteller than of decay through the oral tradition. We're not quite done talking about the oral tradition yet, though, and I say this realizing we haven't even delved into the specifics of THIS story. We'll get there! But we have to talk about why the Haudenosaunee tradition in particular (and frankly many Native American traditions with it) has become fragmented, because it's indisputable that there *are* vastly different versions of the Great Law of Peace's history despite the rigorous training I referred to above. Simply put: they were forced into diaspora. US and Canadian efforts both have pushed the Haudenosaunee into lands traditionally held by their neighbors. An experience like that is traumatic for both the individuals and the culture that goes through it, so between the loss of regular yearly rituals (where these stories would have been recited) and the urgent need to assimilate into the new societies (e.g. Huron) that they found themselves living alongside, stories changed. This is a guess, but I would say they changed more between the period of 1700-1900 than in any of the six to eight odd centuries before it. NOW we get to our series. Because when you get to this point with oral tradition, you haven't entirely lost the history... but you do have to extrapolate it. Same as any history! You now have different versions of events, and you triangulate those to try and arrive at basic facts. I'm not smart or researched enough to do that on my own, so I relied heavily on anthropologists and native cultural scholars who have devoted their lives to piecing this back together. Take the Peacemaker. In some stories, he was a Mohawk, plain and simple. In others, he's a Huron who came to the Haudenosaunee because he felt a calling. So did the idea of his Huron heritage come about from the period of time when the Haudenosaunee were forced to live among the Huron? Or can we make something of the fact that all the stories where he's a Mohawk describe him as having strange, even mythical origins - perhaps reflecting a very old cultural resistance to admitting that he's Huron and not from the Five Nations at all? As a historian, you have to decide. I personally did not feel convinced either way (hence my completely avoiding the subject in this history; the Peacemaker is the only person without a tribal gustoweh because I wanted to leave room for both interpretations) but I think it makes for a very good example of how you can use oral histories (even ones that disagree with each other) to do rigorous historical research and analysis. Similar to how I approach the Peacemaker's heritage, when it came to discussing events that have taken on mythical aspects, I tried to keep the script secular but the imagery symbolic. Tadodaho is often described as having literal snakes in his hair. I can't say that in a history, so I left it out - but we drew him with very messy, long strands of hair sticking out that deliberately look "snake-like" as a respectful nod to those traditions. The Peacemaker, Jigonsaseh, and Tadodaho are sometimes described as reincarnations of characters from the First Era of human history, but instead of saying that, I gave them symbols of their prior incarnations (sapling, lynx, and flint) which appear subtly on or around them. This was the best way I could figure out to approach a story that has spiritual significance as well as historical significance in a secular way that didn't dismiss or disrespect the spiritual elements which mattered greatly to the people who told the story. Interestingly, those kinds of details were the ones I had most trouble with. The broad chronology of the story is remarkably consistent across most versions of the story; the order in which the tribes join seldom varies, with one exception in that I came across more than one version (but still a minority) where the Onondaga joined before the Seneca and it was Tadodaho's idea to recruit the Seneca afterwards. On the whole, though, I think the fact that despite so many different versions of the story, the chronology remains the same - often down to the tiny detail of the peace envoys returning to (fail to) convince Tadodaho after the Oneida join - is pretty excellent evidence that the most important points of the story did survive war, diaspora, and forced cultural assimilation (I'm lookin' at YOU, "Indian boarding schools"). And it's not just the history that survived: the constitution did also. You can find it and read it online, with all its many direct references to people like Tadodaho, Hiawatha, and the Peacemaker, confirming their existence if not their backgrounds and roles. The wampum belts (which I ascribe to Hiawatha, although again there is reason to question this) served as a form of pictographic writing: each article of the constitution had a belt which summarizes that article through images and symbolism. We've lost many of those belts over time (and the famous Hiawatha Belt is definitely not the original make, though it may be a copy of an original design) but certainly they attest to the Haudenosaunee recognizing how important it was not only to make these laws, but to remember and record them. How useful is a law if no one remembers it anyway? Not useful at all. I'll wrap with this broad summary: the events leading up to the creation of the confederacy have to be deciphered by reviewing and comparing multiple accounts, the same as any historical event. I relied heavily on people who have come before me to do that work, and tried to summarize their findings while also being respectful of the very important (and very personal) traditions which are the right of the nations to whom this history belongs. Their government still exists - it's one of the oldest and longest-surviving participatory democracies in the world - and this history is an important first step to understanding both the way it shaped them as a people today, and how and why their government succeeds. Last thing: I know I talked forever, but I still summarized and reduced the crap out of this. If you want to read about it at length, I can't recommend Darren Bonaparte's "Creation &amp; Confederation" highly enough.

Anonymous

Yes, great video indeed, I became a patron today because of it...I've been meaning to for a long time...but me kinda poor. Yet since this ties into my booklet and planned video game I thought I should start paying you guys back for all the awesome videos....hope my small donation is not insulting. I do plan to give more in time :(

ExtraCredits
>>2446013

No donation is too small, and honestly if it's not financially comfortable for you to donate at all, we'd rather you took care of yourself first! I'm very happy that you've been enjoying the videos and want you to know that we'd all love for you to continue enjoying them for free and keeping yourself financially secure. We'll be happy to have you as a member of our community just the same!

Anonymous

1st: I was flailing my arms lividly and screaming on the inside "WHAT?!?! HOW COME I NEVER HEARD ABOUT THE FOUNDING FATHERS LEARNING FROM THE FEDERATION?!?!" 2nd: The Peacemaker rowing away with the peace sign and bidding us farewell with "Peace!" ........ *facepalm, followed by a slow clap*

Anonymous

No Walpole? :(

Anonymous
>>2448132

Yeah, I think in my classes once or twice the Confederation was *mentioned* as a source for the drafters of the Constitution, but what precisely it was or any details of their own legal codes or governance...nope.

Anonymous
>>2448132

The only time I remember the Confederation was mentioned was that it went to wars and that was it.

Anonymous
>>2449929

I was wondering about that and was even more surprised that he did not even show up when they were discussing how Washington and Franklin sat with the Confederation descendants.