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THE SIX NATIONS 0/

There are few historical events recorded in America that are more interesting than that
touching the consolidation of the “Five Nations” into one vast confederation, under the
statesmanship of Hiawatha, nearly four centuries ago.

In following up the history of these people we find them, subsequent to their alliance,
engaged in all the early colonial wars. French and English colonists alike feared, yet
pandered to, this great war-like nation, who at one time ruled the land from the Atlantic
sea-board[sic] to the Mississippi, and from North Carolina to the great lakes and river St.
Lawrence.

That the remnant of this all-powerfi1l1[sic] people who once dictated terms to every white
and red race on the continent, is, in the present day, a law abiding, peaceful, semi-
agricultural nation, occupying a great portion of our own county, and the adjoining one of
Haldimand, is telling evidence of the Nineteenth century march of advancement, and the
possibilities of all intelligent races that are given opportunities of absorbing what is best in
their sister-nations, whether it be art, habit, or handicraft.

The English and the Iroquois, as we know them in the county of Brant, have made a
brotherly exchange of many things, within the last few decades, which happily bodes more
good to both nations than those erstwhile interchanges of musket shots and tomahawks.
The Canadians have adopted the Iroquois use of Indian corn as an almost national food.
The Iroquois national game of lacrosse has been Canadianized, and. although thirty years
ago it was absolutely unknown among the whites, it is to-day[sic] known the world over
as Canada’s national sport. Snow shoeing, tobogganing, canoeing, are all adaptations from
the red man, who in his turn has adjusted himself to civilized habits and customs, profiting
by their excellences and, let us trust, learning as little harm as possible from their
imperfections.

It has been a long but astonishingly rapid leap from the wigwam, and the council fire of a
century ago, to the neat little, well-ordered, governmental building, known as the “Six
Nations Council House,” at Ohsweken, yet through all that time with its changes in the
Imperial parliament, its strange happenings in Canadian politics, the Iroquois nation have
held their system of government intact. It stands to-day[sic], as it stood in the days of
Hiawatha, unshaken, unadulterated, unaltered, a living monument to the magnificent
statesmanship of the man who conceived it, and carried it, and culminated it before ever
the white man had entered the depths of America’s forest lands.

The Indian reserve on the Grand river has dwindled from what was the first Imperial grant,
that is, the lands that lay for six miles in depth on each side of the river from its source to
its mouth, to a tract comprising but fifty-two thousand acres, the greater portion of which
is under cultivation, for unlike western tribes the Iroquois have shown a great aptitude for
agriculture, as those who have visited their annual industrial exhibition in the spacious
agricultural building at the village of Ohsweken will readily testify.

 

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