I Have Gone Native and Joined the Haudenosaunee Confederacy

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Somewhere between the coffee pot and the apocalypse, I crossed a line no cartographer had ever bothered to draw.

One morning I looked in the mirror and discovered that the Republic had misplaced me. My driver’s license still existed, my tax forms still arrived, but spiritually I had wandered off the edge of the map and into the Longhouse.

The television was still shouting. The stock market was still vibrating like a wounded insect trapped in a fluorescent light fixture. Politicians were still promising to save the world by setting fire to it more efficiently. Yet none of it seemed particularly urgent.

The old people had already warned us.

They said seven generations.

Not seven minutes.

Not seven fiscal quarters.

Seven generations.

That kind of thinking causes severe discomfort among people whose spiritual horizon is limited to next Tuesday.

So I packed up my assumptions and defected.

I wandered into the Confederacy carrying nothing but confusion and a suspicious amount of optimism. The Mohawk were there. The Oneida. The Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later the Tuscarora. Nations tied together not by conquest but by a stubborn insistence that people should keep talking to each other instead of trying to exterminate one another.

A radical concept.

The Great Tree of Peace stood there in my imagination, roots stretching in four directions. Any traveler could follow those roots home.

Meanwhile the modern world was busy constructing newer and more sophisticated ways to lose itself.

I shaved my head badly.

I painted my face with whatever color happened to be nearby.

I wrapped myself in enough beads, feathers, ribbons, stories, and mistakes to resemble a runaway exhibit from an anthropological museum.

Nobody seemed overly concerned.

The crows laughed.

The wind approved.

The maple trees remained diplomatically neutral.

After a while I realized nobody was asking me to become somebody else. The trick was becoming less of what I already was.

Less noise.

Less ownership.

Less certainty.

More listening.

The rivers became relatives instead of resources.

The forests became neighbors instead of inventory.

The animals ceased being scenery and resumed their ancient position as fellow conspirators in a very old drama.

Even the stones appeared to be paying attention.

Now I sit beneath impossible skies, drinking coffee strong enough to restart dead civilizations, watching the moon drift over the cedar trees.

The Republic still sends its messages.

The Empire still trembles and boasts.

The markets still panic.

The televisions still glow like radioactive campfires.

But I have gone native.

Not by blood.

Not by costume.

Not by fantasy.

By remembering that peace is older than politics, that gratitude is older than money, and that the Earth was never property in the first place.

The crows, I am pleased to report, continue to find this extremely amusing.