Strife in the Cayuga Nation

The NY Times reports on the trouble among the Cayugas, one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois League. The tribe lost its reservation in the 1800s, but they have been fighting in court to get it back for decades and may eventually win at least part of it. Meanwhile they are also trying to buy up land to recreate a reservation of sorts through ownership. Their elected leader is a man named Clint Halftown. Halftown is considered the "nation representative" by the federal and state governments and thus their leader in the lawsuits and other sorts of negotiations. He signs the deeds when they purchase land.

Halftown is opposed by a faction that call themselves "traditionalists." They don't like Halftown or his methods, which have included opening two casinos. But they mainly think the tribe's modern government is wrong, because it follows the European model of elections rather than the Haudenosee model of clan mothers and hereditary chiefs. They especially hate that Halftown is their sole legal representative in their ongoing battles with outsiders. He may be elected, but they consider one-man leadership inherently less democratic than their old model, with multiple chiefs and clan mothers.

And that is what makes this situation particularly interesting to me, and not just another sordid factional strife. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was above all a political entity, aimed at keeping peace internally and organizing for war against outsiders. Its traditions were mainly political traditions. This would be even more true in modern times, since most Iroquois are Christians, and traditions related for example to relocating villages to new agricultural land would hardly be relevant. A few speakers of the Cayuga language remain on their Canadian reservation, but nobody in the US speaks it fluently.

So if the Cayuga give up their political tradition, what do they have left? And it is indeed a fascinating legacy, which worked well enough to make the Haudenosaunee a regional power for centuries. I can see the appeal of retaining it, and also the resentment against using a different system imposed by the US government. Surely part of the reason the US promoted the idea of a single, elected tribal leader was to have somebody who could legally surrender tribal lands.

On the other hand, democracy and modernization seem to be what a majority of Cayugas want. Nobody questions that Halftown was elected multiple times in free and fair elections. I suspect that some of his supporters think the "traditionalists" are just sore losers, who promote an alternative system of government because they can't win elections. Even among the Cayuga, the appeal of democracy, of equality, of one-person-one-vote, has for now triumphed over hereditary chiefs and clan mothers.