​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
​

​The Haudenosaunee have land in the city of Philadelphia called Wampum Lot. In 1865 - 1867 city developers wanted to procure land to build the Commercial Exchange Building and they found this plot of land not covered by deeds but that it belonged to the Six Nations.  The city soon forgot about Wampum Lot. 


In November 1922, a Haudenosaunee and Indigenous contingency and Williams Penn’s descendants held a ceremony recognizing the Native American ownership of Wampum Lot.  


Today, our small delegation of Mohawks and Oneidas met the Mayor of Philadelphia to recount the history between our nations.  


Yesterday, we met with the National Park Service in Independence Hall to discuss rekindling the relations between our nations. 


This November 2022 will mark 100 years since the last commemoration of Wampum Lot. 


The Haudenosaunee have had a continued presence and influence upon the birth of the modern democracy that the world knows as the country called, United States of America.


Author: Wakerakats:te, Iakoiane of Roiane Tehanakari:ne
Bear Clan Mother of the Mohawk Nation Council 
Louise Bear Herne
Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Partner Website: https://www.katyamiller.com/
Photograph: Katisionni Fox 5/10/2022
Bear Clan Mother Series #12

Louise Mommabear spoke, ”There certainly seems to be a feeling of erasure intended to remove any spirit that would imply that we were once there."


Six women from the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York traveled to Philadelphia recently to reconnect with a patch of tribal land. They came to retrace the footsteps of ancestors, to feel under their feet the earth that was deeded to them by colonial leaders centuries ago.


Instead, they found themselves walking amid cracked marble and crumbling slate near 2nd and Walnut Streets in Old City.


“I anticipated a park in a natural pristine state. Like any other park, it would have trees, grass, water,” said Louise McDonald (Native name Wa’kerakátste), a Mohawk Bear Clan Mother from Akwesasne, N.Y. “I was frozen for a minute because I felt it had been choked and that it wasn’t a true representation of the original intentions of the space. It just seemed to be purposely buried with a cover-up narrative. There certainly seems to be a feeling of erasure intended to remove any spirit that would imply that we were once there.”


Instead of the bucolic setting the women envisioned, they stood in an urban canyon enclosed on three sides by apartment buildings, the historic Thomas Bond House, and a multilevel parking garage. The space, called Welcome Park, was created as an open-air attraction in 1982 by the Friends of the National Park Service to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn. But the women found nothing welcoming about it. For while the park walls listed Penn’s accomplishments, there was no mention of Native Americans and their ties to the land.


The plot had been given to the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations from the Iroquois Confederacy) in January 1755 by John Penn, William Penn’s grandson. In the 1700s, Native American groups often visited Philadelphia for diplomatic and trade meetings. They sometimes numbered in the hundreds and visited so frequently that John Penn asked the Provincial Council of Philadelphia to consider setting aside a piece of land for these gatherings. The delegations often refused to negotiate treaties until they could stand on their own ground and build a council fire.


Philadelphia’s Department of Records researched the site, at the request of The Inquirer, and found that if the land "was located somewhere between Walnut Street, South 2nd Street, Sansom Street, and South Hancock Street, then it’s safe to say that no part of it currently belongs to the Iroquois Confederacy.”


In an email, the records department said that “every inch of ground between those streets is now owned by either the United States of America or by the condominium owners at the Moravian Condos.”


History tells a different story of the Native Americans’ long association with the tract.


The Haudenosaunee were given a strip of land behind the Slate Roof House, a home William Penn once rented. The property, deeded with a wampum belt and presented to 12 visiting chiefs “in perpetuity for the conduct of Native diplomacy,” was referred to as the “Wampum Lot.” Its size is in question. According to The Quaker in the Forum by Amelia Mott Gummere (published in 1910) and Haudenosaunee tradition, it was roughly one square city block. Other sources describe the lot as 15 by 47 feet. Today, it appears to sit under a portion of the Moravian condominiums and the southeast corner of Welcome Park and behind what had been the famous Bookbinder’s Restaurant.


Haudenosaunee ownership of the tract was acknowledged by the city well into the 20th century.


After the demolition of the Slate Roof House in 1867, the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce tried but failed to negotiate a deal with the Iroquois to purchase the land to expand the Commercial Exchange Building constructed in its place. In November 1922, the Wampum Lot was rededicated by five visiting chiefs, along with William Penn descendant William Penn-Gaskell Hall, Philadelphia Mayor J. Hampton Moore, and Pennsylvania officials. A pipe of peace was smoked on the spot where they believed John Penn originally deeded the land.


In the late 1970s, the Commercial Exchange, which had become the Keystone Telephone Building, was demolished. Welcome Park would arrive a few years later.


It’s unclear how ownership of the land was viewed by the city when it made a portion of the property available to build the park. The city records department, citing the demands brought on the coronavirus, said it was not able to further research decades of property records.


In 2015, a group of Native leaders, including Chief Sid Hill, Tadodaho of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, gathered with members of the Society of Friends and local residents in the Wampum Lot.


For the six women, their day in Philadelphia last month, which included a private tour of Independence Hall, was bittersweet. It was a reminder of how powerful their confederacy was during colonial times, and how it inspired the United States form of government. The U.S. Senate acknowledged the confederacy’s contributions in a 1987 resolution honoring the bicentennial of the Constitution.


“We almost became the 14th colony,” said McDonald.


“We gave our government structure to the United States,” said Michelle Schenandoah (Native name Kaluhyanu:wes) of Syracuse, the lone Oneida in the group. “We were a very highly evolved people with a highly sophisticated form of government. We know about democracy. … This form of government and this form of democracy is over 1,000 years old and is based on principles of peace, and it still exists to this day.”


The important thing, and the thing I walked away from it with, is that there is a deliberate erasure of our history,” said Schenandoah. “Why is this history not known to the public? Yet within our oral history we still have these pieces of information, living history. We still keep those stories very much alive."
“The minimalization of true history — it just seems to capture one point of view’” McDonald agreed. “It misses the richness of other people present. There has to be some sort of concerted effort to bring it back.”


Before the group left Welcome Park, they burned sage to cleanse themselves and the area. They gathered in a circle, said an ancestral prayer, and shouted a few cheers as a reminder their people were alive and had returned.


“We will be back, and we won’t be alone. We are going to bring many people with us,” McDonald said later. “We are shaping up a letter to the Mayor of Philadelphia,” seeking an explanation of what has occurred on their land and recognition of its historical significance. They hope to hand-deliver it in June.


"This was a sacred site, a place of convergence,” said McDonald. “We would like to see it returned to its earthly state, a place to have a fire, to have a historical marker to explain the history, and a place for us to return to so we can carry forward the memory in our children and grandchildren.”


In the Haudenosaunee tradition, women have the final say in tribal land sales. “When the women show up, it gets serious," she said. “We are here to recall the memory. We are here to reassert and to authorize. We don’t like to call ourselves feminists. We like to call ourselves ‘Ladies of the Law.' ”


Six Haudenosaunee women from upstate New York came to Philadelphia to investigate a piece of land given to the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations from the Iroquois Confederacy) in 1755 by John Penn, William Penn’s grandson. The land was granted to the Haudenosaunee as a place to meet, to camp and discuss treaties. That piece of land is now part of Welcome Park and under a portion of the Moravian condominium building (in background). L-R: (seated) Fallan Jacobs (Teiohontathe), Louise McDonald (Wa'kerakátste), Alexandra David (Karakwiiostha); (standing) Michelle Schenandoah (Kaluhyanu:wes), Tsiotenhari:io Herne, and Chelsea Sunday (Tiawentón:ti).
.
 
B Charles Fox 
Updated March 25, 2020
Full Credit-Attribution for Educational Purposes: Philadelphia Inquirer 
Author: CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

​Bear Clan Mother Series #11

​What we don't know?  Why they don't want us to know? The truth would unravel this country. What created the wealth of prestigious universities in the United States?  The Morrill Act! 


To extinguish Indigenous title to land siphoned through the Morrill Act, the United States paid less than $400,000. But in truth, it often paid nothing at all. Not a single dollar was paid for more than a quarter of the parcels that supplied the grants — land confiscated through outright seizure or by treaties that were never ratified by the federal government. 


Cornell University is number one benefactor of this corrupt act  and Penn State is a close second. The grants of land raised endowments made 52 institutions  across the United States very, very rich.  Our day at Penn State was to remind them of their history and that a land acknowledgement is not enough.  It needs to tell the true history and to make restitution to the future of Indigenous youth.  


Penn State is a hop, skip and a jump from the famous Carlisle Residential School where many Haudenosaunee children were forcibly taken.  The way history gets told by Penn State changed today as we met with Deans and Department Leaders.  Proud of our delegation for changing the narrative.  Nia:wen to Dr Hollie Kulago for inviting us.


Author: Wakerakats:te, Iakoiane of Roiane Tehanakari:ne
Bear Clan Mother of the Mohawk Nation Council, 
Louise Bear Herne

Link to radio interview with Louise Herne, Michelle Shenandoah and Katsitsionni Fox :
Women Rising Radio: https://www.womenrisingradio.com/2022/12/26/women-rising-radio-44-indigenous-women-envision-rematriation/

Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Partner Website:https://www.katyamiller.com/
Photograph: Katisionni Fox 5/10/2022
Bear Clan Mother Series #10

The cradleboard, a representative symbol of Indigenous mothers and their babies all touched by the impacts of residential schools, journeyed across the salt waters to invoke reflection by the Catholic Church.


In this long overdue historic event, the empty cradleboard presented an opportunity for Pope Francis to feel the injustices inflicted upon our children, families and ancestors.

The cradleboard was retrieved and returned home safely to our elder midwife Katsi Cook, and women leaders. A sigh of relief for Kaluhyanu:wes and Katsitsionni after their week-long trip to the Vatican. 

​Filled with mix emotions, recounting their experiences in detail, both ladies were unbundled from their mission with loving words, gifts and song from our leadership, elders, women and youth.
~ Mommabear


A good example of Rematriation;  that which brings the Sacred home to the Mother.


Author: Wakerakats:te, Iakoiane of Roiane Tehanakari:ne
Bear Clan Mother of the Mohawk Nation Council, 
Louise Bear Herne


Video: https://www.facebook.com/100001555636480/videos/pcb.5067336209994850/509873737185888

Link to radio interview with Louise Herne, Michelle Shenandoah and Katsitsionni Fox :
Women Rising Radio: https://www.womenrisingradio.com/2022/12/26/women-rising-radio-44-indigenous-women-envision-rematriation/

Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Partner Website:https://www.katyamiller.com/
Photograph: Katisionni Fox
Bear Clan Mother Series #9
​

April 1, 2022. Mohawk Bear Clan Mother posts: The Cradle Board is on its way home to us. Deep in its fibers are the words that were spoken to Pope Francis. 


The words that follow were spoken and authored by  Kaluhyanuwes Michelle Shenandoah Powless. They come from a speech delivered by her in a private audience with Pope Francis during the First Nations Delegation on March 31, 2022....


Fifteen delegates attended and participated in the First Nations Delegation. Present were leaders, spiritual advisors, elders and youth. I was the last delegate to speak. Three private audiences were held during the week. The Metis Delegation, Inuit Delegation and First Nations Delegation.


A general audience was subsequently held on April 1st with over 160 Indigenous people in attendance. There was a cultural presentation by each of the three delegations and they were followed by a statement from the Pope.


Closing statement: You have heard the voices of our people this week. We are living peoples, human beings with souls. We come in the footsteps of our ancestors, elders and leaders, and many who still request an audience from you.


All those you have heard this week represent only the smallest numbers of Indigenous peoples impacted by the Papal Bulls that make up the Doctrine of Discovery, which has given settler nation states an illegitimate assumption of authority over our people and land for over 500 hundreds years.


The Doctrine of Discovery has led to the continual taking of our babies to this day, and the disappearance of thousands of our women who have gone missing or murdered. Women who would have been mothers, sisters, aunties, grandmothers, community members, the backbone of our nations. It has allowed the settler colonial states to take our babies and leave them vulnerable to societal ills that create broken families. It has led to the displacement of our men into broken states and prison states, separated from the ability to be fathers and healthy individuals. And it has led to the dispossession of our lands.


And it has deprived us of our dignity, our freedom and led to the exploitation of our Mother Earth, from which she now pushes back against humanity to listen, while she cleanses herself from the harms we humans have done to her.


These Papal Bulls that make up the Doctrine of Discovery also opened the door to slavery in the western world, and stole the lives and dignity of our African brothers and sisters.


It has given the right for all peoples of the world to view Indigenous peoples as dispensable, while violently taking our Mother Earth for personal and institutional riches, for which our precious metals (from the Americas) adorn these halls.


The Doctrine of Discovery has enslaved the entire world since 1493 to today, to view us ...
to treat us ... to take from us ... to murder and rape us ... and to destroy our culture ...
to decimate and invisibilize us.


It’s been a long genocide across all of Turtle Island, and it has been legalized under these Papal Bulls Laws that are held up by the Doctrine of Discovery that is discriminatory with exploitative acts that destroy people, families, children and Mother Earth, and they are deemed legal to this day.


Laws create policies, policies shape education and education shapes behavior, and how people around the world have come to treat us and see us.


Among my generation, I was born in a year when it was illegal to practice our spiritual and traditional way of life. In my generation, I was born when the United Nations only referred to my people as flora and fauna.


Our Indigenous peoples, according to the Doctrine of Discovery, are without souls.


The world has responded and acted accordingly to the precepts that Indigenous peoples, as non Christians, do not have souls and therefore have no right to our bodies, our children, our lands, our governments or our futures. 


As people, under our own ways of life, governance, and existence, we do have souls and together we are all human beings.


You have the responsibility to forever turn the hand of fate toward peace. Toward a future all families around the world dream about for their children, for each other, and for the world they live in.


This here is called a cradleboard and it was used to carry our children in it. We can even hang the board on a high place so our children are eye level with us and feel equal and included.


I am leaving this board with you overnight. This is a symbol of every Indigenous child who went to a residential boarding school across Turtle Island. Those who survived and those who did not. 


In our way, when making decisions, we often sleep on the issue at hand. How you treat this cradleboard tonight will be how you come to treat our people in the future. When the sun rises, I ask for their spirits to be re-matriated, restored to a high place of sacredness, because you will have decided to make things right. 


I am sent to you by one of our traditional Clan Mothers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, where laws of peace have prevailed for over 1,000 years, where our democracy was given to the world, and where our rights of women were also given to the world.


As Indigenous peoples we have gifts to offer the world once again, to bring balance in living with Mother Earth, and peacemaking processes to help us live with each other as human-kind. You only need to open the door and your heart for all of the world to hear us by revoking the Papal Bulls that contain the Doctrine of Discovery.


Today, we come to you to implore you to release the world from its place of enslavement that consciously and unconsciously grips every soul on this planet by these insidious Papal Bulls.


This cradleboard is the symbol of our collective future. We ask that you make it right, so the world may truly move forward in peace and make it right with Indigenous peoples, and restore dignity toward our peoples so that all our souls may be at peace with each other.


Tomorrow we will reconvene one more time. I will retrieve this cradleboard to bring home to Turtle Island, symbolic of bringing our children back home to us.


Yaw^ko, a grand thank you for hearing our words today. We have come a long way carrying many prayers. I ask for all of Creation and the maker of our beings, who we call the Great Creator to be with us. Let us sleep on these matters, and make them right. We give great thanks for each other, for all of life and for this time together.


Author: Michelle Schenandoah
Oneida / Kunukwe/She/Her
Executive & Creative Lead
Rematriation.com

Link to radio interview with Louise Herne, Michelle Shenandoah and Katsitsionni Fox :
Women Rising Radio: https://www.womenrisingradio.com/2022/12/26/women-rising-radio-44-indigenous-women-envision-rematriation/

Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Partner Website: https://www.katyamiller.com/
Photograph: Katisionni Fox
Bear Clan Mother Series #8

​Aotearoa: Land of the ever-shining light is the original name for New Zealand from the Indigenous people, the Māori. They ‘call it back’ from the British monarchy. 

Kanata: villiage is the original name given by the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee in their own language, for use under treaty to the crown of Canada - British monarchy.  Canada was “called out” recently by the Mohawk Bear Clan Mother with her people on July 1, 2021, to account for the discovery of their children’s mass graves. If the situation is  not cleared and rectified, the name that was theirs — can be taken back.

​We live in times of great change, Times of Prophesy. Indigenous people around the world hold, The Original Teachings, a very specific vibratory frequency given to them by their ancestors and Source - Creator of all.  It includes the first sounds and dances to help balance life upon Mother Earth. One could say that the establishment of this frequency is crucial for our world to continue forward. We witness, now — The Shift of the Ages.

Article: King Charles III sent a letter to New Zealand 2/5/2023 referring to the country as Aotearoa. It is written to be a first for the British monarch. This comes in the same week it was announced that the UK monarchy will be removed from Australian currency. No coincidences.
Link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11708267/King-Charles-pens-letter-New-Zealand-referring-country-Aotearoa.html

Article: Read where Australia announces decision to remove British monarchy from its currency 2/2: The Independenthttps://www.independent.co.uk › au...Australia announces decision to remove British monarchy from its ...

Beautiful Aotearoa: Land of the ever-shining light can be seen in ceremony 2011 under the careful guidance of Drunvalo Melchizedek:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsbNc4HzLTY

​Around 35 Indigenous delegates arrived safely in Rome, and that included Kaluhyanuwes and Katsitsionni. They met at the Embassy of Canada and went to the Holy See after a day at the Vatican. 


There was a meeting with Cardinal Marx Ouellet and Cardinal Michael Czerny. The Métis and Inuit delegates have already met with the Pope, and the First Nations delegates will meet with the Pope this Thursday. 


A general audience with all Indigenous representatives will also be held with the Pope this Friday. Kaluhyanuwes is talking to Paul Gibbard, Canadian Chargé d'affaires Representative of Canada to the Holy See. 


I am proud of the mother Kaluhyanuwes and Grandmother Katsitsionni as they lean into this historical call for justice for our babies who never made it home from the nurseries of hell called residential schools.


Author: Wakerakats:te, Iakoiane of Roiane Tehanakari:ne
Bear Clan Mother of the Mohawk Nation Council, 
Louise Bear Herne

Link to radio interview with Louise Herne, Michelle Shenandoah and Katsitsionni Fox :
Women Rising Radio: https://www.womenrisingradio.com/2022/12/26/women-rising-radio-44-indigenous-women-envision-rematriation/

Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Partner Website: https://www.katyamiller.com/
Photograph: Vatican Media
Bear Clan Mother Series #7
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​

The silence of our babies voices will speak loudly inside the house of the abuser. Haudenosaunee Mothers are on a mission to carry a message of epic impact to the Vatican in Rome in the coming days.  


Two weeks ago from today, March 22, 2022, I declined the invitation (from the Pope); instead requested for other delegates to go in my place.  Katsitsionni Fox and Kaluhyanuwes Shenandoah Powless stepped up to my request to deliver a reverberating Empty Cardboard mandate to Pope Francis calling for a reverent accountability to all Onkwehonweh upon whom his institution inflicted harm. 


The world must know about their role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at Residential Schools of Onkwehonweh children on turtle island.  


An apology is needed for us to hear and heal; more importantly it's time for the abuser to stop the behavior and to uphold accountability to the harm done.  


Additionally, a letter form the Elders Council will be delivered and the call for the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery will also be included. Katsitsionni Fox and Kaluhyanuwes Shenandoah are traveling with a larger delegation sponsored by the Bishops of Canada to meet with the Pope. I am grateful for their sacrifice and their courage. I pray for their safe passage. Mommabear 


Author: Wakerakats:te, Iakoiane of Roiane Tehanakari:ne
Bear Clan Mother of the Mohawk Nation Council, Louise Bear Herne
Website: www.somaticsoundtherapeutics.com
Photograph: Katisionni Fox
Bear Clan Mother Series #6
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