Addition to Chapter 31

(Added September 3, 2024)

Ingredients for Lasting Peace: Boundaries, Agreements, and Integrity

How were the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy able to make a peace that has lasted so long? If people today wanted to make a lasting peace, what lessons could they learn from the Haudenosaunee’s success?

The Mohawks are one member nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and in the book A Basic Call to Consciousness, a group of Mohawk writers gave many details about the Confederacy’s founding and described the Great Law of Peace. The Great Law contains a huge amount of wisdom. Here’s what I learned.

First, healthy boundaries are essential. But boundaries alone are not enough. Lasting peace also requires shared agreements and reliable integrity.

In War, Each Side Violates the Other’s Boundaries

Before they founded the Confederacy, the nations were at war with each other, meaning they were not honoring each other’s boundaries. That’s simply what war is: actions like theft and killing are violations of other people’s boundaries.

Healthy cultures could be at war because what makes a culture healthy is that it maintains an internal baseline of respect. Within each culture’s boundaries, they maintained a baseline of respect, but towards other nations who were outside those boundaries, they were at war.

Regardless of why the wars started, over time, each nation probably had good reason to be upset with the others, as each nation was violating the other nations’ boundaries. That’s the trouble with war. The more people die, the more the survivors may feel angry at the adversaries who have killed so many of the survivors’ friends and family. Thus, it is easy for bad feelings and conflict to go on for a long time.

The peacemaker encountered a system of blood feuds, where people commonly avenged their relatives’ deaths with more killing. The Mohawk writers said, “blood feuds between clans and villages ravaged the people until no one was safe.” Thus, in an effort to protect themselves, people commonly counter-attacked and killed people from the enemy nation, and each new attack then led to a new counter-attack. The peacemaker recognized that this sort of reciprocal violence could go on indefinitely if it were not stopped.

If war is a state where two or more groups of people are violating each others’ boundaries, then what is peace?

Peace Happens When People Agree to Respect Each Others’ Boundaries

Peace happens when all groups uphold agreements to respect each other’s boundaries.

Thus, peace isn’t just the absence of war. Two groups of people who are strangers to each other might not be at war, but what will happen when they meet? There is no way to know.

Peace is a commitment by two or more groups of people to respect each other’s boundaries. When all sides agree to respect each other’s boundaries, and then uphold those agreements with integrity, the peace can last indefinitely.

Making peace and starting a new culture are very similar: they both involve creating agreements to ensure that everyone’s boundaries are respected. Chapter 4 explored what defines a culture, including agreements for how to set external boundaries (protection from external threats), agreements for internal boundaries (rules and systems of accountability), and how to live well within those boundaries. These agreements require all participants to have integrity, which is why integrity is so crucial to living in a good way.

The simplest peace agreement might state that everyone involved will stop fighting each other. But the member nations of the Haudenosaunee went much further to ensure that their peace remained durable for centuries.

How did they do this?

External Boundaries: The Haudenosaunee Stand in Solidarity if Anyone is Attacked

When a culture establishes an external boundary, they protect themselves from disrespect by outsiders. Everyone inside the boundary — that is, everyone in the culture, and their guests — benefits from this protection.

The founding nations agreed to create a new external boundary for the entire Confederacy. If any member nation were attacked, the entire Confederacy would unite to repel the attacker.

In the story of the Nootka, the preacher, and the clown from Chapter 3, when the preacher attacked the clown, every single Nootka person instantly took a stand to protect the clown. That example illustrates solidarity on the scale of a village.

The same solidarity can happen at any scale. The founding nations agreed to have solidarity on the scale of a Confederacy. An attack on any nation was seen as an attack on the group, and all member nations would fight the invaders, even following the attackers into their own land until the Haudenosaunee were confident that the danger was gone.

The Mohawk writers said, “In terms of the internal affairs of the [Haudenosaunee], the first and most important principle was that under the law the people of the nations were one people.” As one people, they stood in solidarity to ensure that if anyone were attacked, the entire Confederacy would respond.

Internal Boundaries that Ensure Respect for Everyone and the Land

Internal boundaries are agreements about rules and systems of accountability that maintain a baseline of respect between people. The Haudenosaunee were very careful to set internal boundaries that respected everyone and the land. They did this in many ways, including:

1. studying past conflicts and making changes to avoid them

2. acknowledging the Earth’s needs

3. training their children so that they would accept responsibility for upholding the agreements of their culture

4. rejecting private property

5. avoiding conquering other people.

It is impossible to briefly recount all the ways the Haudenosaunee have maintained a healthy culture for centuries. But I believe these five elements have many lessons to teach. Let’s look at each.

1. The Haudenosaunee Studied Past Conflicts and Created Agreements to Avoid Repeating Them

The Haudenosaunee founders carefully studied causes of past conflicts and ensured their agreements would prevent such conflicts from happening again.

One cause of conflict was disagreement over hunting territories. Who was allowed to hunt in what areas? The Confederacy agreed to abolish these boundaries internally, and allowed anyone from any member nation to hunt anywhere in the Confederacy’s territory.

They agreed that anyone from within the Confederacy could occupy their land peacefully, and no one else could deny this.

They outlawed theft and hoarding so that no one could have a greater share of their society’s wealth than anyone else.

Each member nation remained autonomous and handled its own internal affairs.

They reviewed their traditional ways of handling disagreements and “remove[d] those customs of the past that had sparked conflict and fostered disunity.”

They also agreed that their Grand Council would “act as judiciary in serious disputes that people cannot resolve among themselves.” Thus, the Haudenosaunee created a mechanism for resolving conflicts when people could not do this themselves. However, it was still everyone’s responsibility to ensure that the Grand Council did their job well, and to only select leaders who upheld their rules.

Some people think of “peace” as the absence of conflict, but when people do not trust their neighbors, this kind of peace by itself does not feel very safe or satisfying. The Confederacy’s founders believed “if absolute justice was established in the world, peace would naturally follow.” Thus, they created a society that guaranteed justice, knowing that a durable, satisfying peace would result.

2. Acknowledging the Earth’s Needs

The Haudenosaunee’s founders ensured that they lived in right relationship with the land, considering the needs of the land and future generations. As a result, they had strict rules around conservation. They only hunted as many animals as were needed. They ensured that their population did not grow so large that they degraded the land. In other words, they practiced what many Americans call “family planning,” but they did this at the scale of the whole society to ensure they lived in a way that the Earth could support indefinitely.

As a result, the Mohawk writers said they lived with “almost unimaginable abundance and variety of nuts, berries, roots, and herbs. In addition to these, the rivers teemed with fish and the forest and its meadows abounded with game…”

Whereas one encyclopedia defines a utopia as “impossibly idealistic”, the Mohawk writers described how, prior to the arrival of Europeans, “It was, in fact, a kind of Utopia, a place where no one went hungry, a place where the people were happy and healthy.”

3. Training Everyone to Uphold Agreements that Maintain Healthy Boundaries

The Haudenosaunee did not just set up a government and let it do the work of proposing and enforcing laws.

I believe a foundational principle of the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace is this: it is every single person’s responsibility to uphold the agreements of their culture. If anyone is threatened, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure the threat is dealt with. If anyone breaks a rule, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that the systems of accountability restore justice.

When the Haudenosaunee say that they are “one people,” I believe this is partly because everyone knows that they can trust everyone else to uphold the agreements and stand in solidarity with each other. Occasionally some individuals might misbehave, but as a rule, everybody stands for a culture of mutual respect and ensures that individual incidents are resolved to restore justice.

The Mohawk writers said, “[Everyone] was socialized to the ideology that, if an injustice occurs, it is their moral duty to defend the oppressed against their oppressors.”

The Haudenosaunee did not just make a strong government to keep them safe. They created a spiritually strong society full of individuals who accepted responsibility for upholding their culture’s rules, knowing those rules worked for everybody. The Mohawk writers said that “universal justice is the product of a spiritually strong society, and many of the rules that [the peacemaker] proposed are designed to create a strong society rather than a strong government.”

When every person accepts responsibility for upholding the agreements of their culture, the government responds to the will of the people, not the other way around. This wasn’t just a mental or theoretical idea, but a core spiritual part of life. The Mohawk writers noted that “In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.”

All the Haudenosaunee’s agreements would be worthless without integrity. The Mohawk writers emphasized, “spiritual integrity,” and said their people represent “integrity, courage, honor, and peace.” Integrity is a requirement for peace, because peace requires clear agreements between people, and everyone must have integrity to uphold those agreements.

Every child was raised to embrace this spiritual integrity, not just as a theoretical goal, but a practical, spiritual way of life. The Mohawk writers said, “The Haudenosaunee raised their children from the cradleboard to be participants in the culture. The ways of the [Haudenosaunee] have always been powerfully spiritual in nature, and it is true that the government, the economy, everything that is Haudenosaunee has deep spiritual roots.”

I believe that “spiritual integrity” described by the Mohawk writers is comparable to “integrity of service,” reviewed in Chapter 28.

The Haudenosaunee specifically avoided factions, and I believe they could do this because no group of people felt the need to band together to ensure their needs would be met. Instead, everyone in the Confederacy took responsibility for upholding the rules that allowed everyone to live in a good way.

The Mohawk writers acknowledged that maintaining systems of self-governance that coordinate many thousands of peoples needs “is a very complex business.” However, “the primary rule about the flow of power and authority is clearly that the power and authority of the people lies with the people and is transmitted by them through the ‘chiefs.'”

All this explains why Mohawk man Segwalise said, “The national Councils of Chiefs do not govern the people; instead they act as representatives of their clans in a process that coordinates the wishes of the people.” Thus, instead of the leadership imposing law, “The confederated Council of Chiefs, or Grand Council, acts as the coordinating body of the will and determination of the member nations.”

4. The Haudenosaunee Reject Private Property and Welcome the Guidance of Their Spiritual Leaders

The peacemaker had clear instructions for the Haudenosaunee’s leaders: “When you sit in council for the welfare of the people, think not of yourself, your family, or even your generation. Make all of your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming, then you yourself will have peace.”

The Haudenosaunee’s political leaders are also their spiritual leaders. These leaders do not just say pleasant words. The Mohawk writers said that their leaders conduct many ceremonies that “require the distribution of great wealth. As spiritual and political leaders, they provide a kind of economic conduit. To become a political leader, a person is required to be a spiritual leader; and to become a spiritual leader, a person must be extraordinarily generous in terms of material goods.”

The Haudenosaunee strongly emphasize sharing, and do not embrace private property. The Mohawk writers said, “Property is an idea by which people can be excluded from having access to lands or other means of producing a livelihood. That idea would destroy our culture, which requires that every individual live in service to the Spiritual Ways and The People. That idea (property) would produce slavery.”

They recognized that a culture that accepted private property ownership would eventually have leaders that exclude people from accessing others’ property. These leaders would no longer perform their duties of serving everyone and helping to redistribute goods.

5. The Haudenosaunee Reject Having Rulers, Even When They Could be the Rulers!

The Haudenosaunee knew that terrible things would happen if they won a war and began imposing taxes or religion on their adversaries. Ultimately, this would make their culture unhealthy, where a few people ruled over the rest.

Thus they created rules for themselves around war.

As the Mohawk writers noted, during war, “The opponent had an absolute right to a cessation of the hostilities at any time by simply calling for a truce. At that point the process of negotiation went into action…”

In the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace, they agreed that if they won a war against some other culture, they would not seize territory or impose taxes, religion, or any other injustice. The Haudenosaunee’s only demand was that their opponents put away their weapons and stop fighting.

Furthermore, any individual or group could approach the Confederacy, learn their Great Law, and agree to abide by it. After this, they would be offered protection by the Great Law and the Confederacy.

In this way, the Haudenosaunee rejected having a culture with rulers, even when they could be the rulers.

Lasting Peace is Impossible in Unhealthy Cultures

Unhealthy cultures may end any given war, but they cannot create a satisfying peace where everyone feels deeply safe. Creating deep peace requires cultures with healthy boundaries, shared agreements, and consistent integrity by everyone.

Unhealthy cultures have rulers who selfishly look out for their own interests at the expense of everyone else. This is why unhealthy cultures such as the United States have ignored the obvious wisdom promoted by Haudenosaunee leaders. The Haudenosaunee created peace and maintained a baseline of internal respect for everyone. Such a deep peace leaves no room for rulers to exploit their people, and so the rulers of the United States and many other unhealthy cultures have rejected the Haudenosaunee’s teachings.

While individuals and subcultures can benefit from lessons from the Haudenosaunee, in order to fully embrace these lessons and find deep and lasting peace, we must create a culture where nobody rules over anybody else.

(All citations are available in the ebook.)