peacemaking flows

for generations downstream

Matt Asaro

Dec 03, 2023

II. Righteousness

III. Power

I. Reason

What will be of the world seven generations from now?

Indigenous worldviews and legal traditions nurture good, rational minds because some form of this question animates their sense of meaning and purpose in the world.

The Great Law of Peace, for instance, Kayanerenkó:wa, which constitutes the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, places an express responsibility on lawmakers to consider the effects of their decisions seven generations downstream.

Drawing end to cycles of bloodshed, the Great Law unites six nations of northeastern Turtle Island with a message of reason, righteousness, power, and peace. First offered by one inspired Peacemaker, its good message spread in each of the four directions, welcoming all who embraced it to join this civic family.

Sustaining peace became an enduring process of balance and reciprocity with all creation—human and non-human; past, present, and future. Everything is connected, after all. “To consider unto the seventh generation,” Kayanesenh Paul Williams explains, “is really to say that our thoughts must go beyond our physical capacity to see; they must go downstream and around the bend in the river.”1

Gratitude nourishes, and then in return is nourished by, this continuity.

For the Haudenosaunee, Williams relays, “giving thanks is the first step towards law and the beginning of any meeting of the people.” They open gatherings with words that come before all else, sharing their appreciation for the miracle of creation, and embracing the responsibilities embedded in our connection to it.

The printed version, Greetings to the Natural World, first recognizes those present:

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us, we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living beings. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give our greetings and our thanks to each other as People.
Now our minds are one.

Succeeding verses salute The Earth Mother, The Waters, The Fish, The Plants, The Food Plants, The Medicine Herbs, The Animals, The Trees, The Birds, The Four Winds, The Thunderers, The Sun, Grandmother Moon, The Stars, The Enlightened Teachers, and The Creator. Each fosters the deep relational kinship and land-connected stewardship from which real, lasting peace flows.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer distills so purely: “sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.”2 Living in this enlightened way, people procure forests and pastures; they plant gardens and share hunting grounds; they build pathways and protect waterways. Never taking more than they need, and always reciprocating the gifts of land, they live by the sacred principles of the Honorable Harvest.

Once upon a time, the land told its stories, and people listened.

II. Righteousness

The land continues telling stories. But now we, or at least the people making political and economic decisions, are not listening. The land Peacemaker and kin walked is today a Superfund site: a slippery mass of industrial waste over thirty feet deep.

This contrast epitomizes a culture of disrespect and dominion reigning, as it has for the last five centuries. One believing humans above land and all creation, not truly connected to it. Consumption, accumulation, and waste further characterize a “free” market economy, where short-term capital gains trump long-term well-being.

The coming seven generations bear no relevance as this culture cannibalizes the means of our existence. Sources of life are today reduced to profit centers.

Food and water, medicine, dignity, and a safe home, joy and connection, become financialized assets—hollowed of good, moral purpose. Prisons and borders hold this disorder in place such that most people trapped by their fires come from situations of depression and dispossession, where life’s necessities are hard to come by.

In evidence, a Prison Policy Initiative report found incarcerated people in the United States had median annual incomes forty-one percent lower than their non-incarcerated peers prior to incarceration. Certainly during, and persistently afterwards, finding a job, housing, or healthcare gets even harder.

Along this line, a United Nations assessment of incarcerated people throughout the world determined: “the penitentiary system in most countries is no longer aimed at [] reformation and social rehabilitation… but simply aims to punish [].”

Fundamentally, given their reactive, punitive nature, policing and prisons do not and cannot address the root causes of harm. Indeed, they more often compound harm.

“Rather than proactive, community-based investments in employment, education, housing, and conflict mediation,” Derecka Purnell writes, “governments invest in reactive policing and prosecution that imprison poor and working-class people.”3

Borders operate in similar ways. Imaginary, flexible, and utterly militarized, they hold in place the status quo economy of dominion. It is no accident, after all, that advantages and disadvantages, comforts and consequences, flow to and from people and places in the same ways they have since the earliest days of European imperialism and colonization.4 Harsha Walia explains this as clearly as anyone:

Borders maintain hoarded concentrations of wealth accrued from colonial domination, while ensuring mobility for some and containment for most—a system of global apartheid determining who can live where and under what conditions.5

To illustrate this divide, as much as $36 trillion compounds in fiscal paradise today. At the same time, farmworkers, collectively one-third of the world’s workforce, and a great many of whom are “migrant” workers, “are among the world’s hungriest people.” Yes, the people who feed the world struggle most to feed themselves, their families, and their communities. How on Earth is that possible?

Walia sees a world beyond the imperial borders holding such disorder in place. In a free world, people enjoy both: “the freedom to stay, meaning that no one is forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and the freedom to move with safety and dignity.” Such freedom of movement is especially important for the coming generations, given more and more people will be displaced by conflicts, or climate and ecological threats they had no part in creating. By 2050, the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates such threats will displace over one billion people.

That’s one generation away. Imagine seven generations from now.

III. Power

Prior to embracing the Great Law, John Mohawk writes, “the people had been at war for so long that some were born knowing they had enemies and not knowing why they had enemies.” Traversing such a context, the Peacemaker transcended this generational violence by addressing the pain at its roots.

He achieved this primarily through ceremonies of Condolence, which begin with both aggrieved parties recognizing the humanity of the other and the losses and sacrifices each had suffered. Such proceedings help heal the pain of loss and alleviate any thirst for revenge, thus transforming “the power to injure into the responsibility to protect.”

At root, Williams writes, “the Peacemaker understood that, for peace to exist, people must not only be rational but must also accept that other people are capable of rationality, for rational minds will seek, create, and maintain peace.”

Of particular relevance today, “A Land for All” provides a good example of this peacemaking work. Conceived by a diverse group of Palestinians and Israelis, this platform proposes a framework grounded in shared understandings of independence, partnership, mutual respect and recognition. In offering this path toward peace and reconciliation, the authors first reflect on the truth of the matter:

More than a hundred years of conflict have taught us that no nation can be the sole lord of this land. Occupation, annexation and denial of rights do nothing but deepen the conflict and fan the flames of hatred, and the concept of separation has failed as it ignores the complex reality of two peoples living in the same land.

Their proposed pathway to peace bears strong resemblance to the Haudenosaunee Great Law. It provides for a confederal government of equal, independent partners characterized by open borders, which delineate “political separation between the two states, but not demographic or geographic separation.” They further agree on the return of Palestinian refugees and hostages to their homeland, a shared capital district, and a cooperative focus on safety, dignity, and justice for all.

Before any of this can happen, however, the violence has to stop. Everywhere. A rational, peacemaking mind knows peace will not be made with war; and cannot emerge in an economy where war, waste, and warming are so profitable.

Peace flows from cultures and economies of gratitude and reciprocity. Restoring these relationships, locally and internationally, is the great task of today. Said differently, the “essential adventure of our time,” Joanna Marcy writes, is The Great Turning: “a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.”

“Acting on behalf of life transforms because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal…. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us.”

This shift might materialize in constitutional amendments recognizing the vitality of land and prescribing rights for future generations. Recently, sixteen young Montanans exercised their state constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” in a suit against the state for enabling fossil fuel extraction, thereby jeopardizing their (our) future—and they won! Similar suits proceed throughout the world, as do campaigns for “green amendments” like Montana’s.

Another means of joining life and law is by recognizing rivers and waterways as legal “persons.” The Māori of New Zealand secured such recognition for the Whanganui River in 2017, declaring with moral power: “I am the river; the river is me.” Rivers in Canada, Columbia, and India enjoy similar status, while other places move that way. These moves reflect paradigmatic shifts in the way euro-centric law operates, opening new paths to land-connected lifeways of Indigenous law and tradition.

These traditions, at their root, sustain the biodiversity, which sustains all life on Earth. In fact, though Indigenous peoples today comprise about five percent of the world’s population, they protect approximately 85% of the world’s biodiversity. As such, by transferring management and control of land back to their original stewards, we’d move closer yet to the peaceful, life-sustaining civilization we can and must be.

An international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty would move us that way as well. Such a treaty could lay the foundation for a new kind of international cooperation. A righteous, new world order—beyond an economy of reckless industrial growth, toward one that honorably sustains all life on Earth for ourselves and our posterity.

Likewise would a jubilee of “sovereign debt” serve our pursuit of lasting peace. Such debts subjugate formerly colonized nations to foreign creditors, thereby thwarting universal efforts to meaningfully address global poverty and collapsing ecologies. As a recent Debt Justice report determined: from 1970 to 2023, governments in the Global South paid $2.2 trillion, just in interest, to Western creditors.

Reaching, at last then, to the roots of armed conflict and global warming, we find the institutions that finance and profit from them. These entities, namely Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street, operate in relative opacity, free of democratic accountability. Thus, by democratizing central banks, pathways of international trade, and local energy utilities alike, while also expanding public banking, we can begin to deconcentrate capital and hasten the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and from conflict to peace. Easier said than done, of course.

Nevertheless, in these many ways, we can begin to practice peace as a process of balance and reciprocity. Considering the coming seven generations is central to this process because it’s a perspective transcending the current disorders of dominion and cyclical violence. Enlightened by Indigenous worldviews, legal traditions, and leadership, we are empowered to meet today with good, rational, peacemaking minds.

We can build co-ops, unions, nations, and confederations with these good minds. And with these good minds, we’ll harness our bonds to all creation. Doing so for generations forever, peace might again flow toward those souls long down river.

Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment and share.

Thank you to my friend and editor Madeleine Brink.

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Finally, instead of buying needless stuff this holiday season, give the gift of reading. In the footnotes below, I’ve linked books you could gift to a loved one, or to yourself! The work of these authors deeply informs my writing here.

In any event, I wish you all a safe and peaceful holiday season and New Year.

Williams, Kayanesenh Paul, Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace, University of Manitoba Press (2018).

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions (2013).

Purnell, Derecka, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, Verso (2021); see also Maynard and Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, Haymarket Books (2022): “It’s the consistent and structural refusal to meet people’s basic needs that is the status quo; the ongoing and structural denial of meeting basic needs…underlines the necessity of the broader transformation.”

See e.g., Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations, Oxford University Press (2022).

Walia, Harsha, A World Without Borders, from Imagining Global Futures, edited by Adom Getachew, Boston Review Forum (2022). See also Walia, Harsha, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books (2021).