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The Six Nations Museum in the tiny Adirondack hamlet of Onchiota is one of the little-known treasures of New York State. Within its log walls, there's more history and culture packed than in institutions many times its size. But this column is not about that longhouse-shaped private museum or the Mohawk family, the Faddens, who have kept its doors open for more than 60 summers. I'll write about them and its late, beloved founder Ray Tehanetorens Fadden at another time.
Instead, this essay is linked to one object in that museum. It's a small leather bag hanging from one of the horns of a buffalo head mounted high above one of those doors.
"See that?" John Kahionhes Fadden said to me one summer when I was visiting, jerking his head up toward the buffalo. "That belonged to Arthur Parker. That was his medicine pouch."
Arthur C. Parker. If you do not know his name, then you probably don't know much about the Iroquois people, those five formerly warring tribes who gathered themselves into a great league of peace about a thousand years ago and who call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the "People of the Longhouse." It was Arthur C. Parker who, through his extensive writing, his professional career as a museologist (his own description of his work), and as an activist, did much to dispel the stereotypes about Indians that characterized his time and make visible to the wider world the history and the contributions of the Haudenosaunee.
His accomplishments were not without struggle. In her 2001 book, To Be Indian, The Ufe of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker.; Joy Porter does a thorough job of exploring the life of a man who was perhaps the most published Nalive American writer of his time. Yet Parker, born on the Seneca Indian Reservation in western New York, also found himself struggling between the white and Indian worlds throughout his life. Although he always identified as an Indian and as an Iroquois in particular, he was only one-quarter Seneca. Since that heritage was on his father's side, he did not qualify as a Seneca within the strictly matrilineal line of descent followed by all of the Haudenosaunee Nations, and was not enrolled. Parker...