Turning Pain Into Power: An Interview With Two Mohawk Leaders in the Akwesasne Territory

Over the next months, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan will post and air a series of episodes focusing on the lives and perspectives of the Indigenous women of North America. The first episode, timed “in ironic dis-observance” of Columbus Day, aired on October 10 and focuses in part on, in Morgan’s words, “the effect of Columbus on the people who originally inhabited this land.” The following is an edited and condensed excerpt from Morgan’s interview with her two guests:

Louise Herne McDonald, condoled Bear Clan mother for the Mohawk National Council, is a founding member of Konon:kwe, the circle of Mohawk women working to reconstruct the power of their origins through education, empowerment, and trauma-informed approaches. She champions the philosophy of Kahnistensera, Mother Law, natural law that binds Indigenous kinship society. She is the principal organizer and leader of Ohero:kon, Under the Husk, a traditional rite of passage ceremony for Mohawk youth. She has presented at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and lectures regularly at universities throughout Canada and the United States on Haudenosaunee philosophies and self-determination regarding women. Affectionately known as “Mama Bear,” which is her clan name, McDonald is a distinguished scholar in Indigenous Learning at McMaster University Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching.

Jonel Beauvais is a Wolf Clan Mohawk who has dedicated years as a council member and lead auntie for adolescent girls entering their first year in Under the Husk. She is also the founder of the Welcome Home Circle in the Akwesasne Territory that embraces the northern United States and southern Canada. The Welcome Home Circle was inspired by her own incarceration and the need for support of those impacted by the carceral system, especially those in Native communities. She works transitioning them back into the community, for safe housing, and for transformational justice. She recently collaborated in upstate New York with the Seven Dancers Coalition, which seeks to educate tribal communities and service providers on sexual assault, domestic violence, campus safety, teen dating, sex trafficking, and stalking. She is a member of the Section 84 Parole Board of Akwesasne, and has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2020 Visionary Voice Award granted by the National Sexual Assault Resource Center. She was also a tribal delegate representing the United States at the 3rd Annual Trilateral Working Group on Violence Against Women and Girls in Mexico City.

Robin Morgan: There were approximately as many people inhabiting North and South America at the time of the European conquest as there were in Europe. So it was hardly a “land without a people” — quite the contrary. I would urge my friends in the audience to have another listen to episode 332, which aired and posted on November 22, 2020. It was called “The Thanksgiving Reality,” and I wrote a blog about it at the same time, which you can find on my website, robinmorgan.net. It delineates a small part of the diseases and almost successful genocide that decimated the Native inhabitants after the European invasion. It’s shocking, utterly heartbreaking, and provides a dramatic backdrop to what you’ll hear today. Because today is about celebration, not necessarily celebration of Columbus Day; no, instead celebration of endurance, survival, and resilience, specifically in the magnanimous magnificence of Indigenous women.

We recent arrivals have so deplorably been kept ignorant about our own history, how much it relied on the Haudenosaunee peoples of the Northeast and their great compact of confederacy, how much the framers of our own Constitution borrowed from them, how much the suffragists in their fight for women’s right to vote imitated them, how deep their own feminism runs, and for that matter just who they really are.

Robin Morgan:Let’s start by talking about what is a Condoled Bear Clan Mother.

Louise Herne McDonald:I am about 15 years into my position as a Condoled Bear Clan Mother, which means I’m a national bear clan mother. This is a woman leader for our Bear Clan under the chieftainship of “he who is dragging his antlers,” that is, he has acquired, or is condoled, in his position through my write-up nomination. Women install our leaders and also can depose our leaders. So women really have their hands on the national representation of the people.

Morgan: In the years that we’ve done this show, we always un-celebrate Columbus Day, and we look at Thanksgiving with a very ironic eye, because of what both of those commemorative days did to Native peoples, but we’ve also had wonderful guests, Joy Harjo, now the poet laureate, and a dear friend; Deb Haaland, now Secretary of the Interior, Rebecca Adamson, etc. But this is the first time that we’ll really be able to go in any depth into the matrilineal roots of your practice, because it is a profound practice. And I want to talk about mentoring because we have with us a great mentor in Mama Bear, if I may call you that, and a great mentee in Jonel.

McDonald: Being a Bear Clan Mother has a matrilineal thread that runs back a gazillion years to the time of our creation that began with a Sky Woman that fell from a celestial opening in the Sky World. She came here already with child, and she established within our society a matrilineal thread, or a mother thread. And through the epochs of time there have been certain stories that have been handed down through the generations, and it begins with She who gave birth to a daughter and created the Earth as we know it. And the daughter in turn gave birth to male twins, and when you move forward in time the first man and first woman were created, and human beings began to populate the world. And then things went amiss, and along came the Great Thinker. He established within the society of the Haudenosaunee Indigenous people a clanship, or a clan, reflecting the animals that were in our territory, like the bear, the wolf, the turtle, the hawk, the deer. A variety of 14 different clans existed in the confederacy of the Haudenosaunee. From there, after the establishment of the clan system, people started to war and bloodlet, and then along came our Messenger of the Great Peace, who we call the Peacemaker. He took that matrilineal thread and saw its significance, and he didn’t dismiss it like the U.S. Constitution did dismiss the women out of their own governance. The Peacemaker saw the brilliance in maintaining the mother line, and he built the foundation to the house, and the men became the walls and the roof, but the women are forever the foundation and they’re also the Supreme Law of the Land, which means there’s a Mother Rite, vested in the mitochondrial DNA and in the cellular level of how a mother can transfer her genetics to her daughter and her son. So the status of who we are as Haudenosaunee follows the mother, which is a maternal order, not a paternal order. So pretty much everything that gets decided or gets set into law, the women have a big voice in it. And there’s different stories within history around the time of confederation with Washington, and Ben Franklin, and all the founding fathers, where they had to address the Founding Mothers of Turtle Island, meaning North America, that the women’s voice should not be dismissed. But it was.

Morgan: Not only the Constitution’s framers, and I find this very interesting that the United States formed its Constitution not on the principles of European governments, but on that of people considered “savages,” but it was not only Franklin and Washington who were in touch with the Haudenosaunee, but the suffragists also were heavily influenced by the confederacy. Throughout most of the 1800s, leading suffragists — Lucrecia Mott, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the great Elizabeth Cady Stanton — were visiting and studying and documenting the confederacy. In 1893, Gage was arrested for registering to vote by authorities, and at the same time she was honorarily adopted for her views on women’s rights by the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk. So it’s a pity that the one thing that they left out of the Constitution and their foundation for this nation was women. Such a tragedy.

McDonald: It is. But things have evolved since then, and women are repositioning their self and their authority. But it’s unfortunate that the patriarchal European male mind could not comprehend the worth of women, and the brilliance of women, and they chose to ignore them; and I think that’s what’s eating away at the world: patriarchy. And, you know, I wouldn’t venture to say that it’s men in general, it’s the mentality that puts the privileged white male at the forefront of our decision making to the detriment of the rest of our society. That’s why the Peacemaker, in order to create balance, included everybody from the smallest child to the oldest elder, our men, our women, our children, we had a participatory governance. That’s why they put women at the center to be the representative to the people, and then she appointed a male leader to be the voice to her clan, and she also appointed a nephew who would carry the message from the mother to the chief, and she appointed a male faith keeper or ceremonial keeper, and a woman ceremonial keeper, so that we held in balance our politics and our spirituality, and they were tightly interwoven into each other. Everybody had a say and everybody was represented. There was no canceling of [anybody], and so it was freedom not just for one or for an elite few but for everybody.

Morgan: Is the Peacemaker a mythic figure, or do we know who the Peacemaker was? Do we know his tribal affiliation?

McDonald: We vigilantly guard our Peacemaker. He has a name in our language. We choose to use the English version because we don’t want his name to be slandered, like “Jesus Christ” or “Goddamn,” so we vigilantly guard our Peacemaker because he is that sacred to us. We know that he is a divine being that showed up here in human form to bring us the divine message, and that was that of peace. It’s not a man-made, man-thought-out peace; it came from a very rich story that has continued through the generations, and we embody that within ourselves, and within our youth to when we ratify or make decisions we ensure that the peace of our people is at the forefront of our minds. The second primordial principal is to use a good mind and not to have it filled with corruption and self-agenda, and thirdly, when we employ those first two we become powerful, which is empowerment. So those are the three primordial principles: Peace, Good Mind, and the Power of the People. So everything that impacts on seven generations is founded on those three simple principles.

Morgan: I was just about to raise that; the Seven Generations rule that everything, every decision that we make, has a ripple effect seven generations into the future is mind-boggling in its wisdom. If everybody thought that way, wow, what a different world it would be, don’t you think?

McDonald: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think we would be in this climate crisis right now.

Morgan: Let’s talk about mentoring. Jonel, I know that you’ve done remarkable work with incarcerated women, and I know that you’ve done a whole lot of [other] work as well, despite the fact you’re a mother of three — I don’t know where you’re finding the time, you must never sleep — but you were six years as a council member and a lead auntie for adolescent girls entering their first year of fasting and discipline rites of passage for youth in Akwesasne, and it just goes on and on: founder of a Welcome Home Circle, and five years cultivating support and experience around violence against women, so talk about all that and about the process that you’ve gone through.

Jonel Beauvais: I really appreciate this topic, because as you just reiterated, there is a lot of tragedy and there’s a lot of hardship and a lot of sadness in those statistics; even listening to them, it’s always personal, you know. And in the same light it also brings just as much weight to the honor and to the responsibility to carry on the goodness that you expressed of us just being women of consciousness and women in alignment with nature and creation, and then also we are kind of wrapping ourselves up in a love story. I’m really happy we’re talking about love, because it’s definitely made its way to my life. Even as an Indigenous woman growing up in Akwesasne, which is also, you know, in between two political bodies — the United States and Canada, our community runs right through that — and so growing up in a very complex political, policed community, I would inevitably be a part of all of those statistics that you would read about Indigenous women: sexual assault, domestic violence, dropped out of high school, very early on addicted to drugs and alcohol, wanting to commit suicide, and so it was just kind of like I was just following through and not understanding that there was anything beyond these adversities. And I [found] myself sitting in New York State’s only maximum security prison for women, and I had a court sentence me to 12 1/2 years in this maximum security prison. I had three small kids, and I was struggling to find my way out of this sentence, and thankfully I was able to get the state to appoint me a lawyer to help me fight this case. And just before I go to prison my mother dies from uterine cancer, and I have three small babies, and so my life is just really crumbling, and I don’t understand in that moment in my own infancy in my womanhood, you know, why was I losing my mother, why was I going to prison? I was a single mother trying to get out of a toxic relationship, and I was trying to do all the right things, and there was no backup, there was no support. And the women of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility really taught me a lot. They really taught me a lot about spirit and humanity, and environment.

Morgan: I know Bedford Hills very well, very well.

Beauvais: Oh, do you?

Morgan: I’ve had a number of women friends and acquaintances who’ve been there, and I’ve visited frequently. Go on.

Beauvais: Good, I’m glad to hear you were an avid visitor, because in prison it’s hard. Cash support is hard, and it’s expensive, and me being so far away from my community and my children. Prison really killed a certain spirit in me, and I didn’t really see myself living out those years in there and wanted to just end it, I just wanted to end it, I was nine months into my sentence and I said I don’t want to do these 12 1/2 years, and I was just gonna, you know, hang myself in my cell …

Morgan: But you didn’t. You came out, somehow, miraculously, and you now work with formerly incarcerated women, and you’ve won all sorts of awards and international attention for doing so. I mean, this is extraordinary. Talk about that.

Beauvais: You know what, it really is extraordinary, and I think I’m really learning to appreciate the extraordinary-ness about it. But when you’re in it, you just feel like, you know, everything’s falling apart and you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen next. You buckle down and learn something about yourself in survival mode, and you learn what you tell yourself, or how you were taught to survive, or how you chose to cope, or how you chose to react, or what you denied yourself, and you think about all those things looking back. Thankfully, I was able to get out of prison, and I didn’t have to do those 12 1/2 years. Then in the transitioning of me coming out of an institution and back into the community, I thankfully landed myself at a community event where Louise was conducting and facilitating a women’s talking circle, and there [were] all these revered women, nurses and police officers and public officials, and they were just these really worthy women, and I was just this, you know, Department of Corrections New York State property of Bedford Hills; 11G0437 was my Department of Corrections number. I had no worth, I felt unworthy. As a result of that circle, those women, they rallied around me, and Louise asked them to sing me a song, and to send me good wishes, and to welcome me home. As a result of the camaraderie of those women underneath that tent at that ceremony, here I am eight years later completely thriving, absolutely, proudly working alongside these women and many more. So it has really been about me getting here extraordinarily off the backs of primarily black women and Indigenous women cultivating their strength, using their positions of power and absolutely putting their hand back down and helping the next woman get on top of things. It’s definitely saved my life and I’m sure many others.

Morgan: And making it visible, because now you’re a member of Section 84 Parole Board of Akwesasne, and a council which is a restorative justice initiative integrating Indigenous ways of mediation to reduce incarceration, and to provide a more interpersonal means of healing for both parties. This is grounding that vision in pragmatic, practical reality. And then also the coalition that you’re part of, the Seven Dancers Coalition, does community outreach that educates tribal communities and service providers through trainings and preservations on sexual assault, domestic violence, campus safety, teen dating, sex trafficking, and stalking. So it’s not surprising that you got the 2020 Visionary Voice Award nominated by the New York State Council Against Sexual Assault. I mean, you’re doing remarkable work.

Beauvais: Oftentimes I would ask myself what helped me get this far, because the system isn’t designed for me to get to these levels of speaking and representation and organizing. It’s very much about power and control. I think it was absolutely through the sincerity of woman-ness and sisterhood and mentorship where, after losing my mother prior to being incarcerated, and then coming back out having a woman be able to recognize me and see me, and offer me some of her time. [This] was a great asset to me in many ways, and she just kept creating opportunity for me to show up. And every time I showed up and every time I came, I learned a little bit more; and it was also very much built off of all of the pressure from prison, because I was with women who were being beaten by correctional officers and raped by them. So I just came from an environment that was absolutely diminishing, dehumanizing. You come out and you see this space that’s accepting and appreciative and generous, and you’re going, ‘This is the absolute answer because the world I just came out of was nothing like this,’ and I knew its value because I knew a lot of people that went to prison but nobody talked about it, and I also knew that my community had the most representation at that time in prison, and it just really bothered me because I didn’t want to see any of my women in there from my community, but at the same time that brings some solace when you see a familiar face; you buckle down in that prison, and you help each other survive the institution.

Morgan: It’s so moving. And it’s so practical. And it’s also so encouraging that, slow as it is, the concept of transformational justice is leaking its way into the official system, not very deeply, not very quickly, not very anything. But it is getting through somehow, and spreading, and that to me is a source of enormous hope. This must be tremendously moving and hopeful to you too, Louise, isn’t it?

McDonald: Of course. You just gave a lot of historical data on the genocide of Indigenous people through eradication, and through legislated and premeditated genocide, and it’s a miracle that you even have us on the line, because we did have systems of resiliency too, and that’s why Jonel and I are here in privileged space, because despite the onslaught of eradication, we still live, we still exist, we still breathe. As for Jonel, you know, you give this woman pain, and she’ll turn it into power. And that’s exactly what we did, we supported her. I believe that we cannot afford to throw our people away because there’s so little left of us. And yet we cling tightly, and we guard closely the preciousness of our women. This morning I turned on CNN, and there’s this big news flash of a missing white woman, but we have over 6,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and that doesn’t get any news coverage at all. So you tell me about a system that is constantly attacking the true inheritors and the true owners of this land; it tells you clearly that it is with great government intention to do away with the power of Indigenous women, and to silence us, but yet we continue to exist.

And so the [mentorship] comes from wanting to redesign how women work. You can’t expect Jonel to work a 40-hour week, and still be a mom, still do her healing journey, and still contribute to the community; any person would buckle and cave under that kind of pressure. So I took her under my wing because I’ve seen her absolute substance, and the core of her ability to move mountains, and all I had to do was just to believe [in] her, catch her in her moment, give her exposure to different circles, and allow her to see and feel things that she had never seen before. She had the power to change the narrative, and that’s what this work is all about, the mentor and the mentee, to change the narrative of an Indigenous woman’s experience, and to remind the world how important women and their infants are in the hierarchy of society. And they should be priority; we have to put women at the top of the list of our funding, at the top of our decision making, they have to be at the table, they have to have the right to their own body and their decision making, and they have to be at the political podium. Thank goodness Deb Haaland is there; she’s really breaking ground.

The other thing we’ve got to mention is the residential school system that was also legislated by the United States and by Canada to “remove the Indian and save the man.” The graves are being uncovered now, so we get retraumatized again and again every day to be reminded, even though we’re the Indigenous people living in harmony on these lands that with open arms welcomed our European family, each day we’re under attack and under assault. So the work that Jonel and I do, we’re in the trenches with our people, with our mothers, with their infants, shielding them as much as we can, not just from the men in our community — who have also been attacked and coopted [by] patriarchy and violent ways and coming out of systems that don’t recognize them — but we’re also protecting [them] from the systemic violence that is continually knocking at our door and doesn’t allow us to have a good night’s sleep. So you know I think Akwesasne’s a real intricate community; we’re multijurisdictional, we’re always fighting the big superpowers of the world: Canada, the United States, and you know their own infancy would not have ever been birthed if it weren’t for the Indigenous people who contributed to the geographical outlay of these countries. Yet we are invisible, and we are constantly under assault. I am happy to say that I’m living a generation of ‘waker-uppers,’ you know, and our European counterparts are waking up to the true history, and it’s amazing to witness, brings tears to my eyes. We have a lot of good allies, like my good friend Sally Roesch Wagner, who wrote the book on the early suffragists. So there are these microcosms of evolution that are happening in different sectors of the countries. To me, at the end of the day, at my age, because I’m not a spring chicken anymore, it’s not about what I acquire in this life; it’s about what I leave behind, and Jonel, who is half my age, is what I’m leaving behind. And if I don’t invest in that then the seventh generations is even more in trouble. So I’m handing the torch off.

Morgan: You both are just miraculous women, and yet you’re very common in that you represent vast numbers of women who feel the way that you do, and who are rising into visibility, into voice, and gradually into power. And it’s a very different kind of power; I like to say it’s ‘power to,’ not ‘power over.’ So I’m very deeply grateful to both of you. Wanishi is, of course, a statement of deep gratitude and hopeful friendship. I’m grateful to Rebecca Adamson for helping to arrange this, and for all of the women who participated in this, and I’m just so touched and moved and thankful to you both for sharing your individual stories as well as the vast, deep history of your people. So thank you from my heart for being with us today, and keep on keeping on; there’s no other way to do it, and we’ll manage it somehow because the planet itself is at stake, yes?