The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the spirits which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives—the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun.
When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things,
then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.

Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have a great love for our country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations. Each of us were created in those lands, and it is our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will spring the future generations of the Ongwhehonwhe.
We walk about with a great respect, for Earth is a very sacred place.

We are not a people who demand or ask anything of the Creators of Life, but instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of Life are still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all living things. To this day, the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and the other gifts of the Creation.
In these places we still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth.

We have seen that not all people of Earth show the same kind of respect for this world and its beings. The Indo-European people who have colonized our lands have shown very little respect for the things that create and support Life. We believe these people ceased their respect for the world a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people of the world believed in the same Way of Life, that of harmony with the universe.
All lived according to the Natural Ways.

Around ten thousand years ago, peoples who spoke Indo-European languages lived in the area which today we know as the Steppes of Russia. At that time, they were a Natural World people who lived off the land. They developed agriculture, and it's said that they had begun the practice of animal domestication. Hunters and gatherers who roamed the area probably acquired animals from agricultural people, and adopted an economy based on herding and breeding animals.

Herding and breeding animals signaled a basic alteration in the relations of humans to other life forms. It set in motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on Nature for the reproductive powers of the animals. With the advent of herding, humans assumed a function which for all time was the function of animals' spirits.
Sometime after this history records the first appearance of social organization known as "patriarchy."

The area between Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was homeland in ancient times of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. Semitic people were among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This led to early development of towns, and eventually cities. Manipulation of waters, another form of spirit life, represented another way humans developed a technology which reproduced a function of Nature.

Within these cultures, stratified hierarchal social organization crystallized. Ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly because of the very nature of cities. Cities are obviously population concentrations. Most importantly though, they are places which must import the material needs of this concentration from the countryside. This means that the Natural World must be subjugated, extracted from and exploited in the interest of the city.
To give order to this process, the Semitic world developed early codes of law.
They also developed the idea of monotheism to serve as spiritual model for their material and political organization.

Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between the Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several millennia, the two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millennia B.C. some Indo-Europeans, specifically the Greeks, adopted the practice of building cities, thus becoming involved in the process which they named "Civilization."

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilization. Semitic peoples invented kilns to enable the creation of pottery for trade and storage of surpluses. Early kilns eventually evolved into ovens which could generate enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, tin and bronze. Indo-Europeans began smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final meshing occurs. Rome is also the true birthplace of Christianity. The process that has become the culture of the West is historically and linguistically a Semetic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in early development of this kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God—a religion imposed exclusive of all others. Local people of European forests believed in the spirits of the forest, waters, hills and land; Christianity attacked those beliefs and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. Christian peoples, possessed superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were able to militarily subjugate Europe's tribal peoples.

Iron led to developing tools to cut down the forest, the source of charcoal to make more tools. Newly cleared land was then turned by newly developed iron plow, pulled for the first time by horses. With that technology many fewer people would work much more land, and many other people were effectively displaced to become soldiers and landless peasants. The rise of that technology ushered in the Feudal Age and made possible, eventually, the rise of new cities and growing trade. It also spelled the beginning of the end of the European forest, although that process took a long time to complete.

The eventual rise of cities and concurrent rise of European state created the expansion and search for markets which led men, such as Columbus, to sail across the Atlantic. Development of sailing vessels and navigation technologies made the European "discovery" of the Americas inevitable.

The Americas provided Europeans a vast new area for expansion and material exploitation. Initially, the Americas provided new and even finished materials for the developing world economy which was based on Indo-European technologies. European civilization has a history of rising and falling as its technologies reach their material and cultural limits. The finite Natural world has always provided a kind of built-in contradiction to Western expansion.

Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal.
Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were inassimilable elements to the civilizations of the West. Forests provided materials for larger ships, the land was fresh and fertile for agricultural surpluses, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for conquering invaders. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century, North America was already a leader in the development of extractive technology.

Hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared for to provide farmlands. Those forests were destroyed to create charcoal for the forges of the iron smelters and blacksmiths. By the 1890's, the West had turned to coal, a fossil fuel, to provide the energy necessary for the many new forms of machinery which had been developed. In the first half of the 20th Century, oil replaced coal as a source of energy.

The Western culture has been horribly exploitative and destructive of the Natural World. Over 140 species of birds and animals were utterly destroyed since the European arrival in the Americas, largely because they were unusable in the eyes of the invaders. The forests were leveled, the waters polluted, Native people subjected to genocide. Vast herds of herbivores were reduced to mere handfuls, buffalo nearly became extinct. Western technology and the people who employed it have been the most amazingly destructive force in all of human history. No natural disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages counted as many victims.

But like hardwood forests, fossil fuels are also finite resources. As the second half of the Twentieth Century has progressed, the people of the West have begun looking to other forms of energy to motivate their technology. Their eyes have settled on atomic energy, a form of energy production which has by-products which are the most poisonous substances ever know to Man.

Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas of more efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet is the clearest of signals our species is in trouble. It is a signal which most Westerners have chosen to ignore.

Air is foul, waters poisoned, trees dying, animals disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing. Our ancient teaching warned us if Man interfered with Natural Laws, these things would come to be. When the last of the Natural Way of Life is gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with it. And our Way of Life is fast disappearing, a victim of these destructive processes.

The other position papers of the Haudenosaunee outline our analysis of economic and legal oppression.
But our essential message to the world is a basic call to consciousness.
Destruction of Native cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet. Technologies and social systems which have destroyed animal and plant life are also destroying Native people. And that process is Western Civilization.

We know that there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the intent of our message. But experience has taught us that there are few who are willing to seek out a method for moving toward any real change. But if there is to be a future for all beings on this planet, we must begin to seek the avenues of change.

Processes of colonialism and imperialism which affected the Haudenosaunee are but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world. The system of reservations employed against our people is a microcosm of the system of exploitation used against the whole world. Since the time of Marco Polo, the West has been refining a process that mystified the peoples of the Earth.

The majority of the world doesn't find its roots in Western culture or traditions. The majority finds its roots in the Natural World, and the Natural World, and traditions of Natural World peoples, must prevail if we are to develop truly free, egalitarian societies.

It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical analysis of the West's historical processes to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity.
At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance which has rendered their people insensitive to the true nature of their lives.

We must all consciously and continuously challenge every model, every program, and every process the West tries to force upon us. Paulo Friere wrote in his book the Pedagogy of the Oppressed that it is the nature of the oppressed to imitate the oppressor, and by such actions try to gain relief from the oppressive condition. We must learn to resist that response to oppression.

People living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole Natural World. What is needed is liberation of all things that support Life - air, waters, trees - all things which support the sacred Web of Life.

We feel Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can continue to contribute to the survival potential of the human species. The majority of our peoples still live in accordance with traditions which find their roots in the Mother Earth. But Native peoples have need of a forum in which our voice can be heard. And we need alliances with the other peoples of the world to assist in our struggle to regain and maintain our ancestral lands and to protect the Way of Life we follow.

We know this is very difficult. Many nation-states feel threatened by the position. Protection and liberation of Natural World peoples and cultures is a progressive direction which must be integrated into political strategies of people who seek to uphold Man's dignity. But that position is growing in strength, and represents a necessary strategy in the evolution of progressive thought.

Traditional Native peoples hold the key to reversal of processes in Western Civilization
which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction.
Spirituality is the highest form of political consciousness.
And we, the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world's surviving proprietors
of that kind of consciousness. We're here to impart that message.