Seneca Nation receives annual U.S. payment of cloth for 216th year

ALLEGANY TERRITORY, Salamanca, NY – August 9, 2011 – The Seneca Nation, along with the other nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, signed the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794 with the newly formed United States of America to recognize nation sovereignty and land base.

For the 216th consecutive year, the U.S. government recently fulfilled its obligation under the treaty with the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee by sending each a piece of cloth and its share of a collective $4,500. This “payment” called for by treaty demonstrates clearly that, in the eyes of the now mature United States, the provisions of that special sovereign treaty relationship must be met, as a matter of federal law, now and into the future.

“In our light speed, 24/7 society, people need to remember that just like ‘1776 and the Declaration of Independence’ and ‘1789 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution,’ ‘1794 and the Treaty of Canandaigua’ are just as alive and in force today as then,” said Seneca Nation President Robert Odawi Porter. “Our critics would have people believe that our treaties and our sovereignty somehow went the way of wagon trains and mules, when in fact the United States government has continued to honorably live by its obligations under this treaty for the last 216 years by doing so in 2011.”

From 1789 until 1871, when Congress formally ended the practice, the United States entered into some 400 treaties – “the supreme law of the land” – with American Indian tribal governments. Often, these treaties spelled out the terms under which tribes gave up some or all of their ancestral lands in exchange for other lands – usually west of the Mississippi River. Senecas remain on parts of their ancestral land.

Many people have the mistaken idea that these treaties are irrelevant today. But the U.S. government still considers at least some of these treaties to be in force. Under the terms of the 1794 treaty, the U.S. delivers $4,500 worth of goods to the Six Nations of the Iroquois every year in exchange for the Haudenosaunee’s “peace and friendship.”

This year marks the 216th year the U.S. government honored its obligations under the Treaty of Canandaigua by delivering a quantity of muslin cloth to each of the Confederacy member nations. This “annuity cloth” represents the continuing government-to-government relationship with the United States and forms a symbolic but real annual affirmation of the sanctity of this agreement.

Each member’s share of treaty cloth has gotten smaller over the years – in 2007, each member received a piece of cloth just six inches square – yet its significance never diminishes.

As stated in Article IV of the treaty [emphasis added]:

“The United States having thus described and acknowledged what lands belong to the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas, and engaged never to claim the same, nor to disturb them, or any of the Six Nations, or their Indian friends residing thereon and united with them, in the free use and enjoyment thereof: Now, the Six Nations, and each of them, hereby engage that they will never claim any other lands within the boundaries of the United States; nor ever to disturb the people of the United States in the free use and enjoyment thereof.”

Porter concluded:

“Treaties are powerful living documents that we, and obviously the U.S. government, take very seriously. We wish other governments that seek to encroach upon our rights, disrupt our commerce and disrespect this sacred sovereignty would also accept and live under those supreme conditions.”