Group from St. Regis to return to land of Mohawk ancestors
Indians buy 322 acres of land for a fresh start
Hope to leave St. Regis troubles behind
reprinted w/o permission from Syracuse Herald Journal
Sunday, 9/12/93
By Jim Reilly
Tom Porter was talking about the land and, though he was more than
100 miles from the spot he described, it was as though a picture of the
place hung framed in his mind. "The property is roughly 322 acres, give
or take a few acres. It faces the south. In other words, there's a
hill, but the hill inclines towards the south, which is perfect for
solar energy," he said. "It has roughly 200 acres of about the most- I
believe you could say it's virgin woods, or something close to it.
There are trees there that are 200, 250 feet tall. There's the Mohawk
river, and beyond that the Thruway. We're on the north side of the
river. And I'll tell you, if you have a headache, and you go into that
woods, you don't have to be there long and your headache will go away."
Porter and a group of other traditional Mohawks from the St. Regis
Mohawk reservation near Massena hope this place , with its woods and
water and rattlesnakes , will heal some of the headaches and heartache
that have gnawed at the reserve for years: drug use, alcoholism,
smuggling, shootings, and disputes over gambling, money and leadership
that broke up families, embittered friends and have led to violence and,
more than once, death.
Porter, a traditional Mohawk chief, will not say Akwesasne, which is
what traditional Mohawks call the reserve, is a bad place. "Though we
have many problems, there's many , many wonderful people here," he said.
"This is where I was born, this is where my family is. I'm not
condemning people here, I want that to be clear." But Porter and the
others are leaving.
At an auction in July, they bought Montgomery Manor, the old
Montgomery County home for the aged and poor, and its attendant 300-plus
acres in the town of Palatine.
They paid 231,000, Porter said, and took title to the property this
month. Some of the money came from bake sales and pancake breakfasts
and other fund-raisers the Mohawks have run the past few years; some
came from friends they've made in other countries; most, more than
$200,000 came from a few particularly close friends. "I can't say the
name or even where they live, because they've asked to remain
anonymous," Porter said.
For the Mohawks, this marks a return to their ancestral homeland and
the valley that bears their tribal name, a return that has been
prophesied and dreamed about for generations. "The principal villages
of our people were there. In fact, the place that we bought was a bear
clan village. I belong to that clan. My
great-great-great-great-grandmother was born and raised there, or not
far from there."
Perhaps as soon as the end of this month, Porter and a few others
will move into their new home to clean, fix and figure out what needs to
be done to the three buildings to make them livable. The place has been
vacant and boarded up more than a year. Porter said as many as 20
families may move from Akwesasne to the Mohawk valley over the next
year; more may come later.
"It's hard to say how many. We'll have to see in two years' time,
and two years after that," he said. They plan to farm, raise crops and
animals, maybe set up a trout farm using the water from a spring-fed
creek on the land. "On the land, there's an artesian spring that comes
from the big hill there, right from the rocks," Porter said. "It flows
day and night, and it's bacteria-free, they tell me. It's a beautiful,
beautiful spring. There's a lot of possibilities there."
Porter said the group is considering a variety of business ventures
to help support themselves in their new home, from a mail-order service
for Native American crafts to bottling the water from their spring and
selling it. In time, they hope to create a conference center, where
people can come to learn about traditional Mohawk and Iroquois culture.
Porter, 49, is a carpenter, and also has worked as a teacher and
lecturer. They also might rent space to groups seeking a conference
location.
But nothing that might disturb the rattlesnakes.
"A half mile from the property's eastern boundary line on top of the
hill - it's not on our property, but it's only half a mile from the line
- is one of the few timber rattlesnake dens left," Porter said. "It's
supposedly the most densely populated one. The other day, a timber
rattler crossed the road, and all the cars had to stop. It was a big
one, a six-footer. Timber rattlers, they're a sacred animal. They need
to live."
He and others hope to leave behind some of the problems of Akwesasne,
from the political infighting between so-called traditionals and
progressives to the pollution of the land and water from decades of
fallout and effluent from the industries that crowd the banks at the
confluences of several rivers.
They also hope to create an environment where "we can preserve our
language, our ceremonies, our philosophies, the way we look at the
world, for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren," Porter
said.
"What this is, is like-minded people going someplace where we can
preserve what we are as a native people," Porter said. "I don't want to
be arrogant. We are not saying we will do it; there's no formula, no
blueprint, and things are so shattered, there are so many wounds. We do
not know is we will be successful. But this will be our damnedest
try."
He has six children and eight grandchildren. Some will stay at
Akwesasne, some may come to live in the Mohawk Valley.
"Even though we're going to be moving over there, that doesn't mean
we're abandoning Akwesasne," Porter said. "There will be an open door,
both ways. But in the new place, there will be no drugs, no alcohol, no
gambling. We're going to do things that are within our spiritual
teaching and tradition," Porter said. "We're not going to do anything
to hurt that land; nothing that's going to scare the rattlesnakes
away."
+ - - - - - - -- - - - -- - C O M M E N T A R Y- - -- - - - - - - -
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THE POWER OF PLACE. As a living creation, the planet was carefully
crafted over endless eons. Around the planet, the persistent presence
in specific places of so-called indigenous, native, or aboriginal
peoples is a deliberate geomantic manifestation of Earth's intention to
create and support a humanity. Places these ancestral groups occupy are
always prime indicators of the planet's state and balance. Legends,
history and spiritual culture of these peoples are always crucial local
reservoirs in the memory matrix of the mind of Gaia. Even as
"geo-metry" initiates from "earth-measure," so, too, "land-guage"
expresses a local harmony and dimension to a landscape.
Within this global mind field, time is the next dimension beyond
space. So it was timely that last year the movie "Last of the Mohicans"
toured North America -- a gory tragedy of war and treachery in an
earlier American century. But James Fenimore Cooper penned awesome
insight full of epic glimpses into the military, moral and spiritual
forces invading North America to pry open a "new" continent.
Chingachcook and his son Uncas -- the last two Mohican men left alive
and free -- are leaving their now depopulated Berkshire Mountains
homeland for Pennsylvania to live with Shawnee, and thus escape (for a
while) genocide in an onrushing war between English and French, with
their Huron allies.
To the west, Mohawks (People of Flint) and their Iroquois brothers in
the Five Nations Confederacy hadn't sided with Britain yet, and the
English lost bad in the war's first years. Now that Mohicans were only
a memory in the Berkeshire forests, it would be Mohawks who next felt
the crunch of the European onslaught pounding against the eastern door
to the continent. Indeed, only a few decades later, the Mohawks fell to
the Anglo-European invasion and were swept aside and out of the Mohawk
Valley. Two centuries after these grim and bloody chapters of early
American history, Mohawks and many Iroquois were hired as extras for a
1990s remake of Cooper's gem of early American literature.
Now, two centuries after being driven out of the path of progress,
Mohawks are returning to their original ancestral homelands: the Mohawk
Valley. Amid the screaming headlines of a world in upheaval and nations
in turmoil, this tiny movement of a nearly forgotten people to a
settlement in their ancestral homeland is a quietly whispered message
about the power of place and the subtle shiftings of power at our
current time in the cycles of history.
Chief Tom Porter told me of his plan to move a few years ago. I knew
the extensive industrial pollution, with the inevitable mental and moral
madness endured by those trying to live traditional lives at Akwesasne.
(How interesting Chief Porter begins this article talking about how the
land has the power to remove headaches.) I agreed with Chief Porter it
was imperative to resettle on clean land, and to cleanse the human
atmosphere, too, so that a new, pure beginning could be attempted. I am
deeply happy Tom Porter's long held dream is coming true.
As Western capitalist nations teeter in the shadow of runaway
deficits, and Eastern, dictatorial nations totter under rising cries for
democracy, very quietly native peoples of the Americas are returning to
their place. All Earth's creatures possess "homing instinct," and this
primeaval biofunction gets turned on at a crucial moment in each
creature's life cycle. Seems Mother Earth is calling her Mohawk
children home. What time is it on Earth?
Tom refers reverently and repeatedly of the magnificent rattlesnake
den nearby. Such are the duties of Earth's true caretakers. At one
point early in their revolutionary fight for independence, many
colonists adopted the rattlesnake as their banner emblem for the new
nation, with the warning: "Don't Treaad on Me." Later the rattle-tailed
serpent was replaced by the American eagle as the new national emblem.
Serpent and eagle united become the winged serpent -- the Dragon,
harbinger of Transformation.
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-- for a green and peaceful planet, turtle
David Yarrow, turtle from Salt Lake
Earthwise Education Center, P.O. Box 91, Camden, NY 13316
"be earthwise, not clockwise"
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