And there it was, a great thunderclap of irony: At last, after a half millennia of almost totally, deliberately exterminating Indigenous people on this continent, we are now asking for guidance from their very descendants.
Chief Oren Lyons, at The Long House Reserve, East Hampton, N.Y.
By Biddle Duke
The Southampton Press, The East Hampton Press, The Sag Harbor Express
“I bring a hard message,” Chief Oren Lyons recently told an audience of more than 100 at The Church, the Sag Harbor art and cultural institution.
Lyons, a Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan of both the Onondaga Nation and the Seneca Nation, was visiting from up north, a guest of the Peter Matthiessen Center. Matthiessen, the noted Sagaponack writer, was a friend of Lyons’s and an ally in the fight for Indigenous rights. (I’m on the center’s committee.)
The American continent’s long-subjugated and -oppressed original inhabitants have beauty and wisdom to share — and at last we have begun to listen. They’ve seen it all, and they know where this is all headed.
Racism, hatred, greed, wars, the poisoning of and overextraction from the environment, the vast majority of humanity violating the very balance of life on Earth — we are at war with ourselves, Lyons said.
“We’re in perilous times now. We have to turn our attention today and be very concerned about the seven generations to come. Now is the time to think about your grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren … it’s a question of survival of the species.”
The Indigenous communities “have been told about this, that this time is coming, and here it is … We’re losing time. There is a point of no return here when no matter what you do it’s going to be downhill. You’re gonna wind up fighting — fighting each other.”
Then, he added, looking out at the crowd, all lucky enough to find themselves in Sag Harbor on a Saturday afternoon in late spring: “I can see from the people in this room, you have leverage. It’s time to use that leverage.”
Lyons, at 95, is an elder of elders, revered, and among the oldest Indigenous leaders alive. His life is a testament to generations of stubborn and courageous resisters of conquest, theft, racism, oppression and deeply malevolent misunderstanding.
The native population before the arrival of Europeans to what is now the United States and Canada is estimated to have been somewhere between five million and 10 million, with some estimates at 18 million. Four hundred years later, the U.S. Census in 1900 counted only about 237,000 “Indians,” with Canada estimating about 100,000.
Noteworthy is that the total U.S. population in 1900 came in at 76 million.
In three centuries, some five million to perhaps as many as 18 million native Americans were wiped out by violence, starvation, disease, displacement and forced assimilation, while the largely European population went from zero to 76 million.
“Genocide” is what California Governor Gavin Newsom called the American government’s near annihilation of a population in a public apology in 2019, echoing many U.S. and world leaders: “No other way to describe it. And that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”
Here, at a bend on Hill Street in Southampton Village, lies a thousand-acre thumb of native land extending into Shinnecock Bay, home to the tribe of the same name. Against every challenge imaginable, the Shinnecock have courageously survived amid the booming “Hamptons.”
The tribe is now in cultural, political and economic ascendance, reclaiming and regaining sacred territory, relearning their ancient Algonquin language, and building businesses. They are fighting to save the environment here that has fed and instructed them for thousands of years, and which has been ravaged by the “progress” of the conquerors. They are teaching and speaking out with fresh confidence about their history, their traditions, their knowledge.
“Holdouts,” Lyons called the Shinnecock on his visit. He would know, being one himself.
A U.S. Army veteran, champion lacrosse player, award-winning university professor, international human rights fighter, warrior in the Indigenous rights movement, painter, father and grandfather, Lyons was joined by his son Rex, and Shinnecock artist and cultural and environmental advocate Shane Weeks, for the talk at The Church.
The afternoon burned with tough truths. Look around, they said: Humanity is killing itself.
Weeks, who has made his people’s culture, knowledge and traditions his life, spoke of the South Fork’s natural bounty with both reverence and despair.
“We’re here today … with a choice to make,” he said. “We’re here looking at an ultimatum. Do we keep going down this road of exploitation, commercialization — really, a self-serving road that we have been on across the globe in modern society, especially in the United States, since we are the drivers of this? We can’t keep going like this. It’s not sustainable.”
Lyons and Weeks spoke of the aspirational tenet of the seven generations, a simple, if not impossibly hard, principle: to live and meet our needs in this lifetime without compromising the ability of all future generations of all living things to meet their needs and thrive on this planet.
We are failing monumentally at that. Which explains why the über-rich are building their own islands in the oceans and planning their escape to outer space.
Down here on Earth, Weeks and Lyons shared, every living thing was endowed with a set of instructions for sustainable living. But sometimes it feels as though we’ve lost the instructions.
“There’s a god-sized hole within each of us, that’s only getting bigger as we continue to aggressively drift from nature,” Montauk resident Thea Giovannini-Torelli, who was in the audience, reflected wisely in a conversation with me afterward.
In the talk’s Q&A, someone asked, in effect, for a to-do list, for action items. And there it was, a great thunderclap of irony: At last, after a half millennia of almost totally, deliberately exterminating Indigenous people on this continent, we are now asking for guidance from their very descendants.
Oren took the question in slowly, with a slight smile, then offered: “It’s up to you.”
In other words, we haven’t lost the instructions: We just need to pay attention, and remember them.
Just like Aspen trees that present as strong, single individuals, beneath the surface we are all connected, our roots intertwined, the earth, air and water, and insects and birds.
As Matthiessen himself wrote in “Indian Country” some 40 years ago, a “half-blindness has been the curse of Europeans as long as the Indians have known us. But we have not always been accursed; at one time, we, too, were at one with the mysterium tremendum. And we must feel awe again if we are to return to a harmonious existence with our own habitat, and survive; we must consider this life-essence that is all about us, manifesting in each moment — the music of the stars, the color of the wind, the dead stillness between tides at dead of night, the birds, trees, sea pearls and manure, the moment-by-moment miracle of our existence.”
Rex Lyons, left, his father Chief Oren Lyons, center, and Shane Weeks.