Haudenosaunee history is heavily documented in the U.S. and Canada, but some local experts say that even now, it's difficult separating truth from inaccuracies.
Decoding Native history in Western New York and Southern Ontario can be difficult because many of the ones recording events, and later studying them, haven’t been a part of the culture. That means they often didn’t understand the cultural significance of what they were documenting, said Native historian Rick Hill, Six Nations Tuscarora.
“It's a delicate balance between what you hear — the oral history, the stories and reflections people have about our history — and then what non-Indigenous historians have written without necessarily hearing those stories,” he said.
The accuracy of historical accounts is often dependent on when they were written and who recorded them, Hill said.
Woodland Cultural Centre is located on the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Ontario.
Many of the written histories in Canada about the Haudenosaunee were written by Jesuit priests hoping to convert people to Catholicism and carry a religious bias, said Woodland Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather George, Akwesasne Mohawk.
“You have to understand that they were bringing a different worldview, different societal values, but also perhaps a sort of, specific goal in the way that they were writing about Haudenosaunee people," she said. "And non-Indigenous people can contextualize those records in that way as well. It's not just saying, like, only Haudenosaunee people can understand historical context.”
One advantage now is that many of the newer non-Native historians are of a younger generation, so they don’t carry the same biases as older generations of non-Native researchers, Hill said. Especially since Haudenosaunee governance has a woman-led foundation, something many Eurocentric recorders overlooked for centuries.
“Now you got a new generation of the non-Indigenous scholars … They want to know about the personalities of history, the underlying prejudices and how they're examining history from a whole different lens, be it looking at the same materials, but taking a different point of view on it, taking a look at the role of women in history, taking a look at a feminist analysis of what took place.”
Appealing to a wide audience is one of the most important services museums can provide, especially since it helps bring historical and cultural conversations into a different medium, George said. Not everyone identifies with the learning model required to sort through old books and historical texts, she said.
“If you're making say, like a short film, an exhibition, or you're having maybe a workshop, where you're looking at like historical use of plants or food, ways or language, and that allows people the opportunity to do sort of more that hands-on learning," George said. "Those methods, I think are, they're more inclusive, and I think they allow for a broader group of people to engage with history.”
One of the most critical factors when studying the Haudenosaunee is to keep in mind that the culture is present and on-going, instead of “historicizing” and only talking in past-tense, she said.
“We continue to grow corn. We continue to have this political system called the Confederacy," she said. "You have to ensure that when you interpret the history, when you share those stories, that you make the connection to the current day.”
