Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) and Mantle

Abstract

America’s native peoples have been forced to be both inner and outer emigrants since the arrival of Europeans, including British, to Turtle Island. The founding of the United States was arguably the first Brexit, with the following twist: the violent withdrawal of British colonists from the kingdom of Great Britain was also a wholesale withdrawal of British identity in favour of an ‘American’ identity conjured from opposition to taxes and a race war for Indian land. During that British civil war George Washington, known as Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) in our Iroquois language, sent his generals on a scorched-earth campaign calling for ‘the total destruction and devastation of their settlements… that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed’. Fifty of our villages, and extensive farm fields, storehouses and orchards, were burned to the ground. More than five thousand of our Haudenosaunee ancestors fled as war refugees, homeless, hungry and dispossessed, from their own lands.Mantle is a large-scale, site-specific earthwork honouring Virginia’s Native American nations that has recently been dedicated onsite at the Capitol in Richmond. I based its form on the shell beadwork of Powhatan’s Mantle, the deerskin object in the Ashmolean Museum thought to be part of Powhatan’s gift to King James in 1608, its thirty-odd spiral-embroidered disks are symbols of the villages and tribes of his chiefdom.In an uncharacteristic move in January, Trump signed a bill granting long-overdue federal recognition to six of Virginia’s tribes. Despite this gesture, the Trump administration has proven as hostile to America’s Native peoples as it is to its current immigrants – through its rushed approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline, threatening of sacred sites by shrinking Bears Ears National Monument, and a plan to impose work requirements on Native American Medicaid recipients in direct violation of treaties.