Today is Veterans Day; also known as Armistice Day. It is also the anniversary of a notable day in early U.S. history: the 211th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua.
Americans tune out Native American history, I think, because a lot of it is so depressing. We know what happened when Natives were pushed off their land, we know about the forked tongues, the racism and wars of extermination. Why should we want to think about it? Saying “what’s done is done” blunts the depressing aspects, and distracts from the pressing need to outmaneuver each other politically over issues like casinos.
However, the Canandaigua treaty is a rare bright spot in the sad history of immigrant Americans and native Americans. It was one of the first treaties with a sovereign nation entered into by the U.S. under its new Constitution. This treaty negotiated here in upstate New York which is (in the opinion of many, and in my opinion) a living treaty, and one almost as old as our own Constitution; and so perhaps one of America’s most important unsung documents.
Fifteen years earlier, in the throes of the Revolution, George Washington had ordered the Iroquois homeland razed out of existence via a military expedition of destruction that would later be echoed in Sherman’s famous march to the sea. For this, he was given the name Honedagayus, or Town Destroyer, by the Iroquois (known today as the Haudenosaunee). (In fact, all subsequent U.S. presidents still bear this Iroquois “title” to this day.)
But in 1794, the truth was that the early United States was a tottering mess; the Treaty of Canandaigua exists because George Washington had a clear grasp of reality and knew that a political solution in the nation’s then-northwest frontier was of the essence to keep the young nation out of new wars it could not afford. He needed peace, and he needed the Iroquois.
The meeting at Canandaigua was an international summit in every sense of the word (with even a rogue British agent crashing the party), with the same kind of drama and intrigue that you’d have found at a Cold War summit. Far from most people’s conception of Indian treaties as merely white men perfunctorily throwing trinkets at simple-minded natives, this was a truly tricky negotiation in every sense, where the outcome was never assured until the last moment.
This last and strongest treaty between the United States and the Iroquois confederacy has been whittled away year after year… but not completely. As even Gen. Henry B. Carrington, co-author of an official U.S. report, The Six Nations (1892), put it, “The alleged absurdity of the Six Nations of New York being a ‘nation within a nation’ does not change the fact or nullify the sequence of actual history.” (Not that the U.S., apparently, heeded its own report — although our government still invokes Article 7 of the Treaty of Canandaigua when it is convenient for them – as recently as 1990; and it still compensates the Haudenosaunee under the terms of Article 6, each year.)
At Canandaigua in 1794, a Quaker observer, William Savery was privately visited by the Seneca orator Red Jacket, who wanted to run a key Haudenosaunee concession by Savery in secret. Red Jacket said to the Quakers,
Brothers, we hope you will make your minds easy. We who are now here are but children, the ancients being deceased. We know that your fathers and ours transacted business together, and that you look up to the Great Spirit for his direction and assistance, and take no part in war. We expect that you were all born on this island, and consider you as brethren. Your ancestors came over the great water, and ours were born here; this ought to be no impediment to our considering each other as brethren.
The generations that have succeeded them have been dealing with the aftermath of the United States’ failure to defend this treaty from illegal actions by the state of New York, through controversies over land claims, casino deals, and so forth. However, for many decades, every November 11, people – Haudenosaunee, other Native Americans, and non-Native Americans – come to the town of Canandaigua, New York for a hopeful celebration of the signing of this treaty, and this year was no different. (The bicentennial celebration in 1994 drew thousands of people, as well as representatives of the U.S. government.)
November 11 is a day of peace throughout the world, and here intimately at home for Americans as well.
