Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [238]
Which raises another question: Did a person called Hiawatha exist? According to Hodenosaunee history and lore, the answer is yes. Hiawatha was a leader in precolonial America, who probably lived during the 1500s and is credited with helping establish peace among the five major tribes—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—who once dominated what is now Upstate New York.
For years, these tribes had been torn by raids and counterraids, in which captives were either tortured to death or, in some cases, adopted into the tribe to replace a lost family member. According to tribal legend, Hiawatha of the Onondaga had fallen into great grief after years of constant fighting and, in some versions, became a cannibal after his five daughters were killed. He was rescued from his grief and madness by Deganawida, a Huron elder said to be born of a virgin and on a mission to make peace and unite the Iroquois. With Hiawatha acting on what was believed to have been a sacred vision, the two men went from tribe to tribe, persuading them to make peace.
According to Alvin Josephy’s 500 Nations, “The Peace Maker, as Deganawida was becoming known, conceived of thirteen laws by which people and nations could live in peace and unity—a democracy where the needs of all would be accommodated without violence and bloodshed. To a modern American, it would suggest a society functioning under values and laws similar to those of the Ten Commandments and the U.S. Constitution combined. Each of its laws included a moral structure.” When one chief balked at the plan, Hiawatha was able to persuade him to change his mind. According to tribal legend, the reluctant chief, Tadadaho, was an evil sorcerer whose hair was a Medusa-like tangle of snakes. Hiawatha—whose name means “he who combs”—smoothed out the tangle of snakes, cured Tadadaho’s evil mind, and the Great Law of the Five Tribes was adopted. (A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, later joined the league.)
In fact, as far back as 1751—a quarter of a century before the Declaration of Independence—Benjamin Franklin was inspired, or at least impressed, by the Iroquois League, when he proposed a colonial union in his Albany Plan. “It would be a very strange thing,” wrote Franklin, “if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to execute it in such a fashion that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to which it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”
Franklin’s blueprint for a colonial union failed. But there are many historians who believe that in 1789, the principles of the Iroquois Confederacy were studied by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. However, the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution chose not to include the aspect of the Native American plan that gave men and women equality. That would not be a feature of the U.S. Constitution until 1920. So much for Franklin’s “ignorant savages.”
MYTHIC VOICES
There can be no peace as long as we wage war upon our mother, the earth. Responsible and courageous actions must be taken to realign ourselves with the great laws of nature. We must meet this crisis now, while we still have time. We offer these words as common peoples in support of peace, equity, justice, and reconciliation: As we speak, the ice continues to melt in the north.
—OREN LYONS, faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation (August 2000)
Do Native American myths still matter?
Remember the movie Poltergeist? You know. The one with the little girl who looks at the fuzzy television screen and says, “They’re here.” Made in 1982, the movie centers on a haunted house in a suburban development built over an American Indian burial ground.
What about Close Encounters of the Third Kind? This 1977 movie depicts benevolent aliens arriving on earth for