The original Americans, like all human communities, were people of both peace and war, but modern America has refused to put a realistic face on the Indian experience. Images of Native American history are distorted by white guilt, romanticism, commercialization, and basic lack of information.

Americans love Sitting Bull for his stunning triumph in 1875 over George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. But the problem with triumph tales, from the Indian point of view, is that they do not add up to victory. Progressive triumph is not the Native American story.

The American myth of redemptive violence, which requires action, adventure, bloodshed and bluster, is a lie. It is especially so in the Native American case. The great Indian leaders who mobilized violent resistance were justifiably outrages and undeniably courageous. But they did not save their peoples.

The true heroes of Native American history were rather those who resisted nonviolently. Native American culture was rescued and sustained by Indians who strove to avoid war and who picked up the pieces after repeated rounds of death and destruction. Indian ways of living survived because of the patient, persistent, and creative traditionalism of ordinary women and men, and because of the special role of charismatic prophets who set forth new visions for the life of their people. Even while working to sustain traditional values, they accommodated to European culture at some levels, selectively borrowing in order to create viable separate space and identity in American society. Their choices were severely limited, but they were remarkably creative and successful within those limits.

In the 1400's, before Englishmen set eyes on North America, an Iroquois "League of Peace" was formed. The League was an experiment in replacing violence with nonviolence. Its founding prophet was Deganawidah, a Huron by birth and a Mohawk by adoption. Deganawidah came preaching a gospel of peace to the Iroquois during a time of great inter-tribal violence and war. The people should stop killing each other, he asserted, accept the rule of law, and come together in new rituals of unity. Legend tells how Deganawidah recruited and converted three key persons who were caught up in the old way of violence and invested them with positions of authority in the new, peaceful order. The new chiefs' council tackled the issue of disarmament, and at Deganawidah's suggestion, uprooted a great pine tree and threw all of their arms into the hole. Then they replanted the tree, "thus hiding the weapons of war forever from the sight of future generations" (see John Arthur Gibson, Concerning the League: The Iroquois League Tradition as Dictated in Onondaga, Winnipeg, MB: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 1992, xxix). The pine tree was a great symbol of unity. The Deganawidah epic is distinctive from the chartering myths of other nations because it found its unity in remembering the establishment of internal peace, rather than in celebrating triumphal military victory over threatening external enemies.

The Lenni Lenape (Delaware) were another Native American tribe with peaceful inclinations. The Lenape were known as mediators and peacemakers in colonial America. Their reputation for mediation or peacemaking was associated with a name, "Gantowises"-meaning "women"-which they accepted for themselves. Some scholars, accepting the interpretation of early Moroccan missionaries, believe that this name was a badge of honor, originating in its use for Iroquois women of royal lineage who had a highly honored role as peacemakers. Other historians say that the Iroquois pinned the label of "women: on the Lenape after defeating them in battle (see C.A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians. A History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 180-1. The term "Gantowises" lost status when translated into the English as "women," because the English had no equivalent role of honor for women.

The Cheyenne, a Plains Indian tribe, also stand as a testament to the Native American peace tradition. History has saddled them with a reputation for special ferocity, but that interpretation obscures on of the most distinctive Native American peace traditions. The Cheyenne Peace Chief, a council of forty-four leaders, were entrusted with the core moral teachings of the tribe. Their legendary founder, Sweet Medicine, appointed the first chiefs and told them: "You chiefs are peacemakers. Though your son might be killed in front of your teepee, you should take a peace pipe and smoke. Then you would be called an honest chief" (see Stan Hoig, The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980, 7). In the peace Chief tradition, moral power came through the patient acceptance of suffering, rather than through angry revenge. Contemporary peace chiefs receive this same training. In 1862 three Cheyenne Peace Chiefs, Black Kettle, White Antelope, and Lean Bear, travailed to Washington, D.C. and received peace medals, American flags, and official documents to prove their friendly status to the frontier soldiers. Within six years, the three had been killed by white American soldiers. At the time of their respective deaths, all three had responded nonviolently displaying the symbols given to them by the United States government in peace, remaining faithful to the nonviolent Peace Chief ethic.

Black Kettle was killed by troops commanded by George Armstrong Custer at the 1868 Battle of Washita. A century later, in 1968, the grandsons of Custer's Seventh Calvary re-enacted this battle, complete with weapons and mock Indian opposition. The Cheyenne were those mock opponents, agreeing to participate in the reenactment only if it was historically accurate and they were allowed a ceremony to re-inter the bones of one of the original massacre's victims. The re-enactment went awry, scaring the Cheyenne children and becoming all too real for their parents, igniting confusion and hostility. But reconciliation was achieved through the actions of an old Peace Chief, who tool the Cheyenne blanket covering the coffin of the massacre victim and placed it around the shoulders of the mock army's commander. It was a gesture of reconciliation, and it broke through the tension and hostility. Lawrence Hart, a Cheyenne Peace Chief, reported in Mennonite Life (June 1981) that the following scene was "hard to describe . . . People broke down and cried . . . these grandsons of the Seventh and the grandsons of Black Kettle. A reconciliation occurred exactly one hundred years after that battle and it was initiated by one of our contemporary Cheyenne chiefs."

As Native American lands were invaded by white settlers, the native people were forced either to make accommodations to the white culture or to commit cultural suicide. All Indians engaged in some sort of borrowing. The most nonviolent tried to guarantee their survival by learning to speak, read, and write in the English language; by engaging in the rituals of the Christian religion; or by mastering marketable skills for economic change. All this could be done without abandoning key markers of the Native American identity. Indeed, selective borrowing was essential if Indian culture was to outlast the loss of political and economic self-rule.

For all Native American peoples, the most significant sustainers of cultural identity have been the thousands of women who grieved the deaths of sons and husbands killed in war, and then persisted in their own communities to keep traditional ways alive in the face of repeated disasters. Patiently, silently, and covertly these women sustained their cultures in ways that non-natives could not see or recognize. They sustained kinship relations, continued native food ways and planting rituals, used ancient herbal medicines and remedies, and practiced seasonal observances and celebrations. Their names are not in textbooks, but their legacy has kept their people connected to a living past. Throughout history, the Native Americans have adhered to a peace tradition in the face of violent conquest and upheaval. This tradition, though obscured in mainstream texts, provides a vital insight into a people for whom reconciliation is a way of life. It is an insight desperately needed if American society is to overcome the myth of redemptive violence, and reconcile itself with its past.

 

James Juhnke is Professor of History at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. Valerie Schrag is a middle school teacher in Wichita, Kansas. Their research is part of the "Nonviolent America Project" sponsored by the Kansas Peace Institute and Lecture Series at Bethel College.

Reprinted with permission from Fellowship, the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, $15/yr. For a free sample copy write to Fellowship, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960. Photo 1 is a sketch of the Iroquios peace tree. Photo 2 is a Cheyenne encampment at Darlington, Oklahoma, ca. 1890. Credit: Mennonie Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas.