Kaianere'kó:wa: A Lesson in Being Ready to Listen

I lie in Grandmother's bed.We listen.

—Beth Brant, "Ride the Turtle's Back"

We, the Haudenosaunee, are, have been, and will continue to be people of beauty, strength, and wonder. We nurture these elements of our being with the help of a body of knowledge that we call the Kaianere'kó:wa,¹ or the Great Law of Peace.

As I wish to see it, we are in as powerful a position to know this of ourselves as ever. The knowledge is there, in more forms than some of us may realize. Onondaga adoptee and legal historian Kayanesenh Paul Williams's 2018 monograph on the Kaianere'kó:wa, for instance, is an extensive, although not exhaustive account of the Great Law, the story of the Peacemaker who introduced it, and its innumerable applications as Haudenosaunee law.² As Williams reminds us again and again, the Kaianere'kó:wa as a legal text is inseparable from the lived experience of the Haudenosaunee. Context and application are everything. The actual narrative of the Peacemaker's journey only begins 145 pages into and occupies another 140 pages of Williams's text, including running commentary and exegesis. This practice of embedding the story deep in the middle of a larger text is a common one (in Tom Porter's book on Haudenosaunee teachings, to which I will turn in a moment, the Peacemaker story appears 270 pages in) that speaks to a number of the Great Law's key features. For one, it corresponds with the Great Law's central and foundational place in Haudenosaunee society. Likewise, it corresponds to the Great Law's place as the second of three core Haudenosaunee texts, preceded by the Creation Story of Skywoman's descent to Turtle Island and followed by the Kariwì:io (also known as the 1799 Code of Handsome Lake). It also attests to the story's immense richness, specificity, and (especially for non-Haudenosaunee audiences) difficulty, insofar as the story cannot be fully conveyed without assuming or providing considerable background knowledge in Haudenosaunee grammar, nomenclature, kinship structure, and political history for the audience.

The Kaianere'kó:wa's applicability as law extends beyond what the Western settler system would typically define as "law." Translated alternately as "the great good" (Porter 416), "the good word," and "the good way" (Williams 1, 7), the Great Law is less concerned with defining "law" in the sense of legality and illegality than it is with modelling a series of pathways to peace and, for lack of a satisfying equivalent term in English, goodness. As Williams explains, the term "Kayanerenkó:wa" (as he spells it) has roots in the concept of "yoyanere," which he translates according to a "broad spectrum" of meanings including "good," "correct, proper, right" as well as "a path, a way, a way of being" (219). In my own upbringing, "ioiá:nere" (as it is spelled in Porter's book) has been a common way of expressing congratulations or approval, especially to children when they are behaving or doing a task correctly—as in, "you're doing well" or "good job!" With these latter senses in mind, I've come to understand the Kaianere'kó:wa as both a set of legal parameters and a pedagogical framework. Indeed, like any effective mode of pedagogy, the Kaianere'kó:wa is neither prescriptive nor proscriptive, but descriptive. Specifically, it describes ways of being Haudenosaunee; more broadly, it also describes ways of being a people, whether as individuals, families, communities, or nations.

It is this pedagogical function of the Great Law that I would like to explore in greater depth here. Whereas Williams's emphasis on the legal and historical elements of the Great Law requires him to devote considerable time and effort to tracing the countless textual variations and to explaining the political principles which attend to the law in its many forms, he devotes much less time to how the Great Law works as teaching and method. That is not to say that this dimension is absent from Williams's text; he does give attention to...