Independence Hall Philadelphia Revisited - Haudenosaunee: People of the Long House

Haudenosaunee: People of the Long House Revisit Independence Hall May 12, 2022
​#13 in the Bear Clan Mother Series

 

​The Pennsylvania State House, later to be renamed as Independence Hall, is considered to be the birthplace of America. The Declaration of Independence was signed August 2, 1776 and the U.S. Constitution was signed eleven years later on September 17, 1787. 


Both heroic documents were highly debated and signed within this building. What is not spoken about enough, however is the fact Indigenous Elders of the Haudenosaunee First Nation People — Five Nation Confederacy, now Six — were also present and they had everything to do with our American adoption and adaptation of democracy.  They are, unto this day, The Keepers of Original Democracy. 


Their eclipsed story is great and our American History Books do well to include them as a valuable part of our history as Americans and as human beings. 


Going back, there was not always peace amongst the many first nations before Europeans and Vikings came to what Indigenous ones call, Turtle Island. 


It took the Peacemaker, a man from the Huron valley now known as Canada, and the Mother of Nations, a woman in the Haudenosaunee territory, to create what is unmistakably the first democratic system in the world. Their union of heart and mind and spirit is the perfect example of “gender equality,” and that which was necessary for the Great Law of Peace to be seeded and created without which, there would have been no constitution and no America as we know it.


The photograph shown is magnificently historic. Many of those seated at that table inside Independence Hall May 12, 2022, have ancestors who would have been present with America’s founding fathers on that summer day in 1776. Their story deserves recognition.


Author: Kris Farquhar
Photograph: Katisionni Fox
Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
​