Responsibilities versus Rights

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A Bill of Responsibilities

What Oren Lyons says the Bill of Rights Should Have been Called

Oren Lyons, Onondogan Chief and Faithkeeper of the Iroquois Confederacy, aka The Six Nations or Haudenosaunee people of the Northeastern United States, says that it would have been better if the framers of the United States government had called it a Bill of Responsibilities, rather than a Bill of Rights. The Iroquois Confederacy was the model of governance to which the framers of the United States Constitution turned, in seeking to create a balanced representative government. The separation of powers, the balance between Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, was all modeled on the Confederacy. There were, however, several notable deviations. First, the equivalent of the Supreme Court, in the Iroquois Confederacy, was entirely comprised of women. Second, as Oren Lyons points out in the video above, the purpose of the equivalent of the Bill of Rights, in Iroquois culture, was not to establish rights, which prioritize the individual, but to establish responsibilities, which prioritize the Commons, and articulate our responsibility to care for the future.

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Who taught us this?

Oren Lyons is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a Chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee. He was a founding member in 1977 of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth. This council of respected Indian leaders meets annually to provide an avenue for Native American culture to inform and contribute to contemporary cultural and political debate. In 1982 he helped establish the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations and participated in the Indigenous People’s Conference in Geneva, an international forum supported by the UN Human Rights Commission. In 1992 he was invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations and open the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People at the UN Plaza in New York. During that year he organized a delegation of the Haudenosaunee to attend the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and was invited to address the national delegations.

Now retired from teaching, Lyons was Professor of American Studies at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where he directed the Native American Studies Program and taught Native American history. He authored and co-authored many books and articles, including children’s books, and in 1992 edited Exiled in the Land of the Free, which explains the influence of the ideas and values of the Iroquois Confederacy on American democracy and the Constitution.

Our gratitude to the Sacred Land Film Project for permission to share this excerpt from their interview with Mr. Lyons, part of the their Standing on Sacred Ground film series.

Who taught us this?

Oren Lyons is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a Chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee. He was a founding member in 1977 of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth. This council of respected Indian leaders meets annually to provide an avenue for Native American culture to inform and contribute to contemporary cultural and political debate. In 1982 he helped establish the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations and participated in the Indigenous People’s Conference in Geneva, an international forum supported by the UN Human Rights Commission. In 1992 he was invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations and open the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People at the UN Plaza in New York. During that year he organized a delegation of the Haudenosaunee to attend the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and was invited to address the national delegations.

Now retired from teaching, Lyons was Professor of American Studies at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where he directed the Native American Studies Program and taught Native American history. He authored and co-authored many books and articles, including children’s books, and in 1992 edited Exiled in the Land of the Free, which explains the influence of the ideas and values of the Iroquois Confederacy on American democracy and the Constitution.

Our gratitude to the Sacred Land Film Project for permission to share this excerpt from their interview with Mr. Lyons, part of the their Standing on Sacred Ground film series.

Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.