1) Our cultural knowledge explains that our two people were created separately on two different continents. We did not come across the Bering Strait. To be placed on a progressive continuum is in itself the purest form of racism.

2) We begin to travel in two paths with understanding, respect and cooperation,the bench mark of separation.

3) We have two distinct legacies of life. We each have an entirely different way of viewing the world. These differences have led us to deal with each other in a sometimes bizarre mannar.

4) Aboriginal world view contains a greater sense of the current completeness of existence.

5) Aboriginal people have a different way of seeing reality. Any discussion of land becomes a discussion of religion, kinship and is our view of land. We view everything as possessing a life and we look to the unity of whole as the completeness of existence. All life comes from Mother Earth.

6) Belief is more important than what they can prove.

7) Land does not belong to us. It belongs to the coming faces (generations to come). In this sense, we cannot own,sell buy and give land away. It belongs to all.

8) Everything is related and survival depends on how one exercises the use of resources. We only take what we can use.

9) Our view of time and space is different. The spirts allow us to return to the orgins of ceremonies and as long as we do them in completeness we can draw on that original power and strength. It seeks harmony in a cyclical contact over time. We are concerned with being and maintaining rather than becoming developing, changing, making and storing.

10) Every Hodenoshaunee person has a personal relation with nature and does not strive to control it. There is no connection of land, labor and wealth.

11) The future does not contain the stimulating prospect of progress.

12) To meet the Non-Native halfway is to self destruct.

13) Why is the option of leading a separate cultural domain into the future so shocking? Reaction would be pure racism. Any one wants to be different. Work on understanding the difference. Form a partnership not a marriage.

Simply put, the Iroquois were the most important native group in North American history. Culturally, however, there was little to distinguish them from their Iroquian-speaking neighbors. All had matrilineal social structures - the women owned all property and determined kinship. The individual Iroquois tribes were divided into three clans, turtle, bear, and wolf - each headed by the clan mother. The Seneca were like the Huron tribes and had eight (the five additional being the crane, snipe, hawk, beaver, and deer). After marriage, a man moved into his wife's longhouse, and their children became members of her clan. Iroquois villages were generally fortified and large. The distinctive, communal longhouses of the different clans could be over 200' in length and were built about a framework covered with elm bark, the Iroquois' material of choice for all manner of things. Villages were permanent in the sense they were moved only for defensive purposes or when the soil became exhausted (about every twenty years).

Agriculture provided most of the Iroquois diet. Corn, beans, and squash were known as "deohako" or "life supporters." Their importance to the Iroquois was clearly demonstrated by the six annual agricultural festivals held with prayers of gratitude for their harvests. The women owned and tended the fields under the supervision of the clan mother. Men usually left the village in the fall for the annual hunt and returned about midwinter. Spring was fishing season. Other than clearing fields and building villages, the primary occupation of the men was warfare. Warriors wore their hair in a distinctive scalplock (Mohawk of course), although other styles became common later. While the men carefully removed all facial and body hair, women wore theirs long. Tattoos were common for both sexes. Torture and ritual cannibalism were some of the ugly traits of the Iroquois, but these were shared with several other tribes east of the Mississippi. The False Face society was an Iroquois healing group which utilized grotesque wooden masks to frighten the evil spirts believed to cause illness.

It was the Iroquois political system, however, that made them unique, and because of it, they dominated the first 200-years of colonial history in both Canada and the United States. Strangely enough, there were never that many of them, and the enemies they defeated in war were often twice their size. Although much has been made of their Dutch firearms, the Iroquois prevailed because of their unity, sense of purpose, and superior political organization. Since the Iroquois League was formed prior to any contact, it owed nothing to European influence. Proper credit is seldom given, but the reverse was actually true. Rather than learning political sophistication from Europeans, Europeans learned from the Iroquois, and the League, with its elaborate system of checks, balances,, and supreme law, almost certainly influenced the American Articles of Confederation and Constitution.