Everywhere you go in North America these days, it seems, you see the Six Nations flag. There it is in Santa Fe at a film festival, in Washington at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, in Standing Rock at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests---proud, distinctive, the unmistakable banner of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. You’d think it’s been flying forever. But in fact, it is less than 40 years old, the brainchild of two faculty members and a student at the University at Buffalo.
Those two students, Rick Hill and Tim Johnson, went on to prominent careers as spokesmen for and interpreters of the Indigenous experience. (They wrote the script for the Heritage Moments episode you just heard.) But in 1990, they were just a couple of young guys. Hiil, a Tuscarora, was born in Buffalo and was teaching after just having gotten his master’s degree; Johnson, a Mohawk, was an undergrad from North Tonawanda. Hill was associated with the Iroquois National lacrosse team, which had just been invited to play at the World Championship tournament in Australia---a landmark in the history of Haudenosanee autonomy, as the team planned to travel there under their own native passports. But there was a hitch---the Iroquois did not have their own flag.
Hill got in touch with Johnson and explained the dilemma. He told Johnson that Oren Lyons---the Onondaga and Haudenosaunee faithkeeper, UB professor, Iroquois Nationals team leader, and a standout goalkeeper on the 1950s Syracuse University team that featured Jim Brown---had suggested using the Hiawatha wampum belt as the model for the flag. The belt itself, anywhere from 300 to 500 years old (though some estimate the design to be over 1,000 years old), is deep purple with four white squares in a line surrounding a stylized white pine tree. They symbolize the five nations at the time: the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca, with the Onondaga at the geographical and spiritual center.
Johnson duly made sure he got the colors and dimensions right as he painstakingly worked on the design. Then his father, Harold Johnson, a longtime chemical worker who also ran a T-shirt shop in Niagara Falls, made it into a banner. The confederacy finally had a flag (and a national anthem, the traditional “Bean Song”, today played alongside the US and Canadian anthems before games).
Hill went on to a career as an artist, writer, museum director, and educator. Johnson became a museum director, storyteller, and film producer. Lyons, now in his mid-90s and still active as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, is a towering figure in the Indigenous world, and the world at large.
Yet as great and far-reaching as the work of each of those men has been, the creation of the Haudenosaunee flag, arguably, is as great as any of it.
Cast (in order of appearance):
Rick Hill: James Jimerson
Tim Johnson: Billy Logan
Narrator: Susan Banks
Script: Tim Johnson, Rick Hill and Jeff Z. Klein
Sound recording: Cameron Taylor
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski and the Buffalo Common Council for their generous support