Review Of Haudenosaunee's Legendary Founding

The video Haudenosaunee’s Legendary Founding is interesting because it demonstrates one way that Native Americans use oral tales to preserve their history and culture. This tale is an origin story about the creation of the Wampum belt. The oral nature of this tale is significant because it captures the moments of emphasis and feeling better than it could if it was simply written in standard prose. Being able to hear it, rather than simply read it, also makes it feel more vibrant and personal. The addition of the animations and the music to the story also makes it feel more alive. There is a sense of vivacity within spoken stories that written stories struggle to capture on occasion. The fact that this story was recorded in the Haudenosaunee’s

All languages native to the Americas have been threatened since the implementation and subsequent dominance of English (and other colonial languages). The inclusion of the Haudenosaunee’s native language in the video shows how oral storytelling can preserve a language and, by extension, a culture. Also in terms of cultural preservation, this tale is centered around one of the most significant objects to the Haudenosaunee -- the wampum belt. The belts have multiple uses but perhaps one of the most interesting is how they are used as a reminder of their shared history. As told in the Haudenosaunee’s Legendary Founding video, the wampum belt has symbols for each of the nations who buried their weapons under the white pine and made an agreement to maintain the peace. The belt serves as a depiction of an important historical event, but also a reminder to keep that covenant. On the Onondaga Nation's website, they go more in-depth about the importance of the wampum belt. They state that "[t]he speaker puts the words of the agreement into the wampum as the strings or belts are woven together. Each speaker thereafter uses the wampum to remember the initial agreement and the history that has happened to date. To us, the belts are our living history" ("Wampum"). Once again there is an emphasis on remembering and preserving their history and

The Haudenosaunee stated that they had possessed these wampum belts for "countless centuries" before the anthropologists took them. It is surprising that the very people who wanted to study Native peoples would also be the ones to steal their cultural artifacts. Today, the Haudenosaunee still use these belts, and they even keep them in meetings as a reminder to maintain the peace that the ancestors agreed to. It is revealing that the colonizers saw the Native American’s lack of a written language as proof of their lack of civilization, yet the Native people were still preserving their history and culture in other ways. It is clear that the colonizers did not observe them very closely, otherwise, they could have seen that they were keeping records of their history through their oral tales, wampum belts, pictographs, etc. Similarly, the Haudenosaunee had a functioning democracy long before America became a country and even before many nations adopted this form of government. It is possible that the colonists recognized these practices and chose to ignore them, which would be upsetting but not