The Green Dragon
The Unity of Biology and Ecology with Spirit
Voices from the Earths
Return of the Mohicans
Quiet Ceremony of Reburial
Native Americans laid to rest in Waterford park
by Bob Gardiner, staff writer, Albany Times-Union, Sunday, July 20, 1996

[DELETED PHOTO: IROQUOIS CHIEF Paul Waterman greets Leah Miller Heath of a Wisconsin Mohican band at a reburial ceremony Saturday in Waterford as state Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro, center, and another Indian elder look on.]

WATERFORD, NY—Native Americans, whose ancestors camped, hunted, warred and died many years ago in the land around the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers gathered on Peebles Island Saturday for a funeral ceremony to rebury two Indian skeletons unearthed last year under a village street.

Onondaga Chief Paul Waterman of the Iroquois Confederacy performed a burial ceremony he called Sa-ou-tee-da-wang-yeh in a secluded section of the state park. The ceremony, closed to the public and the media by the wishes of Native Americans and to ensure that the remains are not disturbed, was attended by Waterford town and village leaders, state Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation officials, and a large contingent of both Iroquois and Mohican Indians, including about 50 representatives from the Mohican Nation, Stockbridge-Munsee Band from Bowler, Wisconsin.

"I can't help but feel my ancestors camped right here and fought battles here," said Dorothy Davids, casting her eyes over the trees and out across the Mohawk River as gusts of wind played through her graying hair. She was sitting with a group of tribal elders at a 1 pm news conference.

"The ceremony I was just privileged to witness was truly beautiful and moving to me, even though I did not understand what Chief Waterman was saying," said state Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro, who noted that this was the first time Native American remains were reburied in a state park.

Representatives of the two tribes gave small gifts to Castro and other park officials, and to Waterford Superintendent John E. Lawlor, before gathering for a traditional meal.

The skeletons, unearthed last year during sewer construction on Front Street, might be Mohican or Iroquois, said Bill Bouchard, project director for Hartgen Archaeological Services of North Greenbush. Bouchard's firm excavated the remains and some other Indian artifacts found near them and had stored the remains since last May until arrangements were made for a reburial. Archaeologists know the skeletons were Native Americans because they were buried in a fetal position—unlike Europeans, who were buried with arms and legs extended.

Both the Iroquois Confederacy and the Mohican Indians claimed the skeletons were their ancestors because both tribes lived in the area in the 1600's, the approximate age of the remains. State park officials negotiated with both tribes to come to an agreement on the place and the ceremony for the reburial.

Regardless of the trivial origin of the remains, the remains had to be properly reburied, Waterman said. "We come from the Mother Earth and then go back to our mother," Waterman said. "That's why they are buried on the fetal position-because they are going back to their mother like a baby."

Waterman, speaking in his native tongue and wearing ceremonial feathered head dress, told the crowd of about 100 people through an interpreter from his tribe, "From the people of the Onondagas they send greetings to all gathered here and thoughts of well being."

Leah Miller Heath, a representative of the Mohican Nation, Stockbridge-Munsee Band, thanked state officials for honoring the band's historical roots in Waterford.

"This is our homeland and these people could have been our great-great-grandfathers," Heath told the crowd. "We are a tribe that has lost much of our oral history because we had to move away from here."

The Mohicans frequently visited the Waterford area until the Iroquois Wars in Colonial times, when the Iroquois became the more dominant area tribe.

Another tribal elder, Bernice Miller Pigeon of the Mohican Nation Stockbridge-Munsee Band, described the ceremony as quiet and respectful.

"Chief Waterman did some incantations and burned tobacco in a fire, then each person put a handful of dirt on the grave," said Pigeon as she caressed a palm-size stone she picked up at the park to take home and put on a pile. "Whenever we visit an ancestral place, we take a stone to remember our ancestors."

"I don't know just how it started, just that my father did it, and his father did it, and his father and so on."


Commentary
Bones of The Ancestors
sacred time ~ sacred space ~ sacred ceremony
by David Yarrow

IN THE EBB AND FLOW of history, this "quiet ceremony of reburial" signals a major shift in the tides of fortune and future.

Three ordinary, unnamed skeletons turned up by a backhoe installing sewers under Main Street, Waterford, a small village at the mouth of the Mohawk, and among the oldest settlements in upper Hudson Valley. The graves bore no special funeral objects, or other indication of special status. Ordinary "John & Jane Doe's." Not chiefs or clanmothers.

Yet over 100 people attended this private funeral in a public park. Not only the Waterford Mayor, but even NY's Parks Commissioner and other state officials. This private event even rated a color photo and page one Local News coverage, outranking Greek, Scotch and Jewish festivals. Why bestow such honor on ordinary people—"Indians" at that?

This reburial is very significant, indeed—more than many participants understood. It's ancient medicine to heal a damaged land and vanquished people by placing the bones of ancestors in sacred ceremony at a sacred place.

For 50 Mohicans who came by bus from Wisconsin—from the far west end of the Great Lakes—the journey was a pilgrimage of return to their ancestral homeland.

MOHICANS ORIGINALLY INHABITED the upper Hudson Valley for centuries. In 1600 Mohican population was about 8,000. Decimated by disease, war and treachery, they were forced from the Valley by European settlement. By 1672 there were only around 1,000. At the low point (1796), there were 300 in the Stockbridge band—the "last of the Mohicans."

However, contrary to impressions from Cooper's epic novel of early America's frontier, they didn't vanish. Rather, after the American Revolution, many Mohican survivors stayed with Oneidas of Iroquois Confederacy, then migrated further west. In 1856 Menominee in Wisconsin gave them land and they increased to 600 by 1910. The Stockbridge-Munsee currently number almost 1,500 on a reservation west of Green Bay.

ONONDAGA CHIEF PAUL WATERMAN was surprised Waterford wanted to keep the bones to rebury in a local park—a reversal of previous centuries of racism, genocide and neglect of indigenous peoples. Only a decade ago, the Iroquois were the last to be informed when native remains were unearthed—after archaeologists, anthropologists and others had done their deeds. Many skeletons became museum specimens; most were dumped as refuse.

Does Waterford's request signals a sharp shift in attitude and policy toward indigenous survivors? Is this more proof "Dances with Wolves" wasn't merely an aberration in Kevin Costner's quixotic movie career?

In 1988 Chief Waterman spent many long days on a Kentucky farm by the Ohio River where artifact—hunters had unearthed over 1000 skeletons. With other Onondaga chiefs, Paul gathered and reburied the bones. The Kentucky incident—featured in National Geographic—provoked some states to improve their laws against such desecration.

In July 1988, the very day Chief Waterman returned from this gruesome duty in Kentucky, he was called to Syracuse City Hall where the Common Council was to approve construction of a $200 million Pyramid shopping mall on the site of the last Onondaga village on the Onondaga lakeshore.

After persistent lobbying by the Six Nations, NY law now requires construction work to cease when native burials are uncovered, and an archaeologist must remove skeletons and determine age, origin and identity. Since NYS recognizes the Iroquois as the only indigenous survivors in upstate, NY routinely contacts them to conduct reburials. Thus, Chief Waterman was invited to conduct the July 20 ceremony.

However, before July, neither NY nor Onondaga officially recognized the Wisconsin—or any—Mohicans. The three hadn't had face-to-face contact since late 1700's—no formal relations between these nations in nearly two centuries. A bit of pioneering diplomacy was required to gain approval for the Mohicans to attend this private reburial of their ancestors' bones.

Joining the Onondagas and Wisconsin Mohicans were Mohawks from Kanatsiohareke, a new Mohawk settlement 40 miles up the Mohawk Valley established in 1893 by traditionalist Tom Porter, the fourth (but unnamed) person captured in the color news photo. In earlier centuries, Mohawks were the Iroquois neighbors of Mohicans. After the ceremony indigenous folk had a picnic at Kanatsiohareke to rekindle old relations.

THIS GESTURE'S TIMING IS SYNCHRONISTIC. 1993 saw release of a new movie of James Fenimore Cooper's early American literary classic "Last of the Mohicans." Now, in 1996, we see a first act to a "Return of the Mohicans."

Further, the reburial was 30 days after summer solstice World Peace and Prayer Day, led by the Lakota with the sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman pipe in the Black Hills. Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse called the sacred pipe ceremony after birth of a white buffalo in Wisconsin at the 1992 August full moon, saying, "Birth of the White Buffalo Calf lets us know we are at a crossroads—either return to balance or face global disaster."

.And this is eight years after Chief Waterman's interventions in Kentucky and at Onondaga Lake.

AND PEEBLES ISLAND IS NO ORDINARY town park. Rather, by geomancy, the science of a living, sacred landscape, it's the most auspicious site in upper Hudson Valley.

This small island at the mouth of the Mohawk is a NYS park, and headquarters of the NYS Historical Society. Peebles Island was strategic site and sacred space for millennia, shared for spiritual ceremony purposes. A 1630 Dutch deed speaks of "Monemin's Castle", a Mohican village there named for Chief Monemin, who was killed in a 1626 battle with Mohawks.

Peebles Island also sits on one of North America's most powerful "dragon lines." This geomantic corridor on the 43rd parallel links Cape Cod on Atlantic coast with Detroit, the Motor City, at the hub of the Great Lakes. Along this powerful passage are Boston, Mt. Wachusetts, Shelburne Falls, Peace Pagoda at Grafton, NY, Peebles Island, Oneida Lake, Onondaga Lake, head of the Finger Lakes, and Niagara Falls—all auspicious spots. This great geomancer's line continues west to link the Black Hills, Great Salt Lake, Lake Tahoe, and San Francisco.

Ancient wisdom and modern tradition from China to Greece know where the bones of one's ancestors are laid to rest with proper honor and ceremony anchors the spirit of current and future generations to the land to assure their well-being, fertility and abundance. Peebles Island is that place.

AND CHIEF WATERMAN'S TOBACCO wasn't ordinary. His burial blessing was sacred tobacco gathered from 24 American tribes by the Traditional Native American Tobacco seed bank project at Univ. of New Mexico. Thus, the skeletons were honored by indigenous tribes from all across Turtle Island, adding auspiciousness to Chief Waterman's simple rites.

The news article ends with one Mohican taking a stone as a remembrance of the essence of her experience. My Scottish ancestors—the Peebles clan—left similar stonepiles of memory in their homelands. This simple act is a timeless tradition that arises from a universal understanding that bones are the stones of our bodies, and rock is the bones of Mother Earth. Even as layers of bedrock carry embedded fossils of ancient ages, so our bones bear the memories of our ancestors. Just so, in our own body, minerals provide electric charge and magnetic geometry that allow our nerves to hold onto and access memory.

So the quiet Peebles Island ceremony is a step toward peace between red and white peoples. And between scattered nations of indigenous survivors of the wave of war and conquest that swept Turtle Island. This timely gesture nurtures hope that an era of reconciliation and reparation is dawning in North America.

For the Mohicans, this honor opened doors for them to return to their ancestors' homeland—to return to their ancient roots and recover their memories. The spirit of their people is again anchored in the sacred earth and a focus in time. For native America, this reburial feeds hope for an era of resurrection for peoples who have faced invasion, genocide and extinction.

ON JULY 20 I STOOD ATOP 1000+ foot high limestone ledge in John Boyd Thatcher State Park of Helderberg Mountain southwest of Albany. Below me Indian Ladder descended cliffs of Onondaga Limestone to the Mohawk Valley floor. Miles to the north I saw the "forever wild" peaks of the Adirondack Mountains; northeast were Vermont's Green Mountains; east were Massachusetts' Berkshires. Nested amid this sweeping landscape, at Peebles Island, a burial ceremony was underway.

Hiroshima Day 1992, while visiting Wisconsin, my left hand touched a 6,000 volt powerline. Scorched unconscious, I fell to shatter my spine. I was eight months in a Wisconsin hospital fighting to recover from this near-death catastrophe. Near Thanksgiving, I left the hospital for a first time in four months in a wheelchair—to see my Iroquois friends hired as extras in the new movie remake of Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans."

Now, four years later, I found myself aiding the "return of the Mohicans" from Wisconsin. As I hobbled through a field of fragrant, lavender blossoms of wild thyme, strong, steady winds from the west threatened to knock me off my crutch. As if indigenous spirits who wandered west in an earlier century were riding home for the ceremony.

As I gazed out across this immense landscape space to Peebles Island, I offered a prayer that Chief Waterman's simple ceremony will further the healing and renewal of native peoples, the land and its ecological communities. From my eagle-eye view, it seemed the ancestors' bones were properly honored that day, and the door was opened to bring the people home.

"Last of the Mohicans" told a tale of a time of tragedy, treachery and war. Return of the Mohicans may usher in an era of peace and reconciliation.

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David Yarrow — Turtle EyeLand — championtrees@msn.com — www.championtrees.org/yarrow/ — updated 9/1/2003