Great Law of Peace - Gayanashagowa
Discussion
Updating the Great Law of Peace for today's U.S.
Benjamin Life:
"For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, later joined by the Tuscarora, had governed themselves under the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace: a federation of sovereign nations, joined by a common council, bound by a constitution carried in wampum and memory. The colonists knew this system well. Benjamin Franklin printed the proceedings of Haudenosaunee treaty councils, including the 1744 council at Lancaster, where the Onondaga speaker Canassatego urged the quarreling colonies to unite as the Six Nations had. In 1751 Franklin wrote that it would be strange if the Six Nations could sustain such a union and a dozen English colonies could not. His 1754 Albany Plan of Union, drafted at a congress that Haudenosaunee leaders attended, proposed a grand council of delegates from distinct colonies, and the Articles of Confederation later bound the states in what they called a “firm league of friendship.” What the founders took was the architecture: distinct peoples joined under a common council without dissolving into one; a union understood as a compact entered by agreement rather than a grant from a crown; proof that a people could govern itself without a king. In 1988, Congress itself passed a concurrent resolution acknowledging the Confederacy’s contribution to the development of the Constitution, and, in the same breath, recommitting the United States to uphold its treaties with Native nations “as the tribes understood them to be.”
What the founders borrowed was real; what they left out is what we are still missing.
Under the Great Law, the senior women of each clan, the clan mothers, nominate the chiefs who sit in council, and hold the power to remove them if they fail their duties to the people. Councils deliberate toward consensus rather than resolving disagreements by majority vote. Decisions are weighed against their effects on generations not yet born. The American constitution kept the federation and discarded the grandmothers. It kept representation and discarded recall. It kept the council and discarded consensus. It kept the union and discarded the unborn.
I want to propose that a genuine refounding would begin by restoring what was omitted. Not by copying the Great Law, taking it without invitation yet again. The first act of a consensual refounding is to ask. Nation to nation. In council. With the people whose consent was never sought the first time.
In September 1789, writing to James Madison from Paris, Thomas Jefferson argued that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” that the dead have no rightful power to bind the living, and drew the conclusion with characteristic arithmetic: “Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.” Madison politely disagreed, preferring a constitution that would accumulate veneration over time. Madison won, and the result is one of the hardest constitutions on earth to amend. But by Jefferson’s arithmetic, ours expired in 1808. We are more than a dozen generations overdue.
Other countries have done this work in living memory. In 2008, after a constituent assembly in which Indigenous movements played a decisive role, Ecuadorians approved by referendum a new constitution that made Nature, Pachamama, a subject of rights, with the right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles,” and built the Andean principle of sumak kawsay, the good life derived from healthy relations, into the state’s purpose. Bolivia’s 2009 constitution refounded the country as a plurinational state, followed by a law on the rights of Mother Earth. Chile’s 2019 uprising produced a constitutional convention whose 2022 draft included rights of nature and plurinational recognition, and which voters rejected decisively. That last example is part of the lesson. A refounding through consent can be refused. That is what consent means. And Ecuador’s experience since 2008 shows the other hard truth: words in a constitution, without new economic and democratic practices underneath them, can coexist comfortably with the old extraction. A new contract has to be lived before it can be written."