In The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau points out that North American mainstream media is Foundry-centric. Much of it is based in the Foundry, and so much of U.S. history is rooted in the Foundry. When people in Dixie complain about northern “Yankees,” they’re not referring to Montana or Oregon; they mean the Foundry. When settlers in the west wrote “back east,” their letters didn’t go to Atlanta or Miami; they went to the Foundry. The Foundry is where, historically, most of North America’s population could be found; now, it is migrating south and west. But of course, nothing as industrial as a foundry could ever do justice to a bioregion, however much it might apply to the sociological phenomenon Garreau was concerned with. No, the better architectural structure for this bioregion is “the Longhouse.”

That’s what the native Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) saw their homeland as: a great longhouse whose floor was the earth and whose roof was the sky. The Onödowága’ (Senecas, “People of the Great Hill”) guarded the western door; the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawks, “People of the Flint”) guarded the eastern door; and in the middle, the Onundagaono (Onondaga, “People of the Hills”) tended the fire. The eastern longhouse-building tribes dominated the lands that now make up Garreau’s “Foundry,” not just the Haudenosaunee—literally, “the People of the Longhouse”—but the Wyandot (Hurons), the Erielhonan (Erie), and the Lenni Lenape (Delawares). Most of these cultures spoke Iroquoian languages, and most of them developed distinctive political structures like the Haudenosaunee—complex political alliances fixated on curbing the accumulation of power and the preservation of personal liberty. There is a reverence for liberty among the Haudenosaunee that far exceeds the contemporary American’s; in fact, there is ample evidence that it was the example of such Iroquoian leagues in general, and the Haudenosaunee specifically, that inspired the United States Constitution’s aspiration towards similar ideals. And surely there is a lesson to be learned in that the ancient Iroquoian example had to be eliminated before the full erosion of that ideal could begin.

Even so, there is a recurring impulse in this bioregion to try to “build a longhouse together,” to preserve personal liberty and bring people together in fairly complex systems at the same time. Today, the Foundry has become the Rust Belt, and there’s a deep-seated yearning for a cultural suicide embedded in the overly-complicated urban and economic renewal plans that are continually put forth. The Foundry’s invasive culture despoiled much of the ecology, and espoused a naked worship of hard labor and masculine toughness. It was a fundamentally suicidal way of life. In the Foundry, collapse is already well underway. There are Foundry cities already in ruins. But there is also a seed of hope in that yearning for death to see the world reborn from these ashes, so we can try something new, something that will preserve our liberty and freedom. Deep down, we want to build a longhouse together.

Native Culture: The Longhouse

Cultivation did not reach the Longhouse bioregion for a very long time, thanks to the Americas’ north-south axis. (Diamond, 1997) When it did arrive, it became part of a fundamentally horticultural, rather than agricultural, way of life. The “Three Sisters” guild of corn, beans and squash is still presented as the textbook example of a permacultural guild.^{1, 2} This became a predominantly female activity, leaving men to hunt for supplemental animal food. Longhouses united families, and villages were made up of some number of longhouses.

The Haudenosaunee were both matrilineal (tracing descent and genealogy through female clans, signified by one of several clan totems), and matrilocal (husbands moved in with their wives’ families upon marriage), but it is certainly overstating the case to call them matriarchal, as some have. Egalitarianism and freedom were too crucial to Haudenosaunee life for patriarchy, matriarchy or any other -archy to truly fit.

Longhouses were governed by councils made up entirely of women, who, since they controlled its food supplies, could evict any in-married male at will. Villages were governed by both male and female councils. Councils on the national and league level were made up of both male and female office-holders. It’s true that the higher one went in the structure, the less relative importance the female councils had—on the longhouse level, there wasn’t any male organization at all, while on the league level, the female council merely had veto power over male decisions—but it’s also true that decisions on the lower level were of much more immediate relevance to daily life. In terms of everyday affairs, Iroquois society often seems to have been about as close as there is to a documented case of a matriarchy. (Graeber, 2001, p. 37)

There were individuals who wielded influence, but without coercive force behind it, were forced to found their power on consensus. “Chiefs” and sachems could be removed by the women, and new ones selected by them.

Although the Indian sachems on the Eastern Seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory, wrote the colonial leader Roger Williams, in practice they did not make any decisions “unto which the people are averse.” These smaller groups did not have formal, Iroquois-style constitutions, but their governments, too, were predicated on the consent of the governed. Compared to the despotisms that were the norm in Europe and Asia, the societies encountered by British colonists were a libertarian dream.³

And:

Bonaparte, who himself served as a former elected chief of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, does not even think that roiá:ner should be called “chiefs”: “a lot of our people don’t like using the term ‘chief’ instead of ‘royaner,’ because chief is such a generic term. You’ve got fire chiefs, police chiefs, chief of staff, etc. Those are positions where the people who have them are empowered to make decisions for a group, whereas our ‘royaners’ are facilitators for having the group itself come to the decision, and who then act upon that decision.” Indeed, the focus on decision-making among the Rotinonshón:ni [Haudenosaunee] was always to reach consensus. Snow has argued that the Rotinonshón:ni “emphasized consensus rather than executive authority, unanimity rather than majority rule, and equality rather than hierarchy.” Taiaiake goes so far as to write that “holding non-consensual power over others is contrary to tradition. Whatever the purpose behind the use of arbitrary authority, the power relationship is wrong.” Richter describes a state of universal suffrage, claiming that voting in the council was open to all who had reached the age of maturity.⁴

The role of “chiefs” in such societies left such individuals open to constant ridicule and judgment (the Haudenosaunee demanded that royaner have skin “seven hides thick,” to patiently take the abuse of office), to be removed at a whim, and they lacked any coercive power with which to back up their “commands.” One is reminded of a line from John Boorman’s 1985 film, The Emerald Forest: “If I force a man to do what he does not want to do, then I am no longer chief.”

Graeber, who as an anarchist is quite suspicious of all hierarchy, says of the traditional Rotinonshón:ni, “for all the complex federative structure, society was in most respects highly egalitarian. Office-holders, male and female, were elected from among a pool of possible heirs; the offices themselves, at least the male political ones, were considered as much a responsibility as a reward as they involved no real material rewards and certainly granted the holder no coercive power.”⁵

With the introduction of intensive horticulture, population expanded, and with expanded population came greater violence—the mourning wars.

The Iroquois believed that the death of an individual created a spiritual void which undermined the power of the entire community. Paralleling this community void was a personal void experienced by the friends and family of the deceased. If the village condolence rituals failed to assuage the grief of these individuals, the female relatives of the deceased had the right to call for a mourning war. When a mourning war was called, the village assembled a war party which was sent out in search of captives for adoption into the community. After one or more captives were taken from neighboring nations, the prospective adoptees were brought back to the village and beaten as they passed through a gauntlet composed of two rows of men, women, and children. The captives were then tortured, but not killed, by all members of the community. At this point, the torture was suspended and all the potential adoptees participated in a grand feast. At the end of the feast, the women of the family of the deceased determined the fate of the captives. If a captive was rejected, he or she was further tortured, killed, andoften eaten; if a captive was accepted, he or she was adopted into the family. The newly adopted member often took the name of the deceased individual whose death had initially triggered the mourning war. In most cases, male captives were not adopted because they represented both a flight risk and potential threat. Women and children who were adopted found themselves, according to most descriptions, genuinely welcomed into the community. In many cases, the children of female captives became village leaders, Pine Tree (war party) chiefs, and even chiefs of the Iroquois League.⁶

With such brutal practices, it can be easy to misunderstand the nature of the mourning wars, and they have been routinely misunderstood. Remarking on Iroquoian practices of torture, cannibalism and the mourning war complex as a whole as evidence of their warmongering very much misses the point. Captives taken in the course of a mourning war might be tortured as part of a process of eradicating their old life and initiating them into Haudenosaunee society, essentially as infants as far as their social status and prospects went. Some captives did go on to become important members of Haudenosaunee society, for example. It was the choice of the female relatives to initiate a mourning war, and their choice as to whether a captive would be adopted after such torture. If the captives were adopted, they would be given the name of the deceased, in order to fill his place. If not, they would be executed and eaten; cannibalism would quite literally transform the captive into Haudenosaunee. Either way, the ultimate goal—replacing the dead—was fulfilled. It certainly was not a peaceful, gentle practice by any means, but it also falls short of simple warmongering, or brutality for its own sake.

But in the European sense, torture was a means to extract information or confessions from prisoners; in the Iroquois culture, torture seemed to be a way to strip the prisoners of their former lives so that they may be integrated into Iroquois society or killed for their spiritual power. Indeed, the entire ceremony surrounding the capturing, pre-torture festivities, the torture, and the post-torture all have deep cultural reasoning; the replacement the dead, or, at least, to ease the grieving of the mourners. …

Historical stereotypes of the Iroquois depict them as a war-loving peoples. This is not entirely the case. Before the heavy influence of and Iroquois dependence on European trade, warfare was almost exclusively for the purpose of ‘replacing’ the recently deceased with captured enemies. In the Iroquois war, taking as many captives was essential. Killing off an enemy or even suffering a few casualties “would subvert the purpose of warfare as a means of replacing the dead with captives.” As mentioned earlier, torture procedures began long before the actual torture. Captives were usually of non-Iroquois nations and villages, and usually those who were on bad relations with the Iroquois because of the lack of trade or political disagreements. After initial capture, the captives were abused during the journey back to the Iroquois village; there are conflicting reports as to the exact treatment of the captives, but both reports state that the hands, legs, feet, and especially fingers of the prisoners were greatly abused and mutilated. The captives were frequently forced to sing, as they were showered with gifts of food and beads and treated as guests of honor or esteemed clansmen and kindred. While being able to perceive the reasoning behind the capture of the prisoner , the French missionaries were not able to see the deeper meaning of the Iroquois kindness. The Iroquois religious, political, and social structures were all based on gift giving. To gain power and influence over a person or a group of people, one would have to give numerous material gifts away, usually beads, furs, or food. Therefore, by giving the captive material gifts, the Iroquois were demonstrating to him that they had absolute power over him; the power of life or death. “From the victim’s perspective, torture was at once a reminder of his captors’ dominance, a test of perseverance, (reflected in songs and in taunts hurled at the torturers), and an altered state of consciousness similar to a vision quest or a dream that provided contact with sources of spiritual power and paved the way for a new life.” …

The captives were ‘given’ to a family in mourning over the death of a person of kin, and this family chose whether to adopt or kill the captive. Relations contains stories of both end results. But either way, the captive had to endure hours of torture. Those Iroquois that conducted the torture was seemingly the entire town, but more specifically, it was the young men and the grieving women that tortured the captive. … The Iroquois continued to burn the captive’s feet, legs, and occasionally other body parts, but not to the degree as they had previously witnessed. During this time, they were calling the captive “uncle” in what the missionaries presumed to be mocking fashion. While it’s possible and probable they were mocking him in some fashion, the “uncle” was probably not part of this. In Iroquois longhouses, the father usually did not live with the children, and so the Uncle of the children filled the role of the father that Europeans were accustomed to; “Uncle” was a sign of respect, and if the captive was to be integrated into the Iroquois society, as was the intention and purpose of the torturing, he would probably be of an esteemed social rank because in this case, he was given to a chief or headsman. …

After the torturing of the captive was finished, by his premature death or otherwise, the family he was given to got to ultimately decide his fate; to kill or keep. If the captives were killed, they were cooked and eaten by the Iroquois village, thus they absorbed the captive’s spiritual power. If the captive were to be kept alive, his wounds were treated, and he became a member of Iroquois society as a member of the recently deceased; “I became aware that I was given in return for a dead man… causing the dead to become alive again in my person, according to their custom.” In the European sense, these adoptees were slaves, but in the Iroquois sense, they were members of their society with little to no political or social power; an infant. These adoptees could live dormantly as ‘lower class’ citizens or they could, using adopted Iroquois culture and techniques, rise through the political, social, or spiritual ranks to wield great power and influence over other Iroquois.

Through torture, Iroquois reflected their complex culture to their victims. The need or desire to keep the captives alive resulted in heroism for the Iroquois warriors. The gift giving ceremonies reflected the social and political system of the Iroquois. The decisions of the grieving women to keep the captives alive or to kill them off reflected women’s power within the society. The torturers’ taunts perversely reflected social life in the longhouses. If the captive died his spiritual power was absorbed, reflecting the Iroquois religion in a simplistic manner. And if the captive was adopted into an Iroquois family, he would be learning the culture from the ground up with the basis of what he learned through the torture; eventually revealing to him why he was taken captive in the first place: To replace a member of the recently deceased.⁷

Such a practice had a natural tendency to spiral out of control; a single death could lead to a raid that killed someone else, sparking a new raid that might kill two, leading to two more raids, and so on. Thus, it is little surprise that so many of these cultures developed inter-tribal leagues dedicated to preserving peace. What the French called the “Iroquois” and “Huron” leagues, who allied with the Dutch and later the English, and the French, respectively; there was also the “Neutral Indians,” so named by the French because their league remained neutral in the Iroquois-Huron conflict that European powers turned into their own proxy war. Together with the Erielhonan, the “Neutral Indians” were called the Cat Nation by other Iroquoian peoples.

Several implications of the mourning war custom need to be highlighted. First, the mourning war was not simply an act of revenge in response to the killing of a tribal member by an outsider. Revenge killings, often spiraling into blood feuds, were one of the most common causes of conflict between Native American groups. While a murder could trigger a mourning war, according to Iroquois tradition any death, whether by accident, from disease, or at the hands of another, was unnatural; it created a spiritual void in the community and therefore could lead to a mourning war.

Second, the mourning war by its very nature provoked acute spirals of hostility particularly between groups practicing the custom. If only one regional group practiced the mourning war custom, it facilitated that group’s population maintenance or growth at the expense of its neighbors. However, if all groups in the region practiced the mourning war, then violence and warfare quickly become the norm. In a world in which a simple eye-for-an-eye revenge norm is established, Algonquin and Mohawk parties can share access to the St. Lawrence River as long as both parties know that neither side has broken the peace. However, in a world in which the mourning war tradition is the norm, an Algonquin party can never be certain of the intentions of the approaching Mohawk party. Inthis latter world, the security dilemma is acute and spirals of hostility are the norm. Thus, it is clear that the five Iroquois nations had a strong incentive to halt the mourning war amongst themselves. It is no coincidence that strong confederacies developed between geographically contiguous groups practicing the mourning war, such as the Iroquois League, the Huron Confederacy, and the Neutral Confederacy.

Third, the later impact of European colonization on the Iroquois and their neighbors takes on new meaning in the context of the mourning war tradition. The epidemics that decimated 50 percent or more of the populations of each tribe in the early 1600’s triggered a massive surge in mourning wars. Moreover, by making Native American warfare far more deadly than it had previously been, the gradual diffusion of guns escalated the frequency of mourning war raids as the number of deaths on both sides of each raid grew rapidly. The mourning war custom, which was presumably adopted to increase the population of the community and to enhance group cohesion, became increasingly dysfunctional after the introduction of firearms and metal arrowheads in the seventeenth century.⁸

These dynamics led to the emergence of the inter-tribal confederacies of the Haudenosaunee, Wyandot and the Neutrals (their own name for themselves has been lost, but the Hurons called them Attawandaron, “People with a Different Language”). However, an ancient tradition of personal liberty meant that such confederacies spent most of their time limiting the powers of rulers; most of the Great Law of Peace is spent limiting and restricting the powers or royaner, for instance.

Democracy is sacred to Natives. When Paul says the word, it is followed by a brief pause, an obvious reverence that I almost envy. I wonder when mine faded, and why.

He speaks with the same awe of the formation of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, the first democracy in North America, and of its two founders: Deganawida and Hiawentha (not “Hiawatha,” as whites are taught in school).

The respect for these two men is so great among Natives that no children are named after them, while the story of their fateful meeting remains remarkably consistent for being at least 600 years old and passed down through oral-tradition.

As told, the wife and six daughters of Onondaga Chief Hiawentha were murdered in another war between neighboring Native communities. Stricken by grief, Hiawentha left his people to wander the land. At the same time, a Huron Indian named Deganawida had a vision of “The Great Tree of Peace,” its broad branches sheltering and protecting all Onkwe Onwe, its roots growing and spreading to all Nations, an eagle perched atop. He too left his people, to wander the southern lands and share his vision, a task made difficult by, depending on the teller, either a severe lisp or two rows of teeth. Eventually, Deganawida came upon Hiawentha, who devised a means of communicating this vision to the many tribes, who spoke many different languages and carried many grudges against one another. Utilizing pieces of shell, or wampum, Hiawentha created a universally understood means of speaking through picture, symbolized by the “Hiawentha Belt,” which depicts five human forms holding hands, the outside hands left open and extended, welcoming new Nations into North America’s first democracy.⁹

According to the story, Deganawida met Hiawentha as he was sitting down to a meal of human flesh that he had made from an enemy he’d slain, an obvious reference to the cannibalistic practices of the mourning wars. Deganawida convinces Hiawentha to only eat deer meat, and never to eat human flesh again; later, Deganawida establishes the practice of the fifty royaners to wear deer antlers, to symbolize the same vow, a repudiation of the mourning war practice.

Replacing the mourning war is a condolence ceremony, in which wampum were crucial. Today, “wampum” is often mistaken for merely a form of fiat money, but this misses much of the point. Wampum are belts of white beads that use a very methodical form of art that falls somewhere between art and writing. Wampum belts can be “read” as effectively as a book, because the art style is very consistent. Thus, it can be “read” by anyone of any language who knows the art style, making it highly effective for treaties and agreements, as with the Great Law of Peace, recorded on wampum belts. It can also be used to tell stories. Wampum belts are highly prized personal possessions, given in recognition of major events in a person’s life, that tell stories from that person’s past, imbuing them with great personal significance. This led Europeans to mistake wampum for simple badges of office.

In the condolence ceremony, a killer would present the family of the dead with a wampum. The Europeans mistook this for their own ancient practice of weregild, and with their notion of wampum as a badge of office and its prevalence in economic exchanges (which the Indians saw as treaties), came to the conclusion that wampum was a kind of money, hence our modern misinterpretation. But the wampum presented by a killer told a tale of repentence and sorrow, and showed that he had come to beg forgiveness from those he had aggrieved, not merely “paying them off.” The pressure of relatives was usually sufficient to make the grieving family accept the offer in cases besides pre-meditated murder.

The seal of the Six Nations shows the clan totems arranged around a great white pine. The story says that once the original Five Nations had been brought together, Deganawida brought them to the Great Tree of Peace, and they buried their weapons beneath it—the origin of the English phrase, “bury the hatchet.” The Great Law of Peace was open to new members (such as the Tuscarora tribe, who migrated north later because of European contact and joined the Haudenosaunee), and invited others to join them under the Great Tree of Peace. There is linguistic evidence that some of the Susquehannock joined the Guyohkohnyoh (Cayuga, “People of the Great Swamp”); there is even some reason to believe that the entire Longhouse bioregion may have once been united in an even larger confederacy.

Darren Bonaparte cites an old oral tradition about the Kaniatarowanénhne (later known as the St. Lawrence river): “[T]here was once a great confederacy that had villages on the St. Lawrence River. After a shooting star destroyed one of their villages on the St. Lawrence, the confederacy broke down, leaving two or three smaller confederacies in their wake who eventually became hostile to each other. The Huron Confederacy, north of Lake Ontario, and the Iroquois Confederacy were two of those; a third would be the people archaeologists refer to as the “St. Lawrence Iroquoians.”¹⁰

The first published European contact with the Haudenosaunee was Champlain’s, at Crown Point in 1609, where he shot fifty of them, including three royaners—including one that bore the name Hiawentha. The French allied themselves with the Hurons; the Dutch (and later the English), with the Haudenosaunee. In 1634, smallpox swept through, while Jesuit missionaries would only trade with converted Iroquoian-speakers, creating the first disparities in wealth. The native culture of the Longhouse was going through nothing less than an apocalyptic breakdown in the face of European pressure. According to European accounts, the “Beaver Wars” were over hunting grounds; it would be more accurate, as Stephen Arthur points out, to see this as a traumatic and bloody civil war.¹¹

Even as contact with Europeans decimated Iroquoian cultures, however, it inspired the European colonists. The “scorched earth” Sullivan Campain in 1779 through the Haudenosaunee heartland earned George Washington the ephitet of “Town Destroyer,” and broke the back of the Haudenosaunee forever. Even so, the example of Iroquoian liberty had already inspired the colonists—something that European monarchs did not look kindly on.

Not every European admired this democratic spirit. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own opinion, without being thwarted,” the Flemish missionary monk Louis Hennepin wrote in 1683. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” a fellow missionary unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses—they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”

Indians, for their part, were horrified to encounter European social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. When the 17th-century French adventurer Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried to convince the Huron, the Iroquois’s northern neighbors, of Europe’s natural superiority, the Indians scoffed.

Because Europeans had to kowtow to their social betters, Lahontan later reported, “they brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having.” Individual Indians, he wrote “value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for it, that one’s as much master as another, and since men are all made of the same clay there should be no distinction or superiority among them.”¹²

Even while they were decimating the Haudenosaunee (who had sided with the British largely because of the genocidal campaigns the colonists had so often launched, and the British Crown’s repeated, though largely failed, efforts to restrain them), the “Founding Fathers” were forming principles of government with little basis in the European tradition. Instead, their exemplars were much closer to home.

[T]he Constitution developed, in several of its key elements, from the Articles of Confederation before it. The Articles, in turn, had grown out of roots established originally in [Benjamin] Franklin’s “Albany Plan of Union” of 1754, and these were themselves strongly influenced by the practices and the active encouragement of the League of the Haudenosaunee, referred to by the colonists, following the French, as the “Iroquois League.” The idea of a confederation of sovereign independent states under one federal roof for certain limited vital common concerns had no precedent in Europe, and was resisted powerfully in the American colonies. But the case for such a union had been consistently pressed by the Haudenosaunee tribes as a condition for vital co-operation, was adopted by Franklin, and was moved forward gradually in colonial affairs, from its first formal proposal in Albany in 1754 to its ultimate adoption in the Articles of Confederation and U.S. Constitution. While Franklin was not alone, by 1787, in advocating a permanent union of equal sovereign states, he had served throughout the period, going back to his earliest publications of Indian treaties in 1736, as a champion and midwife of this idea. And as Franklin made explicit in many places, one didn’t have to go far to see that the idea would work. It had worked for hundreds of years for the Haudenosaunee nations, accomplishing for them exactly the goals desired by the North American English colonies, later to become the several states of the United States of America.¹³

The prominence of Benjamin Franklin—the most active “Founding Father” from the Longhouse bioregion, rather than Atlantica or Dixie, may be revealing, as well. This may be somewhat overstating the case, however. As Charles Mann points out, there are also significant differences between the U.S. Constitution and the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace (mostly in how the U.S. Constitution falls short of the Great Law of Peace). “With its grant of authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus and its denial of suffrage to women, the Constitution as originally enacted was not at all like the Great Law. But in a larger sense the claim is correct. The framers of the Constitution, like most colonists in what would become the United States, were pervaded by Indian images of liberty.”¹⁴

Influenced by their proximity to Indians—by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty—European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes. Lahontan was an example, despite his noble title; his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Lahontan was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”

In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option of voting with their feet.¹⁵

Even more recently, the suffrage movement drew much of its inspiration from the eminence achieved by Haudenosaunee women—even while the reservation system was ending the traditional Haudenosaunee way of life, and the U.S. government was breaking agreement after agreement.

At the same time Rotinonshón:ni rights and responsibilities were under attack, female European settlers were gaining some of those very rights. The contradiction is made even more glaring in the examination of American feminism by Women’s Studies professor Sally Roesch Wanger, who found that the gender relations among the Rotinonshón:ni were an inspiration to suffragists in the United States like Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. While Gage had been to court for attempting to vote in U.S. elections, she pointed out that her adoption as Karonhienhá:wi [”Sky Carrier”] into the Wolf kahwá:tsire [clan] granted her a voice in selecting roiá:ner [royaner]—giving her more political representation by adoption into the Kanien’kehá:ka [Mohawk] nation than she had in the U.S.

This difference in regards to suffrage was something well known to Rotinonshón:ni. Gawasco Waneh (Arthur Parker) wrote in 1909: “Does the modern American woman [who] is a petitioner before man, pleading for her political rights, ever stop to consider that the red woman that lived in New York state five hundred years ago, had far more political rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the twentieth century woman of civilization?”¹⁶

The cruel irony of drawing so much inspiration from the Iroquoian confederacies, while simultaneously destroying the Iroquoians themselves, is overwhelming. Yet if it was the living, breathing example of free Indians that gave Europeans the radical notions of personal liberty and limited government, can we chalk it up to mere coincidence that these ideals suffered such terrible erosion only after native voices had been largely silenced and shuffled off to reservations?

Invasive Culture: The Foundry

Gary. South Bend. Flint. Toledo. Cleveland. Akron. Canton. Youngstown. Wheeling. Sudbury. London. Hamilton. Buffalo. Syracuse. Schenectady. Pittsburgh. Bethlehem. Harrisburg. Wilkes-Barre. Wilmington. Camden. Trenton. Newark.

The litany of names bring clear associations even to the most insulated residents of other regions. These names mean one thing: heavy work with heavy machines. Hard work for those with jobs; hard times for those without.

When columnists speak of managing decline, this is the region they mean. When they speak of the seminal battles of trade unionism, they place their markers here. When they write of the disappearing Democratic city political juggernauts, not for nothing do they call them machines, for this is where they hummed, then rusted.

When television presents the concept “Archie Bunker,” it locates his neighborhood here, for the four boroughs of New York that are not Manhattan are part of this nation.

In an ironic way, this place is the real New South, for it received the vast internal migration of job-hungry blacks fleeing the once-overworked land of Dixie, and now it is the warehouse of their discontent. North America’s Gulag Archipelago, it’s been called; the continent’s chain of urban prison camps.¹⁷

Looking over the vast cities of the Foundry, much less the industrial hellscapes that once characterized them (and helped inspire infernal visions like Tolkien’s Mordor), it can be easy to think that ecology has very little to do with the scene. That would be entirely incorrect, though; the industrial past of the Foundry has everything to do with its ecology, its geology, and its geography. The veins of bituminous coal beneath the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, and the storied coal miners who dug for it, the rich iron ore of Michigan, and the limestone quarries could be brought together in industrial centers along the many waterways. It was the combination of the raw geological resources, and the geographic watersheds that allowed them to be transported to a single location, that made the Foundry an industrial center.

[T]hese cities would not have evolved, or at least evolved the way they did, had they not been strategically located to wrest wealth efficiently from the very dirt of the planet. These cities were well positioned to have the various earths shipped inexpensively, via the abundant waterways, to central locations. There, they would be thrown together at high heat to make metal and other extremely basic nineteenth-century industrial products. In this process, they attracted wave after wave of cheap immigrant labor—first the wave of Europeans, then the wave of southern blacks, recently the Hispanics. Not for nothing did they call it the Melting Pot. How many people have “melting pots” in their kitchen? That’s a Foundry term and concept.¹⁸

Pittsburgh is perhaps emblematic of the Foundry; today, it’s the black-and-gold buckle of the Rust Belt, but during World War II, the city of Three Rivers alone produced more steel than all of Germany. The Allegheny flowed south from the area near the New York border and brought timber from what would become the Allegheny National Forest; the Monongahela flowed north out of West Virginia, allowing the easy transport of coal; they met at the Point, Pittsburgh’s defining epicenter, where they flowed into the Ohio, a tributary of the Mississippi, and from there out to the Gulf of Mexico. Those materials, and the waterways to easily reach distant markets, attracted Andrew Carnegie to the city, and made “the Steel City” the center of the U.S. steel industry.

It was in the mid 1800s that a system was invented that would make the production of steel so cheap that the much stronger material could compete with iron—the Bessemer process. In 1864, at Wyandotte, Michigan, on the Detroit River less than ten miles from the Dearborn that Henry Ford would put on the map half a century later, the first North American commercial pour of Bessemer steel was made. From these ingots, North America’s first steel railroad track was made in 1865, at the North Chicago Rolling Mill.

Steel from the nation of the Foundry changed the face of the continent. Barbed wire allowed the building of fences in the tree-less Breadbasket, transforming it from rangeland into farmland and promoting the creation of towns. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, steel rails linked the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads, and thus the coasts. The “Chicago school” of architecture changed the ways cities would look and function by pioneering the steel skyscraper in the 1880s and 1890s.¹⁹

I am from the Longhouse bioregion, and Pittsburgh specifically; “Godesky” is a good Pittsburgh name. Like so many cities of the Foundry, the invasive culture here is made up of immigrants who came to work hard and lead hard lives in a country that was largely hostile to them. Before the tensions in Mexamerica made Mexicans the most popular target of American racism, it had belonged to the Eastern Europeans, Italians and other immigrants who worked the steel mills and auto factories and coal mines and quarries of the Foundry—and, of course, the blacks who flocked to the Foundry from Dixie after the Civil War. The Foundry thus found a common cause in a naked worship of physical labor—toughness, perseverence, and hard work. The “American” problem with racism is largely the Foundry’s problem with racism.

The patterns of black/white segregation in the “rust belt”—formerly heavily industrialized cities of the Northeast and Midwest—are the products of common historical influences. The collapse of the Southern share-cropping system in the 1930s, combined with an industrial boom in Northern cities from the 1940s on, due to wartime manufacturing, sent millions of blacks North, seeking and finding better prospects. However, after the war these cities declined economically, as they lost their industrial base and firms moved to the suburbs. Whites were enabled by various Federal and local policies to escape the declining cities to the prosperous and growing suburbs. But the same policies did not help blacks. Whites also used class-based zoning and private housing discrimination to keep blacks out of suburban neightborhoods. Observe the high correlation of segregated areas with income in nearly all cases.²⁰

Hard work is the Foundry’s religion; profession is identity. The blue collar life may have entailed physical and environmental danger, but it also provided job security. If you worked hard, you could have a life and a family. If you were down and out, then really, you must have your own laziness to blame. The Foundry was splintered into dozens, even hundreds of ethnic enclaves, and floor bosses often took advantage of those tensions to keep the German team working longer and harder to out-produce the Slovak team, or the Polish team, or the Hungarian team, or the Irish team. What united such a disparate, immigrant population was the worship of labor. The coal miner and the steel worker became cultural icons, heroes to be admired, because they embodied those virtues.

For openers, the whole point of living in the Foundry is work. It has been argued that the Protestant work ethic never really caught on in North America to the extent that its P.R. would suggest.

“The work ethic,” Daniel T. Rodgers, a University of Wisconsin professor, has written, “has always been a minority phenomenon in American life. “The idea that hard, self-denying labor is the summum bonum of life never cut deeply in the South. It was violated in scores of 19th-century frontier settlements and rich men’s ballrooms…”

No one, for example, ever lived in Buffalo for the climate. Or in Gary for the scenic vistas. Or in Camden for the recreational opportunities. Or in Wheeling for the beach. Blue-collar workers may drink to oblivion, or load up their Winnebagos for a weekend in northern Michigan, but they do so in response to their work. Welfare is an emotional issue in these highly taxed Foundry cities because its recipients don’t work.”²¹

The Foundry has always been the seat of our cultural ambivalence towards technology, as well. Huge machines powered the Foundry and provided its economic basis, but at the same time, the people of the Foundry also suffered the effects of industrialism first-hand. In Pittsburgh, stories still circulate from the era of the “Smoky City” of street lights and dark skies at noon, and white clothes that would turn black outside in mere minutes, all because of the black clouds of coal fumes. The worship of labor extended so far that the Foundry even took a perverse pride in its situation—the decimation of the landscape they lived in showed that they were succeeding.

When I grew up in the rust belt, pollution was not deplorable. It was a source of pride and symbol of prosperity. Could you practically taste air thick with iron filings and acids? Did the blast furnaces light up the night sky and blot out the stars? Did the waters run thick and red with waste and cause the fish to sicken and die? Excellent! Those were the infallible signs of competitive success.²²

In that, we can see the seeds of a kind of apocalyptic, suicidal mentality already forming as the hard-working industrialists of the Foundry percieved the paradox of their “success”: the more they “succeeded,” the more they poisoned the air, the water and the earth, and ensured the fate of the very families they were laboring to provide for. Yet the blind, overwrought zealotry of the labor cult forbade any sober realization of this; instead, a kind of suicidal urge began to creep into the Foundry’s mentality as they threw themselves even more into their labor, even as they slowly began to realize that it would kill them. In September 1962, the publication of Silent Spring laid the groundwork for much of the environmental movement; its author, Rachel Carson, was a Pittsburgh native.

On the one hand, it’s possible to forget that to artists like Rivera and Charlie Chaplin, who, in the film Modern Times (1936), showed man becoming merely a cog in a societal machine, the Foundry was a metaphor of the future. A world in which everything that moved was measured in tons, and humans were dwarfed by their inventions, was the ultimate statement of both hope and despair. Detroit and the cities like it were to their time what Houston, Los Angeles, and the cities of the MexAmerican Southwest are to this generation—visions of wonder that both amaze and appall.

On the other hand, especially to residents of the Foundry itself, who, like all North Americans, are capable of their own parochialism, sometimes memories of what was are confused with what is. In the days of Rivera, the Foundry was the linchpin of North American development. In fact, to most, the Foundry—”back east”—was North America. The United States portion of the Foundry was the United States. It is of Baltimore that the United States national anthem sings. Henry Ford, who had his own air force of Ford Trimotors, his own navy of Great Lakes freighters, and certainly his own army of tens of thousands of workers, was as towering a figure as any president or premier. The same was true of Morgan of U.S. Steel and Rockefeller of Standard Oil.²³

With the coal workers and the steel workers and the auto workers, it was in the Foundry that the labor movement had its beginning, and here perhaps we can see some of the native forces of the bioregion asserting itself in the invasive culture—the demand for equity, and the basic response to preserve that equity through complex systems like unions. The great labor struggles of the twentieth century were fought and won in the Foundry, and to this day, many of the Rust Belt’s cities are still controlled by powerful Democratic party machines. Yet the corruption and failure of the unions have led to a basic feeling of betrayal. Of course, that failure and betrayal is just one aspect of the breakdown of the Foundry, and how it has become the Rust Belt.

Syncretic Culture: The Rust Belt

A foundry, in which molten metal is cast into forms, historically represents one of the most basic and ancient technologies known to man. “If you want to use your imagination a bit,” says Sheldon Wesson, of the American Iron and Steel Institute, “one would guess that the first foundry was born when primitive man saw this reddish crud melting around his campfire, and this hot stuff trickled down into the sand, and when it cooled, it assumed the shape of the area in the sand where it had trickled. It didn’t take much of a leap for him to realize that he could produce a form to his own specifications. I’ve seen foundries today so primitive that you wouldn’t believe it. Just wet sand on the floor of the factory. A guy comes along with a hand ladle and pours hot metal pretty much as it was done a million years ago.” ²⁴

Like metal in a mold, the people of the Foundry also molded to the space they were in—inside a heavily polluted, industrial growth out of the Longhouse bioregion, forged together from many immigrant groups in the “melting pot” by the shared cult of hard work. There is also some overlap in the metaphors of the Longhouse that brought together the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (or the various tribes of the other confederacies), and the “melting pot” of American immigrants.

But when steel is exposed to the elements, the result is rust. The “Rust Belt” is the syncretic culture of the Longhouse bioregion—the post-industrial legacy of “the Foundry,” once exposed and weathered. The term was not originally coined with such a relationship in mind, however; rather, it was born from the Foundry’s mindset and signified massive loss and stagnation.

It was called the birthplace of “Big Steel”—the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania. So when U.S. Steel closed the doors of E.T., as the plant was called, it was a foreboding sign that something was terribly wrong with the steel industry. In fact, something was wrong throughout America’s industrial heartland in the early Eighties. For a century, American industry had been the envy of the world. The steel industry provided nearly half a million blue-collar workers a ticket into the middle class, right alongside the miners who worked in the iron-ore pits of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota and elsewhere. For many of these workers, employment in the mine or factory was a family tradition; one’s father and uncles and perhaps even grandfather had put in their forty years at the same place. A job meant a lifetime’s security, a house, a family that could be well-provided for. And this individual prosperity meant prosperous times for communities like Youngstown, Ohio and Hibbing, Minnesota and Flint, Michigan. But in the early Eighties, one after another mill, factory and mine was shut down, tens of thousands of workers were laid off, and dreams were shattered.²⁵

For an amalgamated community forged by their shared worship of hard work, the loss of jobs was more than a loss of livelihood, but a loss of life and the fundamental sense of self. The breakdown of the Foundry into the Rust Belt brings with it an underlying breakdown of the psychological framework of the entire society.

In May 1980, the state of Michigan was suffering from automobile-industry layoffs that yielded an unemployment rate of 14.4 percent, the highest rate reported since the records started being kept. Six hundred and twenty-five thousand people were out of work. (And the unemployment numbers went even higher in succeeding months.) But on the basis of those May figures, which accounted for 0.5 percent of the 7.5 percent U.S. unemployment rate, Michigan used Brenner’s study to arrive at the conclusion that shortly the state was going to see 460 more suicides, 324 more murders, and so on.

And sure enough, as Oscar Paskal said to me in Solidarity House, the Detroit headquarters of the United Auto Workers, “Watch television tonight. See what’s on the news.” What was on the news was a horrifying report about snipers who were driving around and, apparently, taking random pot shots at children. “It won’t be long before you get the standard man-goes-berserk, barricades-self-inside-house, opens-fire-with-deer-rifle,” Paskal said. “In fact, it’s already started.” …

Ask these people who they are, and before they say man, woman, Methodist, Catholic, American, Canadian, Democrat, Republican, black, white, or brown, they’ll say, for example: steel-worker.²⁶

The religion of hard work is so strong in the Foundry that the identity they invest in their work is stronger than any other loyalty, stronger even than their life as humans, or even living things. It had to be, or else, how could they spend their lives destroying their homes, poisoning the air and water their families and neighbors breathed and drank, to provide for them? A deep psychosis was necessary to make the Foundry work, with an underlying strain of suicidal, apocalyptic thought. Most of the apocalyptic fare in the media is aimed at the Foundry, to satisfy the underlying apocalyptic dream to tear it all down and build something new in its place.

It is in this context that it seems important to look at the emotional baggage the Foundry carries with it. Sixties-style northeastern urban renewal, which concentrated on bulldozing whole city blocks and starting all over again, often produced disastrous results. The problems didn’t go away; they just moved to a different, previously healthy neighborhood.

It has been suggested, however, that the war-on-poverty, gung-ho approach to incipient decline represents more than an unsophisticated economic analysis that refused to recognize the investment in money and energy even a dilapidated neighborhood of brick row houses represents. It may have been an emotional response to stubborn, interrelated problems that confronted would-be saviors of the Foundry. Rather than grapple with complex issues, and possibly be defeated by them, the planners simply decided to try to obliterate them.

In Trenton, New Jersey, in the early seventies, a group of young architects facetiously came up with an elaborate plan for that venerable city; it involved setting bonfires on its borders to serve as markers for precision bombardiers inside B-52s. The idea was that this would be Trenton’s share of the “war bonus,” which was supposed to be forthcoming when Washington finally stopped spending money on Vietnam and instead turned to the “problems of the cities,” that is, the Foundry.

What would be left after the prolonged air raid, these architects suggested, would be a new Trenton, restored to the way George Washington knew it when he defeated the Hessians there on Christmas Eve, 1776.

Of course, as Freud pointed out, there is no such thing as a joke, and the interesting thing about the architects’ idea is the level of frustration it reflects. In saner moments, these men were the ones who labored mightily to restore beautiful old Victorian homes that had seen better days, and tried to revive the state capital’s weary downtown. What does this “plan” tell you about depression?²⁷

For an ecopsychologists, such pathology makes perfect sense; it’s only natural that those put in a position where they were forced to poison their children to provide for them would build elaborate, psychotic fantasies to shield them from facing that horrible truth; it’s only natural that the promise of apocalypse would take root in such tainted soils, and where industrialism did some of its worst damage, that the psychosis of civilization would produce some of its most horrifying examples of sheer insanity. How can a poisoned world fail to produce a poisoned mind? The soil, water and air of the Rust Belt has been deeply poisoned by its industrial past. Mercury and dioxin in the water, acid rain and acidic soils, and the myriad toxins in the air are a legacy the Rust Belt must still struggle with. But the earth heals itself, and the collapse of the Foundry’s industry has also meant that the ecology has begun to heal.

The silver lining of Rust Belt manufacturing decline is that residents of the densely populated cities of the Rust Belt will be exposed to lower levels of pollution. Because the environmental cost of living in these cities has fallen over time, such cities may increasingly attract high skill workers and firms. Rust Belt cities, however, have an older capital infrastructure and colder climate than other regions, so whether reduced pollution levels will be enough to attract more high skilled workers than in the past remains a topic for future research.²⁸

Why did the Rust Belt decline? The usual answers revolve around unionized labor pricing itself out of the market, but the truth, as usual, lies in far more basic, material trends. The peaking of North America’s oil supply that led to the oil crisis of the 1970’s dealt a blow to the Foundry’s industries that it could not sustain. Unions, taxes and the various forms of complexity that the Longhouse encourages contributed to that lack of adaptability, but it’s not even close to the full story. The other element is that the geological wealth that the Foundry had been founded on was being exhausted. Consider the case of West Virginia’s storied coal mines:

The good times are when coal is running strong. This has not been recently. The coal is high in sulfur, which makes it difficult and expensive to burn without causing pollution. It is often in deep mines, which requires the work of a lot of high-priced men operating in conditions in which they can, and frequently do, die. Deep-mining coal is still the world’s most dangerous industrial occupation. Where the coal is near the surface, and can be strip-mined, it’s generally on a slope so steep that the operation destroys the environment. There’s a theory that holds that an increase in the severity of spring floods in these parts is connected to strip-mining practices. The hills just can’t hold the rain as well as they used to.²⁹

Of course, with the rising price of energy as we near the global Hubbert Peak, the Foundry has seen a new wave of energy exploitation. Mountain-top removal is gearing up again in West Virginia, and there’s growing interest in using the Foundry’s coal supplies to replace oil.³⁰ Pennsylvania, home of the first oil boom in the late nineteenth century, has likewise seen many old wells reopened.³¹ These had been previously abandoned because it took too much energy to get to the fuels; with the price of those fuels rising, they’ve become economical again, and a final round of exploitation is dawning as the vultures hover close to pick the last wells and mines clean.

But such low-quality, high-cost fuels can only go so far. They can never fulfill the promises of providing for the status quo that are so often made. In many ways, they presage the fate of the Foundry itself: peaked, in decline, and now picking at whatever remains.

If energy deposits are destiny, the Foundry’s future is by no means assured. Although its coal reserves are fantastic, they are deep beneath the mountains, and are mined by men still scarred by battles with exploiters that occurred half a century ago. Being a United Mine Worker is an emotional allegiance, as is being a United Auto Worker, a Rubber Worker, a Steel Worker.

The problem with the Foundry is that it is failing. Its cities are old and creaking, as is much of its industry. It is still struggling with its historic role as the integrator of wildly different personalities and cultures and ethnic groups, and there is no assurance that the sociological battles that it has been assigned will end in victory.³²

With stretched resources and the need to integrate disparate groups with deep-seated historic feuds, the Foundry finds itself in a position familiar to the Longhouse bioregion—in many ways similar to the constant warring that the great Iroquoian leagues originally put out.

Rust needn’t be a sign of decay and decline; as red ochre, it was used by ancient peoples, including Iroquoian-speakers, as a red pigment, particularly for body paint. Archaeologists find some of the earliest signs of human art in bones stained red by the red ochre—rust—with which they’d once painted their skin. It was often seen as a symbol of sanctity. In the Rust Belt, it can be easy to see that point of view—where the world and the weather and the rain have all worn down our perfect, shiny steel, and made it more like the earth. When we stop our endless war, the earth takes it back, and wastes no time in turning the profane sacred.

Prospects: Building a Longhouse Together

There are parts of North America where collapse is already underway; the Longhouse is one of them. In the Longhouse, you can find actual ruins. Detroit is the most well-known,³³ but you can see them even in my home city,^{34 throughout Ohio,35} and the rest of the Rust Belt.³⁶ Growing up in Michigan, Michael Moore’s movies invariably focus on the issues that face the Rust Belt; in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore interviews a young black man who says, “And I was watching TV one day, and they’re showing like some of the buildings and areas that had been hit by bombs and things like that, and while I [was] watching I got to thinking like, ‘There’s parts of Flint that look like that, and we ain’t been in a war.’” Another person puts it in even starker eco-primitivist terms:

Staring off of my porch toward the river I see dozens of buildings: dilapidated, sinking into the river, being demolished, and wasting away. I scan the horizon, and through the blizzard I see a huge city, a once bustling metropolis, now eerily silent. I look down my street, and on either side are vacancies; some in bad shape but the majority are inhabitable. I stand on the porch of the biggest one I could find and smile, and then I go back inside and stoke the fire. Life is good to me, and I feel invincible. There is an old Earth First! slogan that comes to mind: “visualize industrial collapse.” Not only can I visualize it by looking out the window, but I am living here—right smack dab in the midst of it—like a king.³⁷

This is the area of the country where foreclosures are most common,³⁸ where collapse can already be seen. It’s easier to open up a “TAZ” here, and that may be the best sign of collapse one could ask for—when the map starts to open up.

There is a benefit to living in an old Rust Belt city like Detroit. It’s much easier to establish what Hakim Bey calls “Permanent Autonomous Zones,” because of cheap rent and low property values. The Fifth Estate office, for instance, only pays $200 a month including all utilities, and the Trumbull property which includes the two houses and a theater for about $30,000.³⁹

For now—and in all probability, for some time to come—it is the Rust Belt’s deep-seated need for self-destruction that will continue to hold sway. Our love-hate relationship with our crumbling ruins, reminding us that the world of our grandfathers is gone forever, with all the ambivalence of its security and its suicide, will become more and more the prevailing image of the Rust Belt. But there are some who are pushing further, past the cultural death we’ve waited for for so long, and beginning to already build something new in its place. Consider “Farmadelphia.”

Farmadelphia proposes a break down of the divisions between ecology and the built environment—a pretty standard mission among urban revitalization advocates these days. But Front’s vision doesn’t merely sprinkle a community garden here and there; they want to Farmadelphify the whole city.

In this scenario, vacant lots around Philadelphia would be converted into agricultural plots, and the abandoned buildings that occupy many of those sites would stay put, only they’d become useful again in the context of the farm. As a community renewal effort, Farmadelphia would bring people together around both the labor and the rewards of having productive crops growing in the neighborhood. The farms would establish employment opportunities and encourage entrepreneurship among citizens who might want to sell their harvest to groceries or restaurants. Of course, this would also increase the availability and affordability of fresh, local produce all over the city—what’s better than gathering your own greens at dinner time or picking an apple on the way home?⁴⁰

Even though the proposal is couched in agricultural terminology, such deep integration will require horticulture or permaculture, rather than agriculture.⁴¹ Such horticulture could provide for much of Philadelphia’s food supply—Havana has succeeded in providing 30% of its own food supply through such methods. In the long term, however, such an approach would ultimately lead to smaller community gardens, with a breakdown of city life as the city becomes a collection of “villages,” each centered around their community garden, that simply happen to inhabit a fairly close geographical area. Looking longer term, horticultural tribes tend to relocate every decade or so; these villages will disperse, though they may continue to have long-standing relations with one another and see each other as a related people for centuries, or even millennia, to come. If the goal is a “sustainable city,” then disappointment is inevitable; but if the goal is a gradual, peaceful descent of energy and population into a sustainable pattern, then this pattern clearly has strong merits.

Something similar to Farmadelphia’s plan can already be seen, formed ad hoc by the people living there, in the ruins of Detroit.

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms—some consuming entire blocks.

Staking claims on abandoned lots, they produce about six tons of produce a year, said Ashley Atkinson, head of the Detroit Agriculture Network, a loose coalition of 230 growers and volunteers. …

“Detroit has been abandoned by everything, including grocery stores,” Ms. Atkinson said, suggesting that in a city where many do their shopping at “party stores,” liquor stores that sell some convenience items, community farms are more than a symbol of environmental awareness. …

Urban farmers face a number of challenges, from finding water (renegades tap into fire hydrants, Brother Samyn said) to eliminating broken glass, concrete and unsavory contaminants like lead from the soil. Hayfields, mistaken for “ghetto grass,” have been mowed down by the Department of Public Works just as they are ready to be cut and baled. Greenhouses are sometimes claimed by the homeless, and pilfering is a fact of life. …

Advocates often say profits are secondary to building a sense of community. “It’s a means for people to take control of their neighborhoods and get tangible results that they can see and eat,” said Yamini Bala, coordinator of Detroit Summer, a youth gardening group.⁴²

My own home city has a good deal going for it in these terms, as well, with an abundance of farmer’s markets, food co-ops, and community gardens.

Pittsburgh has captured the number one spot in a national sustainability study. SustainLane, a web site dedicated to sustainability issues, has published a 2006 U.S. City Rankings Study which looks at many sustainability issues, including use of local food. With a population of just under 350,000, Pittsburgh leads U.S. cities in its use of local food, boasting seven farmers markets. That’s two per 100,000 people, and all of them accept food stamps.

In addition, the city also features a notable number—188—of community gardens.⁴³

As much as it pains me as a Yinzer to say it, even that foul abomination before man and god known by the blasphemous shibboleth of “Cleveland” has done a great deal in this regard.^{44, 45} It is not enough, but it is a start.

Today, the original Longhouse peoples are in crisis. It can be easy to think that in the heavily industrialized, settled and populated northeast of the United States, the crimes against the native peoples lie deep in history, but they don’t. It was only in 1965 the the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Kinzua Dam, flooding out the Cornplanter Seneca and forcing their removal to the Allegany Reservation over the New York border.⁴⁶ The rage of that recent crime is still alive and well among the Seneca. The current president of the Seneca Nation of Indians, Maurice John, was one of the Seneca moved to Allegany.

My father had to watch while the government pulled down trees and set them on fire. Our homes were destroyed. The bones of our ancestors were taken from the ground and thrown into boxes. I think about all that every day.

The Kinzua Dam is important, but only because it serves as a reminder. It can’t help me to solve any government situation, but it can make us strong.⁴⁷

Today, it is largely the disregard for Indian issues in the Longhouse bioregion that cause so much trouble. The Seneca deal with the endemic poverty and other issues that mark reservation life, and they’ve developed a strategy that relies on the one thing they have left: their sovereignty. As a sovereign people, they’re under no obligation to charge sin taxes on tobacco, or taxes on gasoline, and they can own and operate casinos, regardless of the gaming laws of the United States. New York State has for years tried to collect “unpaid back taxes,” seeing the issue as nothing more than tax money on cigarettes and gasoline. To the Senecas, those things are incidental. They are making a living however they can. To them, the constant pressure placed on them by the state is an attempt to rob them of their sovereignty. Stand-offs have occurred, with highways blocked, tires set on fire, and national guard called in.

To us, it can seem trivial: cigarettes and gambling. Is this what the People of the Great Hill have been reduced to? But for a people betrayed and hunted as they have been, their hope now is to make a living with the only thing they have left—their sovereignty. Tax-free cigarettes and legal gambling are ways they can do that. These lawsuits are about more than state taxes or stopping petty vices like smoking or gambling; for the Seneca, they strike at the only thing left after Kinzua’s betrayal, their sovereignty. President John prays that a settlement can be made, but fears the worst.

As president, I’m doing everything I can to prevent violence from happening. But as we sit here today, I can’t guarantee that won’t happen. I can’t control every Seneca, just as Eliot Spitzer can’t control every state trooper. We are a warrior society. We’ve always fought oppression. It’s in our DNA. You can’t expect us to sit back and let New York State take our livelihood away. … I worry about my people. There are more troopers than there are natives.⁴⁸

Part of President John’s concern must certainly lie with the development of the Warrior Society in recent decades, a movement that has created something of a low-level Haudenosaunee civil war.

“There is a joke that there is a full jar of wampum in Onondaga,” offers Paul, meaning that the representative ideals of the Haundenosaunee are now moot. With many tribes now little more than gaming boards, a society older and more secretive than the Haudenosaunee has returned: the Warrior Society, an unofficial organization put into dormancy with the founding of the Haundenosaunee.

Back then, Chiefs were members of a de facto society of warriors—and even they accepted the Haundenosaunee, and so the primacy of democracy over bloodshed in settling disputes.⁴⁹

Claiming an authority older than the Great Law of Peace, the Warrior Society made an incredible move in 1989. The Haudenosaunee royaners have issued several condemnations of the Warrior Society; by their description:

In 1989, a group from the Mohawk Warrior Society, led by Loran Thompson, and Paul Delaronde, entered the longhouse at Onondaga to disrupt a Grand Council. Francis Boots entered carrying a large wooden club and placed it inside the doorway, with the implied threat they were there to club the chiefs who oppose them. The warriors stated that they no longer recognize the authority of the Chiefs over them and walked out, leaving the protection of the circle of the Great Law.⁵⁰

Note: Originally posted on sixnations.org; source used here is a mirror, because sixnations.org is not currently operational.

What is going on among the Haudenosaunee is a struggle for the endurance of the Great Law of Peace itself. The Warrior Society is invoking a much older tradition, harking back all the way to the era of the mourning wars, in order to confront the systemic abuse, injustice and betrayal the Haudenosaunee have experienced at the hands of the invasive governments of the United States and Canada. The Seneca represent the other end of the spectrum; perhaps it is no small coincidence that Handsome Lake was a Seneca, and his code—a religious tradition that blended traditional Seneca religion with Quakerism, and on the whole adapted to reservation life—remains popular with the Seneca, while the Warrior Society unabashedly condemns the code of Handsome Lake, and is primarily rooted among the Mohawks on the eastern door.

The Warrior Society can be easy to sympathize with on a general level; there is no denying the constant abuse and ongoing genocide perpetrated by the U.S. and Canada, and taking up arms to defend your community from such predation is something even our culture recognizes, respects and even glorifies. Yet, the militancy, homophobia, unnecessary violence and involvement in drug trafficking and gun running^{51, 52} are not only reminiscent of other indigenous resistance movements like MEChA and the Black Panthers, but make it very difficult to outright support them. Much of it may be the standard propaganda that mainstream media always creates around indigenous resistance movements—but there is also an undeniably reactionary, racialist strain in many such movements. Showdowns with the Warrior Society at Oka and Caledonia have already heated tensions to a boil. If it comes to an open conflict, will the onkwe onwe survive? Will the Haudenosaunee?

In the Longhouse bioregion, the trauma of the invasive culture touches everything. Even the original People of the Longhouse are no longer sure if they want to keep building a longhouse together. The reservation system is naturally part of civilization’s par for the course—genocide and obliteration of all cultural diversity, all lurching towards self-destruction. The trauma runs so deep that it’s hard to see a future cut along any racial lines. The original vision of the Great Tree of Peace united many warring peoples with ancient feuds under its protective boughs. That is the native vision of the land, the vision of the old-growth white pines that once proliferated through this land. There are new forests trying to grow back, waters trying to heal themselves, and cities trying to find a new, sustainable life.⁵³ The eastern coyote is getting bigger and hunting deer in packs, because when nature needs a wolf, it makes a wolf.⁵⁴ The Longhouse may have been burned down by the fires of the Foundry, but now the whole community of life in this bioregion is getting back to the ancient task of building a longhouse together. And like the five figures on the Hiawentha belt, they’re holding out their hands for more to join them. So what’s our answer? The lines that divide us run deep, from the urban ghettos of the Rust Belt to the ongoing genocide of the Haudenosaunee reservations. We could fall upon each other in endless war; that’s something our bioregion has seen before, too. Or we could be inspired by the same vision—the same vision that inspired the United States’ “Founding Fathers,” the same vision that we talked about with “melting pots,” and “burying the hatchet.” We could join hands together, move beyond civilization together, and take our refuge beneath the boughs of the Great Tree of Peace, or we could war upon each other forever.

Let’s build a longhouse together.

Works Cited

• Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs & Steel, W. W. Norton.
• Graeber, David. 2001. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave.