 My name is Fern Naomi Renville. I'm a teaching artist. I live in Seattle. I'm also an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wapiton Oyate. We're an Eastern Dakota band from South Dakota, which is where I'm from originally. I'm also a member of the Seneca Cayuga tribe and the Omaha Nation through my grandmother and great-grandmother. This story is called The Great Law of Peace. There was a time a long time ago when the nations of the Haudenosaunee Alliance were at war, not just with one another, but within each of those tribes there was terrible conflict and people were fighting with one another. They say it was a dark time in which women and children cowered in fear of their own men. In this dark time a young man appeared. This young man came to be known as the peacemaker. The peacemaker wondered why people couldn't stop fighting. The peacemaker worked to bring understanding and peace and to put an end to all the violence and conflict. Now, this peacemaker was staying in kind of like a boarding house. There was a lodge. This lodge was run by a woman known as Chakunsasa. Chakunsasa was well known because she alone ran a boarding house for travelers. Now she didn't charge money either. Anyone at all who needed or wanted a safe place to lay their head and be fed at night. She would give them a place in her lodge, but she had rules. You may come into my lodge and you will receive hospitality, but first you must leave your weapons outside the door. And that's what happened. No matter if people were at war outside of her lodge, inside her lodge they enjoyed meals together and slept next to one another and were safe in Chakunsasa's lodge. Well, the peacemaker was very impressed by Chakunsasa's wisdom and he took note. He took note. Now the peacemaker was having difficulties convincing everyone to agree to peace, to lay down their weapons, to decide that the things they were fighting over were not as important as the things that they could fight for together. Now, there was a leader at the time of the Onondaga. This leader was called Tadaraho. Tadaraho was the angriest. And they say the meanest of all of these warring tribes, their leaders. Tadaraho had committed so many terrible crimes that they say that his hair was replaced by snakes. Snakes grew out of his head and replaced his hair. And his face had no humanity in it. Also, he lived in the swamp. Tadaraho was more comfortable in the swamp with his people. The peacemaker went and visited Tadaraho. The peacemaker said, Look, look at this arrow. See this one arrow? It is so easy to break. At a bundle of arrows together, they are strong and cannot be broken. The Haudenosaunee Alliance needs to work together for all of our good. But Tadaraho could not be swayed, could not be convinced. He did not want to leave his warring ways. And so the peacemaker decided to ask for advice from Chakuncessa, the woman who ran the boarding house. Chakuncessa, what do you do? What should we do? Do you have any wisdom? Anything that you can help? Any ideas? Oh, she did. It's funny that you should ask, she said. It's funny that you should ask because recently the birds have been coming to me every morning and singing a song, a new song I've never heard before. This song is beautiful and I can't get it out of my mind. And Chakuncessa sung the song for the peacemaker. And when he taught everyone else to sing that song, together, together the people went into the swamp and they appealed one last time to Tadaraho, who said no again. And then they sang to him. The people sang the song that Chakuncessa had taught them, that she had been given by the birds. They sang that song and Tadaraho started to get drawn out of the swamp, almost against his will. They pulled him out of the swamp with that song. And as he got closer, his snakes on his head, they started to fall out. They fell off. His face started to soften. As Tadaraho came out of the swamp, as the song brought him closer, he returned to himself. He returned to his own humanity. He returned to his humanity and he agreed to listen. Tadaraho, if you agree to this law of peace, the Onondaga Nation will be the keepers of the faith and you will always have a special place. Tadaraho agreed. Tadaraho agreed. And then the peacemaker directed that everyone should find the tallest pine tree, the tallest white pine tree, which they did. And at the roots of that pine tree, they dug a big hole. They dug a big hole and they threw all their weapons in that hole. And then they covered them up. And then the peacemaker gave the Haudenosaunee people the laws that are the reason that they're now called the Haudenosaunee people. Because that means the people of the longhouse. The longhouse that's being described is the house of law and justice and health that is described in the law of peace. Now, the peacemaker said, the first thing that we must establish is that the wisest people are the women. The women are the wisest among you. And the women are also the keepers of the earth. And so we must respect the women. And the peacemaker created the council of grandmothers. This council of clan mothers or grandmothers were the wisest, oldest women in the villages. The ones agreed upon by all that they had the longest demonstrated track records of working for their people and caring for their people. Those were the wise grandmothers who oversaw everything in Haudenosaunee society. The peacemaker created the elder brothers council or the grand council. The grand council included two representatives from every village or every council. In those villages or clans, the people chose these two representatives. They sent them with a consensus message from the village overseen by the council of grandmothers, the wise clan mothers. There was also created by the peacemaker a younger brothers council with the Onondaga and the Oneida. Now, this younger brothers council was just the same. There were two representatives from each clan or village who were sent to represent the consensus opinion of their village. Now, this method of democratic governance did not go unnoticed by the colonists who arrived in 16th century in Haudenosaunee lands. The people who arrived from Europe had never experienced democratic governance. The colonists were familiar with monarchy. The colonists remarked on and noted and were deeply influenced by Haudenosaunee culture, by this representative governance that they could see for themselves in the communities around them, keeping in mind that there was some pretty intimate contact between the colonists and the Haudenosaunee people. The survival of the colonists was pretty much dependent on tribal peoples. And it wasn't just about how to grow food and eat in the new world that was being learned by the colonists. Now, fast forward 100 years, in 1776, a gentleman by the name of Benjamin Franklin, who is described as one of America's quote unquote founding fathers, was intimately familiar with, deeply influenced by, and fascinated with, and a big booster of, what was known as the Irkhoi Law of Peace, because he could see for himself what a unique form of government this was that the Haudenosaunee people were practicing. And Benjamin Franklin absolutely was directly inspired in building the U.S. Constitution by the Irkhoi Law of Peace. Now, you could say that the Elder Brothers Council is the U.S. Senate, and you may remember that we still send two people from each state to the Senate. We have a House of Representatives, a Younger Brothers Council, and our U.S. Supreme Court is surely supposed to be the Council of Clan Mothers or Grandmothers. In 1987, skip forward another 100 odd years, under the leadership of Senator Daniel Inouye, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution Number 76, which recognized and acknowledged the debt of the U.S. Constitution to the Irkhoi Law of Peace. And on the day that this was signed into law and passed, Orrin Lyons, who's the chief of the Onondaga Nation, made an appearance in Congress and opened the session up with a telling of the peacemaker, which just it does. It gives me chills when I think about that. He had been asked there by his friend, Vine DeLoria, a prominent Dakota thinker and professor, who created for Congress a 400 page document that is a side-by-side comparison of the Irkhoi Law of Peace and the U.S. Constitution, and takes a deep dive into the scholarship that documents the interest of Benjamin Franklin and other of the Founding Fathers and the political processes of the Haudenosaunee and the Irkhoi Law of Peace. That document is still there. It's still available. All you have to do is go to the U.S. Congress website. You can download it in PDF form. It's an incredible piece of scholarship and it's really fun to look at the particulars. And I'm encouraging everyone to go do that. This is a story I haven't told a ton of times because I am not as familiar with my Seneca Cayuga heritage as I am my Dakota heritage. I was raised in South Dakota and a Dakota family, so my Haudenosaunee roots are I'm less in touch with, less knowledgeable about. And this is part of me learning my own culture and thank you Creative Advantage and Tina Lapidula for inviting myself and Roger Fernandez to share these stories. Thank you.