Iroquois Democracy
From Jerry Mintz's book, "School's Over" (Chapter 5), about the Indian Way School
1968 was a year in which many new movements were born. I had just started Shaker Mountain and we had four students. One day we all listened to a song recorded by Native American folk singer Buffy St. Marie, called, “My Country, Tis of Thy People You’re Dying.” It was the story of Native Americans in the United States, but it was not the history of the Native Americans with which most of us were familiar. We wondered if it could really be true—that the white Europeans had so mistreated the natives of this continent.
Our awareness grew as one evening on the news we saw that a group of Mohawk Indians had blockaded a bridge that linked the portion of their reservation located in Upstate New York with the portion located in Canada. They were angry over being charged taxes to go from one part of their land to another.
Not long after that we came in contact with a young man who was teaching in a public school near the reservation; one-third of the students at this school were Native. He invited us to visit him and said he would try to introduce us to people who were “traditionalists;” those working to keep the traditions of the Mohawks and Iroquois alive.
This is how I met Ann Jock—the mother of several of the students in his public school, and a clan mother in the tribe—and Tom Porter. The meeting with Tom Porter, which took place in a Long House, where Mohawks have met since before history was recorded on this continent, was a watershed moment for me because he introduced us to concepts I had never heard of before. He told us about the Iroquois Confederacy, which consisted of a number of tribes, of which the Mohawks were one. Other tribes had been invited to “take refuge under the Great Tree” if they were willing to follow the Great Law, which had been handed down to the Iroquois. The Great Law was a method by which people could live together in peace, not a racial concept but a spiritual one. He also explained the way in which the Iroquois made decisions, which has had a profound and lasting impact.
Over the next couple of years, we went back several times to participate in Social Dances—where we were invited to participate in traditional Native dances—and meeting people, learning from them about their lives and teaching them about our school. In 1971, I got an urgent phone call from Ann Jock at one o’clock in the morning. She told me that 70 Mohawk children had been kicked out of the public high school because they wanted to learn their own language and culture. At that time, Mohawk students were actually punished if they spoke Mohawk in school because the teachers assumed that they were saying bad things about them behind their backs. Meanwhile, the language was dying; a whole generation of people no longer spoke their native tongue. Ann asked us if we could come to the reservation the next day, bring some of our students, bring slides, talk about our school and tell them how they could go about starting a school.
We made the two-hour trip the next day, giving a presentation in Ann’s house, which was packed with parents and children. At one point we were asked whether they needed federal funds or state funds in order to start a school. We told them that they already had the resources they needed in their community; it wasn’t necessary to find government funds. A week later Ann Jock and her children (she eventually had 15) and several others from the community started the Indian Way School in a small square building that they had constructed in their backyard. That building still stands and it has occurred to me that maybe it should be designated with a plaque and put on some national register; it was the beginning of the North American Indian Survival School Movement.
Over the next few years, and throughout the history of our school, we continued to have regular exchanges with the Mohawks at Akwesasne, the Native name for the area of Upstate New York, and with the Kahnewake, another Mohawk tribe just outside of Montreal. They would come and visit us at our school in Vermont, and we would bring groups of students from our school to visit them. A year after the first Indian Way School was started, a second one was started over the border in Kahnewake, known in Canada as Caughnawaga.
The school in New York never had any state funding and operated however they could on local funds. Ann dealt with some pushback from the traditionalist chiefs who felt she hadn’t included them in the decision to start the school, and thus withheld their full support. However, the Indian Way School near Montreal had plenty of tribal support. After operating for a year or so, though, they decided to send a group to Ottawa and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to appeal for funding. While they weren’t taken seriously at first, they eventually found a source of funding from the Quebec government that has continued to flow from that time on; the Indian Way School still exists more than 45 years later.
By this point René Lévesque, the Prime Minister of the Province of Quebec, had been elected. He was a proponent of Quebec separatism. He decided that all immigrants had to be educated in French in Quebec. He then decided that all Native Americans were immigrants. Well, even the non-traditionalist Mohawks knew they weren’t immigrants and mounted a protest. They pulled their students out of the local schools, but since they had the Indian Way School as a model, instead of just keeping them out of school, they set up mini schools of about 15 students each across the reservation, led by Indian Way School staff.
After doing this for about a week, the parents were so surprised to see the positive changes in their children that they announced that this was no longer a protest, that this was permanent, and that they were setting up the Survival School. The Canadian government, always happy to do anything that would oppose René Lévesque, said that they would pay for it. They eventually built a two-million- dollar facility along the St. Lawrence River, along with rope courses, a gymnasium, and a cafeteria, taking perhaps a third of the students out of the public schools.
Subsequently, the public school system agreed to create a total immersion Mohawk language elementary school option. They hired Indian Way School staff, particularly Rita Phillips, who had been a teacher there for a long time, to write the appropriate curriculum. This option continues to this day.
Sometimes people wonder what the use is of setting up a small alternative school and keeping it going. In fact, the Indian Way School still continues, along with the Survival School and the public immersion Mohawk schools. This story shows that a small alternative model can lead to a change in the whole community. In this case, it helped preserve the Mohawk language and culture.
