Peacemaker's Process

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        Under the Peacemaker’s guidance, the Haudenosaunee people developed a protocol to be 
        followed when enemies first come together under a temporary truce. The protocol begins 
        with a “condolence,” a short ceremony in which the two parties ack‧nowledge each other’s 
        humanity and the losses and sacrifices that each had suffered. The two parties would meet 
        in the middle of the forest, and one side would say to the other something like this:
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        “We’ve been engaged in combat, and you’ve come out of the forest, and you’re covered in 
        the bracken of the forest; we see that on your clothing.” 
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        “So the first thing we do is we brush your clothing off, and clean off all the stuff that 
        shows that you’ve been in a war.”
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        The next thing they do is they brush off the bench that the man is going to sit on, and 
        make it clean and ready. 
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        One side passes strings of wampum to the other, each string carrying a pre-set message. 
        Your enemy then acknowledges these messages by repeating them back to you. They say things 
        like this: 
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        “With this wampum, I release the pressure in your chest. You’re feeling tight in your body 
        from the struggle, so I release you from that.”
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        “With this one, I remove the tears from your eyes that you’ve been crying because of the 
        people you lost in war.”
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        “And with this one, I release your vocal cords. I release your voice so you can speak 
        strongly.” 
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        They are addressing the conditions that can extend the truce. The first goal is to stop 
        the fighting; a truce is not peace, but it is a small step in that direction. 
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        The peacemaking process begins with some principles, one of which is symbolized by images 
        of people casting weapons beneath a tree and burying them. This is, of course, entirely 
        symbolic, just like modern disarmament is entirely symbolic, since you can always go out 
        and buy more weapons. Likewise, the Indians could always go home and whittle more weapons, 
        and in any case, they couldn’t give up weapons entirely because they depended on them for 
        hunting and food gathering. So when they say they are putting the weapons of war under the 
        tree, this is symbolic language meaning that they are not going to use them on each other 
        anymore. 
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        The second principle can be summarized in this statement: We are now going to put our 
        minds together to create peace. The focus is on a desirable outcome that benefits 
        everyone. One of the most famous quotations from Indians is from Sitting Bull: “Now let us 
        put our minds together to see what kind of world we can leave for our children.” And 
        another is out of the Haudenosaunee tradition now known as The Great Law of Peace: “Now we 
        put our minds together to see what kind of world we can create for the seventh generation 
        yet unborn.” Both of these are pragmatic constructions; both are about envisioning a 
        desirable outcome and then negotiating the steps to go from here to the outcome that you 
        want. 
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