"That the People Might Live": Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy

1. Oral Performances (i)

1 Oral Performances (i) The Iroquois Condolence Rites Hail, Grandfathers, Isn’t this what you decreed: In the far future this institution shall be carried on, that the law shall be continued by our grandchildren? Hail, Grandfathers! Peter John (Fenton 1946, 117) “The League of the Iroquois, or Confederation of Five Iroquois Tribes,” William Fenton writes, “had already been formed by the year 1570 A.D.” (1944, 80; see also Hewitt 1977, 163). But Fenton elsewhere, and others (e.g., Daniel Richter: the League was “established sometime late in the fifteenth century” [1992, 31]), suggest it may well have been in place a hundred 20 Chapter 1 years earlier, yet an exact date for its origin is not likely ever to be established . Originated by Deganawidah, and an associate named Hiawatha,1 historical figures with mythic attributes, the League or Confederation—in Mohawk, the “Kaienerekowa (‘the great law of peace’)” (Alfred xvi)—was established to promulgate the “principles of reason, righteousness, law, and peace” (Fenton 1944, 81; 1998, 95). Taiaiake Alfred, the contemporary Kanien’keha (People of the Flint) or Mohawk scholar and activist, notes that his book Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999) “is inspired by and draws its structure from the ritual songs of the Rotinoshonni [‘people of the long house’ (xxvi)] Condolence ceremony” (xvii). “The Condolence ceremony,” he writes, “represents a way of bringing people back to the power of reason” (xix) after they have sustained a loss. Deriving from Hiawatha’s “concern to find a proper way to console mourners of the dead and to restore individuals, families, and nations to society” (Fenton 1998, 95; also Richter 1992, 32), the full Condolence ceremony was traditionally performed three days after the death of one of the fifty chiefs of the League.2 The loss Alfred addresses, however, is the more general loss to the People resulting from five hundred years of colonialism. “The Condolence ritual pacifies the minds and emboldens the hearts of mourners by transforming loss into strength,” he writes. “It revives the spirit of the people and brings forward new leaders embodying ancient wisdom and new hope.” “His book,” he affirms, “embodies the same hope” (xii). In Jace Weaver’s terms, Alfred hopes “to promote communitist values...to participate in the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (xiii).3 But Alfred’s book, consoling the People so that they might live, is a “manifesto.” Although the form of the Condolence ritual, he states, “is central” to his book (xvii), it is not strictly elegiac expression. Here I will examine the Iroquois Condolence Council or Rites of Condolence as a form of Native American elegiac expression. The death of one of the fifty high chiefs assigned by Deganawidah long ago is a loss which threatens the health and vitality of the grand polity of the Six Nations.4 The Condolence Council, as Fenton describes it, “was in no sense a funeral ceremony, since the dead officers had already been buried with fitting rites; but it was rather a memorial service for the honored dead....5 When all sorrow had been wiped away, the new candidate [for the office vacated by the deceased] was shown and the antlers of office were placed on his head” (1944, 66).6 Fenton notes that “in the civil polity Oral Performances (i) 21 of the Iroquois peoples an office never dies; only its bearer dies. The name is one; the bearers are many” (66; also Hewitt [1916] 1977, 165). Gunther Michelson also remarks the continuance of the names of the chiefs: “This procedure,” he writes of the Condolence ceremony, “was devised by the ancient Iroquois law givers to ensure that the position and title name of a hereditary chief would be passed on from one generation to the next” (62), that the People might live.7 The Six Nations are divided into two moieties. The first, usually referred to in the literature as the Elder Brothers, consists of the Mohawks, the Onondagas, and the Senecas; and the second, the Younger Brothers, is made up of the Oneidas, Cayugas, and, as I have noted, since the eighteenth century, the Tuscaroras (some Tutelo, Delaware, and Nanticoke people were also later included).8 When a chief dies, a warrior of the bereaved moiety “spreads the news of the death throughout the League. Intoning the mourning call, ‘kwaa, kwaa, kwaa’,” he carries “invitation wampum to a member of the ‘clearminded’ moiety,” his Brothers across the...