Every traditional Haudenosaunee formal gathering begins and ends with an address known as Ganö:nyök, or the Thanksgiving Address (Chafe 1961; Kimmerer 2013, 105–117). This speech is also called The Words before All Else. On Seneca territory, the speaker would normally be a male elder, and each speaker would give his own version of the address reflecting the circumstances of time and place, but always following a set traditional pattern.

In 2023 the town of Caneadea, New York, which is located on the site of one of the Seneca Nation’s former reservations, began holding an annual Seneca-Caneadea Field Day in conjunction with the Seneca Nation of Indians as a way of celebrating friendship between the town and the nation. In accord with Seneca protocols, they chose to open with Ganö:nyök. Bill Crouse delivered the address in Seneca and then explained it in English (video 1). In 2024 introduced the speech this way:

Whenever we gather in our territory we always start off by offering these words that we call Ganö:nyök. We also refer to this as Öëdö:h Gaiwadehgöh, these are the Words that Come before Everything Else. And the reason our people have always used this this opening is because it puts our minds as one and it reminds us of what is really important. And I’m pleased to say that this opening is used for ceremonies, and gatherings on our territory as well as even tribal council starts off with being of one mind, and all of our art and all of our celebration waits until we get this one mind.

Bill began his address by inviting all present to join their minds as one with him in giving thanks, and then began to move through a series of thanksgivings addressed to different beings or elements of the world. Following the traditional pattern, the first element was ha’deögwe’da:geh, all the different kinds of people, and then he thanked Our Mother the Earth:

Now with that opening I started off by giving thanks for the earth itself and I said that we are here, we are gathering and we want to acknowledge all the people, that all the people from all across all the four corners of this world are here and that we need to be of one mind. And I said that we’re thankful and we give honor and respect to all the people all over the world.

Then I said the first thing that he created was Our Mother the Earth. It’s a place for us to rest our feet. And that we are of one mind at this time in giving thanks to our Mother the Earth.

Bill then acknowledged, in turn, the waters, grasses, medicinal plants, berries and strawberries, animals, birds, the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash), the wind, Our Grandfathers the Thunderers (the beings who create thunder), Our Elder Brother the Sun and Our Grandmother the Moon, the stars, the prophet Handsome Lake, and the Sky Dwellers who visited him. (Many addresses also include the forests and maple trees; Mohawk speakers include fish and insects.) Bill concluded by thanking Shögwajënö’kda’öh, Our Creator:

I said that we save our best words for the Creator himself, and we’re thankful that everything has been provided for us that we don’t need or shouldn’t want for anything, that it’s already here. And on this beautiful day as we’re here to celebrate and enjoy our combined history at this place, we are all of one mind and giving thanks.

So let me hear you all say this: if you’re of one mind let me hear you say, nyoh.

Each speaker emphasizes different things, depending on the season, circumstances, and personal preference, but the basic outline of the Thanksgiving Address has been consistent through at least the past century, and the theme of relationship is always central (Chafe 1961; Sundown 1959; Bowen 2021, 1–3; Bowen 2022; Bowen, Dowdy, and Chafe 2019, 2–10). In a simplified version of the address written by Sandra Dowdy, learned by students at the Seneca Nation’s Seneca-immersion Montessori school in Steamburg, NY, the opening item for all the people stresses that people were made to love each other (Dowdy 2017, 4, 6, 8):

He intended that we should have love for one another as we are walking about on this earth. And so now we will give it all our thought and carefully give thanks to all of the people.
And let it be that way in our minds.

The relational worldview expressed in the address is intimately connected to the structures and idioms of the Seneca language. The English versions are only paraphrases or explanations of the real address, which must be given in Seneca. Many concepts, including the fundamental idea of thanksgiving, cannot be neatly translated, as linguist Wallace Chafe notes: The trouble is that the Seneca concept is broader than that expressed by any simple English term, and covers not only the conventionalized amenities of both thanking and greeting, but also a more general feeling of happiness over the existence of something or someone. One result is that the English distinction between give thanks to and give thanks for has no relevance (Chafe 1961, 1). Allegany Language Department Director Ja:no’s Bowen’s interlinear translation of a Ganö:nyök (table 1) gives a glimpse of how differently the language works.

In addition to stressing humans’ relationships to the natural world, the speech is relational in that all those present must agree to it in order to be of one mind. As Bill invited his mostly English-speaking hearers to respond, in Seneca communities the community affirms each item by saying nyoh. In Seneca this is a general-purpose affirmation used for okay, understood, and you’re welcome, but in this context it has a more ceremonial register reminiscent of the Hebrew term amen (so be it).

Ganö:nyök as a Window into a Seneca Worldview

The Thanksgiving Address provides traditional Seneca people with one of their most central concepts and tools for making sense of the world. For example, the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca is spatially organized according to Ganö:nyök. Visitors move in the traditional Haudenosaunee counterclockwise circle through exhibits highlighting the different parts of the address, and the other topics on history, arts, and dance are organized in relationship to those parts. The Woodland Cultural Centre at Six Nations Reserve in Canada has dedicated a full wall at the entrance of its museum to a parallel display of Ganö:nyök in all six Haudenosaunee languages (figure 1). The Seneca intellectual John Mohawk used the address as the organizing structure for several of his writings, rather the way Christian theologians used the Apostles’ Creed or the Lord’s Prayer to structure their works (Mohawk 2010, 3–13). Ja:no’s Bowen, director of the Seneca Language Department on the Allegany Territory, starts and ends all of her language class sessions with some version of Ganö:nyök. In her classes (which Andrew attended 2020–2024) she uses the Thanksgiving Address as a source of vocabulary, grammar, and a focal point for teaching Seneca values and worldview.

The Thanksgiving Address provides the particular Seneca way of centering life in a web of reciprocal relationships, as most other indigenous American traditions do (Kimmerer 2013, 105–117; Wilson 2008, 80–125; Fixico 2003, 6–7; Tinker 2008, 68–70; Richter 1992, 18–23; Diamond 2008, 32–32; Broyles-González, Figueroa Hernández, and González 2022, 54; Fox 2013). Humans are understood to be lesser, weaker members of a larger extended family that includes non-human creatures, animals, and plants, and beyond-human beings like the spirits of sun, moon, and stars, within a worldview where, as John Mohawk says, everything that is real has spirit and can be related to as a being (Mohawk 2010, 7–9). Bill stressed in his address at Caneadea that each being has its own duty: for example, I gave thanks for Our Grandfathers the Thunderers, that they protect us and they watch over us as they go and cleanse the earth; also giving thanks for Our Eldest Brother the Sun, that every day he goes on his journey, and we give thanks that he’s always there and always doing his job. If each being has a job to do, then it is the task of humans to give thanks as Haudenosaunee Chief Leon Shenandoah (Tadoda:ho’) taught (Shenandoah 2001, 38):

The Creator planted us here.
He planted lots of things.
So our duty is to keep thanking the Creator.
When we pray it’s a greeting. We don’t ask for anything.
Church people ask for things in their prayers.
We don’t. We greet him by thanking Him
for all the things He has left for Human Beings to survive.

There is no reason to ask.
He has given us everything for us to enjoy.
That’s why our greeting is thanks.
That’s why we have to thank Him for all He left here.
We give thanks for all kinds of medicine,
the berries, water, the air, and the land.
To show this appreciation to the Creator
we have ceremony.
We must show our appreciation for what He has given us
because without the earth we wouldn’t survive.

Giving thanks, the chief taught, was part of the Original Instructions given to humanity from the Creator, and it is a fundamental part of being a Real Person or a Natural Person—the term that speakers of Haudenosaunee languages use for themselves and Native people generally, ögwé’ö:weh in Seneca.

The Seneca language used in the address aids in this way of thinking because Seneca grammar generally requires constant attention to relationships. There are fifteen nominative pronouns in Seneca and some thirty transitive pronouns that convey highly specific relationships (Chafe 2015; Snyder 2018) such as that group of three or more people including at least one male to those two females, or those two females to us excluding you. There is no generic term son or daughter: the parent must say hea:wak for my son (he- indicating a relationship of I to him) or kea:wak for my daughter (ke- indicating I to her). To someone else the child would be hoa:wak (his son, ho- meaning he to him) or shagoa:wak (his daughter, shago- meaning he to her), or other terms depending on which relationship the speaker wanted to stress. For another example, the everyday equivalent of goodbye is ësgö:gë’ae’ (I will see you again), but only if the speaker is addressing a single person. To say goodbye to two people (but not more) of mixed genders, it would have to be ëskni:ge’ae’; saying farewell to a whole group would be ësgwa:ge’gae’.

This relational grammar is why the Ganö:nyök speaker addresses not Earth generally but Ëthino’ëh yöëdzade’, where the ethi- prefix means a relation of all of us to her—Our Mother the Earth. Likewise, the shogwa- in Our Creator means all of us to him. The language aligns with a cultural pattern in which people generally keep close track of who everyone is related to. A member of the Seneca community always knows how they and others are situated in relation to others.

Those relationships are understood to be two-way reciprocal exchanges, and for that reason gift-giving is an important way to demonstrate those bonds. Each item in the Thanksgiving Address enacts that kind of reciprocal communication among relatives: an expression of gratitude for the gifts offered by that person, animal, force, or being that solidifies a two-way relationship.

Earth Songs are a central way for traditional Seneca people to establish, celebrate, and renew these relationships according to the spirit of Ganö:nyök. Many dances are explicitly linked to specific beings mentioned in the address, and we might extend the concepts a bit to include others, as in table 2. If we were to include ceremonial songs for seasonal celebrations like the Strawberry Festival or for healing, this table would easily have an entry for every item in the Thanksgiving Address. Many people also make and share Ë:sgä:nye:’ (New Women’s Shuffle Dance) songs that relate to items of the Thanksgiving Address, as in a Water Song shared on YouTube by the Akwesasne (Mohawk) Women’s Singers (video 2), or the song about strawberries that Allegany singer Jake George sang at the 2024 Seneca Powwow (July 20, 2024). These songs link people to each other—literally—and help them maintain relationships with the other beings to whom different songs are addressed.

Earth Songs, then, may be understood as an extension of the Seneca thanksgiving practices that Leon Shenandoah refers to as the fundamental duties of human beings. In the Haudenosaunee Creation story, the Earth itself was formed through dance. Sky Woman, the story says, fell from the Sky World and landed on the back of a giant turtle (Bardeau 2017; Parker 1923, 59–73; Hertzberg 1966, 11–22; Fenton 1998, 34–50). The muskrat and other animals brought up soil from the sea floor for her and she danced in a counterclockwise circle to spread the soil across the turtle’s back and make the world we know. Bill Crouse’s daughter Ashlyn told this story to explain how Earth Songs, and especially New Women’s Shuffle Dance, connects them to the Earth (Crouse and Dowdy 2023). They see themselves as part of a long line of dancers stretching back to Sky Woman. Earth Songs enable the human family to join together in a circle of gratitude linking them to all the rest of Creation and its Creator. Even more, the being referred to as Creator was one of Sky Woman’s twin sons, and Ja:no’s Bowen points out that even the Creator was part of a family.

Earth Songs are social dances, not ceremonial; but that distinction must be understood within a worldview that understands the sacred in terms of social relationships. Elder Al George describes Earth Songs not only as a form of relaxation, recreation, and simple fun for the community, but also as something that grounds them in who they are and connects them to their ancestors and to the land (George 2024). The community makes the dances and the dances make them. They renew relationships to each other and the whole extended, more-than-human family. The language of one older New Women’s Shuffle Dance song says this well (audio 1):

The way they do are doing things in the Sky World,
that is how our ways are as Real (Native) People.
It’s good fun and it occupies our minds.
While we are doing it now on the Earth
they are also doing it up there.

The circle of dancers on earth mirrors one in the Sky World and joins all together as one community. Part of the reason the dances are good fun is because when people are dancing with a spirit of gratitude, they are doing exactly what people were made to do.

Earth Songs make place in the circle for Ha’deögwe’da:geh, all different kinds of people, in a beautiful model of inclusion. At social dances like the intertribal dances at powwows on Haudenosaunee territory, different body types, genders, ages, tribes, clans, and even settlers are invited and welcomed to join. A social dance involves the active participation of everyone present who is able-bodied enough to move. Outside of educational presentations, the normal practice is that there are no spectators for social dancing. The dances are structured loosely enough that everyone can participate in their own way, from babies being carried to athletic young people to the very elderly who can barely shuffle one foot in front of the other. This is why Earth Songs have always been used on the literal and figurative woods’-edge clearing to welcome outsiders into the community and enable exchanges among Native nations and with settlers.

The practice of reciprocity is emphasized in Seneca stories about the origins of Earth Songs. As Bill tells the story, Robin Dance was a gift to humans from the robin. Likewise certain dances for the corn (though not the social Corn Dance) were gifts from the Corn Spirit to enable a healthier relationship after a period of neglect. Without sharing the details, Bill also notes that there are stories about private ceremonial songs in which someone at the margins of society becomes an intermediary to an animal or other being who gives them songs to take back to the human community. In all these cases the animal or spirit knows that humans need a way to relate to it and so give them the song to enable reciprocal relationship.

As the animals and beings did for their human family members who would have been helpless without their gifts, the Haudenosaunee people did likewise for the Euro-American guests who came to their territory. They adapted the Condolence Council and the woods’-edge protocols to use for treaties (Richter 2001, 129–150; Fenton 1998). Building on the practical symbols that Peacemaker had used to establish good relationships among the Six Nations before colonization, Haudenosaunee diplomats created the Two-Row Wampum and the image of the Covenant Chain to teach the Dutch and later the English how they could work together.

Earth Songs and Reciprocity in Local Communities: The Sing

Earth Songs build relationships in local Seneca communities whenever they are shared, but the aspect of reciprocity is highlighted especially in the event known as a Sing. Starting in the early twentieth century, mutual-aid groups began holding singing competitions to raise money for the needy in the local community, especially widows (Jemison and Reuben 2024; Diamond 2008, 95–100; Woodland Cultural Centre 1990, 83–100). People would gather from all over for joint-aid work like chopping firewood for the winter. In the evenings they would relax by sharing Ë:sgä:nye:’, New Women’s Shuffle Dance songs. In this setting only the songs were shared, not the dance. Singing societies developed like the Allegany Singing Society, and these groups competed as they shared sets of Women’s Dance songs contributed by their members. The songs document and preserve relationships among singers, between teachers and students, and between different towns and territories.

More than other types of Earth Songs, Ladies’ Dance songs celebrate human experience and community life. Singers make songs expressing everyday experiences. Songs shared by the Allegany Singers in a September 2022 recording session included topics of hunting, strawberries, and singing itself. In style, too, these songs engage with contemporary culture, making reference to popular songs, major-key sounding implied harmony, and even polyphony.

Songs are shared and remembered from teachers and relatives, making each set of songs a portrait of local community relationships—a way of remembering the community (see video ). The memory of who created each song is passed on as part of the song, particularly on the Allegany Territory. Very old Ë:sgä:nye:’ songs are remembered as Used-To-Be Songs and still appear in sets at Sings, though their makers’s names may be forgotten.

Relationships and reciprocity, then, provide the motivation for a Sing as part of community mutual-aid efforts, and they shape the style and subject matter of the songs shared and the ways they are shared. The songs remind the community who they are and where they have been, strengthening reciprocal bonds of friendship and family. These events also gather people from different territories and Haudenosaunee nations and allow for exchange. Bill often hears Women’s Dance songs from Allegany sung on other territories, and Allegany Ë:sgä:nye:’ found a worldwide audience with Joanne Shenandoah’s New Age and pop-style remixes (video 6).

Intertribal Exchange in the Earth Songs Repertory

Smoke Dance and Relationships among Native Nations

Today powwows on Haudenosaunee territory have become one of the main sites for sharing Earth Songs between Haudenosaunee nations, among Native nations, and with settlers. At the Salamanca and Akwesasne powwows, the Grand Entry goes in a counterclockwise circle, reverse of the normal practice elsewhere, and is led by the veterans bearing the flags while the singers sing Earth Songs. The normal events of Northern and Southern powwow dance and song are rooted in grass dances of the Western plains (Browner 2002), but at the powwows on Haudenosaunee territory they are supplemented with the distinctively Iroquois competition category of Smoke Dance.

Smoke Dance originated in exhibition shows, in which singers sped up traditional social-dance songs and dancers heightened the traditional moves of wasa:se’ (War Dance) to create a unique Haudenosaunee version of competitive, showy powwow dancing (video 3). Smoke Dance was first included in the powwow arena as a competition category at the Salamanca Powwow, which Bill Crouse’s family helped start in the 1990s, and it is now a widespread category on Haudenosaunee territory and increasingly outside as well.

The high, piercing cries of plains powwow songs and their huge drums, and the spiky, feather plains regalia contrast strikingly with the much more mellifluous tunes and singing style of the Haudenosaunee, coupled usually not with water drum but with a larger frame drum. The traditional songs are amped up—literally, on the giant powwow PA systems—but not as much as other powwow music. The traditional regalia of Haudenosaunee dancers is also plainer, closer to the body, and more modest than the alternatives.

Smoke Dance allows Haudenosaunee dancers to present their own distinct heritage in the context of an intertribal gathering. A powwow is in one sense a diplomatic event, a kind of congress of Native nations projecting an alternative, anticolonial vision of North America as an indigenous-dominated Turtle Island. Smoke Dance builds on earlier traditions of Haudenosaunee diplomacy. Earth Songs have been part of the reciprocal relationships among Haudenosaunee nations since the time of Peacemaker, and gatherings of nations for Haudenosaunee councils and treaties all likely included social dances. Since most of the Earth Songs are fundamentally the same across the Six Nations in both their melodies and their vocable words, these songs enable Haudenosaunee powwow participants to downplay their distinctions and project a sense of pan-Iroquois solidarity. This commonality is what enabled Bill Crouse to be the featured singer at the Akwesasne Powwow in September 2023 though it was Mohawk territory (video ).

Apart from powwows, Smoke Dance competitions and exhibitions are regular occurrences in Salamanca and elsewhere, with categories for each gender and age group. One memorable moment came in a Smoke Dance competition at the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca for Seneca Nation Heritage Day (June 11, 2022), when in the middle of the Golden Age Men’s dance, a toddler found his way out into the circle and the elderly dancers included him in their dances. Unlike other social dances, Smoke Dance competitions do create a distinction between participants and observers. There is a seated audience who applaud at the announcer’s invitation after each dance. Smoke Dance competitions often feature substantial cash prizes, which encourages participation and also raises the stakes for the audience.

Smoke Dance is one of a few occasions in which Earth Songs are sung in a completely different style and context from their original use. When Bill sings Robin Dance for Smoke Dance (one of his favorites for this purpose) it is at nearly double the normal tempo and follows a different structure of repeats. Bill has also on occasion repurposed Earth Songs in other settings. In summer 2023 he organized an exhibition lacrosse dance which coupled a choreographed lacrosse exhibition with Dzo’ä:gá’ Oënö’ (Raccoon Dance). In these ways Seneca singers continue to use Earth Songs with creativity and flexibility as tools to build reciprocal relationships.

Seneca people continue to use Earth Songs to build reciprocal relationships. Those relationships include their links to Mother Earth and her plants, animals, and natural forces, as well as the family and social relationships that make up the Seneca Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. They also extend to their connections to their non-Native neighbors. If settlers can listen to Earth Songs and understand the values of relationship and reciprocity that animate them, then new kinds of relationships may be able to grow between settlers and Natives in Seneca territory, rooted in the protocols the Haudenosaunee originally established for relating with Euro-Americans at the edge of the woods.

In Seneca villages before contact and well into the colonial period, the woods’-edge clearing was the meeting place of local insiders and visiting outsiders (Fenton 1998, 180–190; Richter 1992, 18). Visitors sang as they approached a village, and village residents began preparing for their meeting when they could hear them singing through the woods. They met at the edge of the woods and the locals greeted their visitors with a protocol based on the ceremonies for condoling the grieving, which included songs (select transcriptions by Gertrude Kurath in Fenton 1998, 733–737). They ritually wiped the tears from their eyes, opened their ears, and cleared the block in their throats caused by the griefs and hardships of the journey. This prepared both parties to receive each other and enter into relationship with a Good Mind. Once the guests were welcomed into the community, the outsiders would often be invited to participate in a community social dance in the evening. Starting with Standing Quiver, the lead singer would recruit the other singers and in turn draw the whole village into the dance. The songs and dances solidified the reciprocal connections among everyone present.

Earth Songs have continued that relational function up to the present day. Today the woods’ edge is found not only at the edge of a city or a reservation boundary, but at the meeting place of Seneca people following traditional and not-so-traditional Seneca lifestyles and religious practice, those living on and off territory, as well as indigenous and non-indigenous people. It is a meeting place for past and present, history and tradition. It is a liminal (threshold) space where old relationships can be strengthened and new relationships formed.

The Seneca Arts and Culture Center at Ganondagan State Historic Site was built around the concept of the Woods’ Edge Protocol. The walkway up to the center from the parking lot takes visitors through the stages of the woods’ edge greeting. Settlers and people of all kinds are welcome to the many free events at Ganondagan like the Winter Indigenous Arts Festival. When Bill Crouse and his group present Earth Songs there (figure 5), they are continuing the traditions of using these songs to create reciprocal relationships.

Bill Crouse’s Earth Song Presentations

Bill and others use the songs to educate settlers not only about Seneca music but about worldview and values, care for the Earth, and history. Bill’s presentations give settlers a way to connect with Seneca people and begin a reciprocal relationship with them. His events call on everyone to participate in the Native style; they are not for bystanders or objective scholarly observers.

For this settler (Andrew), Earth Songs are invitingly simple to dance but also surprisingly challenging and physically taxing to keep up. Settlers tend to be at first flattered and then humbled by the experience of dancing Earth Songs. They emerge from the last dance sweaty and smiling, with new relationships to their neighbors, and new friends in Bill and his group.

The 2023 Indigenous Peoples’ Day presentation by Bill Crouse and the Allegany River Indian Singers and Dancers at Genesee Valley Park in Rochester exemplified Bill’s typical program and themes. Bill began as he always does by introducing himself in Seneca and then in English. After giving a basic introduction to his group, the Seneca Nation, and Earth Songs, he told a simple version of the story of Standing Quiver Dance and then led his group dancing in a counterclockwise circle around the park shelter. He invited everyone to follow them and participate in the dance and around forty people did join their line, while as many watched from the side. Among other dances, Bill responded to recent unseasonably cold weather by including the Dance of the North, dedicated to the cold North Wind. In the Corn Dance, someone brought her retriever along with her in the line, prompting Bill to conclude by remarking, That’s the first time that I ever saw a dog doing Corn Dance, and then, to groans, I gotta say, it must be a corn dog! Bill took time to introduce each member of the group and explained their regalia, having first the women and then the men showcase their beautiful, handmade clothes and moccasins. The show included a presentational version of a Smoke Dance contest, with dancers of each gender and age group showing off their finest moves, with the youngest coming last and winning onlookers’ hearts. In accord with typical social-dance protocols, the final dance was Delaware Skin Dance.

Bill knows how to entertain a crowd of settlers, and his presentations are extremely diplomatic with regard to politics. This is partly because he was raised to believe that faithkeepers were not supposed to be partisan, something he said his mother continually reminds him. But every presentation still includes the themes of Seneca sovereignty, history, survival, and excellence. Bill always reminds listeners that the Seneca Nation is a living community with ancient roots deeply connected to their specific land with its creatures and its seasons. He stresses the longevity of their oral traditions as evidence that we’re still here. And he celebrates excellence by showcasing Seneca virtuosity in dance, singing, and regalia, always emphasizing that even his youngest children are learning these arts and well on their way to mastery. He also demonstrates a corny, irreverant Native humor that is so characteristic of American indigenous people despite being still so little recognized by non-Natives (Fixico 2017, 153–176; Deloria, Jr. 1969, 146–167).

Bill’s approach is to counter stereotypes not through direct confrontation but by showing people what Seneca people and their traditions are really like. He knows that there will be attendees who only think of Indians in the past tense, and so while he does stress the continuity of their traditions, he also will say, I should point out that we don’t dress like this every day, for the benefit of hearers who imagine the dancers have stepped out of a time machine or a primeval forest somewhere. One woman came up to Bill after a show at Ganondagan and asked how well the corn-husk outer moccasins she’d seen in the museum worked in the snow. I wouldn’t know, he told her. Most of the time I just wear my boots. Bill’s shows create a woods’-edge clearing, and settlers who may enter with ignorance or stereotypes will leave with the beginnings of a relationship with real Seneca people. The songs and dances serve as a gift from the Senecas back to settlers, providing a way for to enter into a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship.

Sharing the Land in Caneadea

In 2022 the town government of Caneadea, New York, reached out to the Seneca Nation government and asked how they could formally establish friendship—something that had never happened before (Ross 2023). After a long process of collaborative planning their efforts culminated in the Seneca-Caneadea Field Day on July 1, 2023. Intended to be an annual celebration of friendship, the Field Day was held a second time in June 2024 (Ross 2024).

Caneadea has been the site of one of the Seneca Nation’s reservations, one of the last ones they lost before ending up with just the territories they occupy now (Oberg 2016, 141–142). In a large field on the west bank of the Genesee River that was part of that reservation, on a hot day in midsummer, there was a formal ceremony followed by social dancing and a lacrosse demonstration game. Vendors and exhibitors from the Seneca Nation set up tents all across the field. The ceremony included speeches by Caneadea and Seneca Nation officials including SNI president Ricky Armstrong. Gifts were exchanged that had been custom-made for this occasion.

Bill sang the Seneca anthem he learned from Avery Jimerson, Sr., as they raised the Seneca Nation flag next to a town flag (video 7). Notably, they did not fly a New York State flag, the US flag, or the Haudenosaunee Hiawatha-belt flag, as the agreement of friendship was only between the town of Caneadea and the Seneca Nation of Indians. There was a humility and a specificity to that choice that reflected the relational understanding on both sides. This was certainly a political event but it was very specific to the communities involved. The type of relationship they hoped to build was pictured in the third flag they added in 2024, representing the Two-Row Wampum.

A mixed but largely white crowd listened to the speeches and many joined in the social dancing. Bill, Al George, and Jacob Dowdy sang as Bill’s group (mostly consisting of his extended family) danced. The first dance was a Friendship Dance followed by a typical social set starting with Standing Quiver and including New Women’s Shuffle Dance (video 8).

The format the next year was similar, with more Seneca presenters: joining Bill Crouse’s Allegany River Indian Dancers were the Indigenous Spirit Dancers led by Marty Jimerson, Jr., from the Cattaraugus Territory, and a hoop-dance group. The Indigenous Spirit Dancers began with a Seneca Welcome Dance, in which the women and men faced each other in parallel lines and at several points in the dance, came toward each other, interweaving the two lines to switch sides. The hoop-dance group danced to a variety of recorded contemporary Native music, including selections by the Mohawk and Cayuga hip-hop group The Halluci Nation (formerly A Tribe Called Red) and Robbie Robertson. They added a dose of humor by including NDN Kars by Anishinabe musician Keith Secola. Their presentation emphasized relationships with the Earth and with people.

I (Andrew) was struck by how much of the language used in the speeches stretched back to eighteenth-century treaty sessions—the Two-Row Wampum, the Covenant Chain, the Tree of Peace, and other metaphors were foundational. The whole event, held in a literal woods’ edge clearing, seemed almost to reverse the old ceremony in that it was not Seneca people welcoming outsiders to their village but settlers welcoming Senecas back to their own land, now as guests. One YouTube commenter titled the day, Caneadea Field Day. The Return!.

But one could also read it the other way. Here as in the eighteenth century, the settlers had few protocols that would suffice. The Senecas assumed the main burden of ceremony. Two hundred years later somehow it was still the Senecas creating a dance circle and inviting whites to join in friendship, welcoming settlers to step onto familiar land with a new understanding—that the settlers had been the guests all along. Senecas understood land through the worldview articulated by the Thanksgiving Address, not as an object to be owned or a set of privileges to be bestowed, but as a web of relationships to living beings. Others could become part of that web of relationships, even settlers. They could share the land and its resources for the same reason we all must share our friends: we are grateful for their friendship but we do not have the right to limit who else they are friends with.

In our view, since this land was guaranteed to the Senecas by the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which has not been supplanted by another legally ratified treaty, it would be better for the town of Caneadea to actually give this land back to the Seneca Nation, and only then to work together to figure out how the Senecas could share the land with them. But establishing friendship and sharing the land, even for one day a year, are at least good steps on the path forward. That no other city in the region has yet made such a step indicates how far settlers have to go.

In this event all three of this project’s dialectic themes come together. Earth and land define not just Mother Earth or the Genesee valley in themselves, but reciprocal relationships with Our Mother the Earth through a specific place. The Creator’s Game, lacrosse, was played probably on that very field in Caneadea, for centuries before the return in July 2023. The Fish Dance songs sung on that day were made to honor the same fish swimming in the Genesee only a few hundred yards away.

History and tradition are at play here because of the way traditional ceremonies, metaphors, songs, and dances, were used to shape a historic event and respond to the history of that place. Several of Bill’s choices were rooted in history: the flag song, Friendship Dance, Standing Quiver. But the whole event responded to history by creating a new tradition: this event is intended to recur annually. The answer to a cycle of betrayal and abuse is a new cycle of trust and friendship. People forget that places are defined by how we use them, and we can therefore start using them differently.

Above all, the event was a picture of what can happen when settler guests listen to their Native hosts and learn how to build healthy patterns of relationship and reciprocity. Three images that were highlighted at the Caneadea Field Day show the way forward for other communities: the Two-Row Wampum, the Covenant Chain, and the Dance Circle.

Three Ways of Picturing Settler–Indigenous Relationships

The Two-Row Wampum

The Two-Row Wampum or Gaswëhda’ was originally a treaty with the Dutch in the seventeenth century (Tehanetorens [Ray Fadden] 1999, 72–75; Hill 2017, 79–131; Oberg 2016, 12–13, 161; Fenton 1998, 224–242). Wampum beads were made from clam shells and woven into strings or belts that served as mnemonic devices used to communicate messages and make agreements. The belt encoded a message or an agreement through symbols. All the people involved in the communication had to remember the message and preserve it in their own oral traditions; the belt would only remind them. This particular belt (figure 7) had two rows of dark wampum beads down the center with a narrow row of white beads between.

Seneca Nation President Ricky Armstrong, Sr., explained the significance of the Two-Row Wampum at the second annual Seneca-Caneadea Field Day (video 10):

Good afternoon, everyone. As we say in the Seneca language, we are thankful that you are well. It is my pleasure to be back here with our friends and neighbors in Caneadea and to continue a tradition that was started last year, marking an important but meaningful return to the lands of our ancestors. I’m happy to be here again on behalf of the Seneca Nation government.

It was more than 225 years ago when our ancestors signed the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797. As part of that treaty the United States officially recognized eleven Seneca reservations. Among them was Caneadea. All of us here today share roots in this beautiful territory where heaven rests upon the earth. Like our Seneca ancestors did centuries ago before being relocated, many of your ancestors made this land home as well and just like us, part of your heart and your history will forever be connected to this place. In that way we are to be forever connected. Last year we reestablished this important connection between our communities. Today we again rekindle our friendship and the spirit of community.

You may have noticed that the bottom of this year’s logo for the Seneca Caneadea Field Day events displays a white belt that contains two purple lines running through it. This represents the Two-Row Wampum belt. Here is a replica of the original. In our culture wampum belts are crafted from white and purple shells created from clamshells. Traditionally the clam shells beads were woven to create various patterns and symbols to record significant events and agreements or treaties.

The Two-Row Wampum belt represents a treaty entered into in the year 1613 between the people of the Longhouse also known as the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch people. On the Two-Row Wampum belt the white background represents a river, the River of Life. One purple line represents the path of the Natives, the Haudenosaunee, traveling the river in our own canoe, with our own culture, laws, and traditions. The other purple line represents the path of the non-Native settlers in their own boat with their own laws and culture. We won’t disembark from our canoe and attempt to steer your boat, and we expect you to stay in your boat and not interfere with us or try to steer our canoe.

That is the Two-Row concept: two parallel lines that never cross. It’s based on peace and friendship and most important, on mutual respect: live and let live. We honor and live by that Two-Row concept to this day. Today is a celebration of culture, a celebration of history, and above all else a celebration of mutual respect expressed in the Two-Row Wampum belt.

I hope that you will enjoy today’s events and you will engage and appreciate the demonstrations and exhibits of our culture and traditions, and most of all that we will share in the spirit of community and togetherness that we will carry forward with us not just today but every day. So for being here and for celebrating our shared history and for renewing our friendship, nya:wëh, thank you.

The Two-Row Wampum portrayed an image of peaceful coexistence, sharing space and natural resources, but also leaving each other be, according to the same ideal for how Native nations were supposed to relate to each other. It implied respect and cooperation but also healthy distance.

Not only is the Two-Row Wampum a way of remembering a relational agreement of the past; it is also a tool for thinking about settler–Native relationships today. Algonquin/Mohawk scholar Bonnie Freeman presented a whole paper at the 2023 Conference on Iroquois Research just on the three rows of white beads in the middle of the Two-Row (Freeman 2023). Did they only represent distance, like a Demilitarized Zone between the two communities? Or did they represent a more active relationship of peace and cooperation? She actually got grant funding to take the Two-Row message almost literally, by going on a canoe trek with a settler friend and writing about what they learned in a shared experience where they had to cooperate closely or be capsized. In her reading, the Two-Row directs us to create space for an ethical co-existing of friendship, respect, and peace, where one way of being and doing does not overtake the other.

The Two-Row Wampum makes clear that Native people sought ways from the beginning to live in mutually beneficial ways with the European newcomers. In multiple treaty negotiations, Haudenosaunee speakers said something to the effect that Our roads have always been open to you (Fenton 1998; Richter 1992). There was plenty of land to spare, which the Haudenosaunee did not claim to own anyway. There was an assumption both of reciprocity and of respect for differing ways of life.

Many Native people today, despite all the intervening history, still cultivate this kind of open, sharing attitude. Even though the Allegany Territory has never been part of the United States, it has no border checkpoints or customs. Despite being a settler living off Seneca territory, all Andrew had to do to begin learning the Seneca language was sign up for a free online course through the Nation’s Language Department. Bill is coauthoring this project with the support of his community, though there will always be differing attitudes about how much to share. That openness comes with an expectation of reciprocity, that the settler with whom knowledge is shared will be responsible for that knowledge and use it for the community’s benefit (Diamond 2019, 248).

The Two-Row might also be read to mean something like separate but equal or stay in your lane, and some settlers still need to hear that. There are situations where Native people would prefer to just be left alone. Native people don’t need help from settlers because of a supposed deficit inherent in their biology or culture. The problems well-meaning settlers want to help with—poverty, addiction, language and culture loss—are ones that settlers created. Native nations would not need grant funds or studies from linguists for language revitalization if generations of forced re-education in abusive boarding schools had not nearly driven the language extinct. They would not need economic aid if the US and Canada had not taken away the land that was their economic base. There would be no need for digital-humanities projects like this one to document oral tradition if all the conditions that allowed oral tradition to work effectively for thousands of years had not been so violently disturbed. Native people are perfectly capable of determining their own needs and developing ways to address them, and when they are able to define their own space the results are beautiful to behold, as anyone can see at a powwow. There you see a glimpse of a modern America that is a confederation of hundreds of ancient but living and thriving indigenous nations—plus a few immigrant guests living in their midst, sharing the land.

On the other hand, the Two-Row is not a cop-out for settlers who just don’t want to do the work or take the risks required to remedy their relationship with Native people. In music schools and concert halls, a much greater risk than assimilationism is segregation, and greater than that is the danger of pure erasure. But the Two-Row Wampum challenges settler institutions to rethink how they approach their goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion with respect to Native people, because Native nations are not necessarily looking for inclusion. Instead of programming music by a white composer that integrates Native elements, or even programming music by a Native composer that conforms to Classical canons and can be played on European instruments according to European aesthetics, the leaders of these institutions might consider whether it would be better simply to create space on their stage for Native performers to present according to their own agenda; or perhaps to dedicate some of their funding to support the work of Native cultural revitalizers even if the results can’t be immediately showcased on stage. Settler scholars who are concerned about watering down the canon by including Native American music in their courses might consider the alternative: funding an entire course of study in the local Native nation’s music, taught by local Native teachers compensated at a rate on par with the settler faculty (even if they don’t have PhDs), and making it required for all music majors in addition to the content focused on the European canon. University music schools and departments could be organizing Native-run indigenous music and arts festivals to be held annually in the nicest building on campus and promoted heavily to the whole community. Let the settler institution handle the finances and logistics, since the space and the money originated with Native land anyway; let the Native community take the lead on the actual content presented. That kind of initiative would embody the Two-Row Wampum as a cooperative gesture that shares resources but also allows for cultural difference.

The Covenant Chain

The second image that the Haudenosaunee provided to Euro-Americans was the Covenant Chain, which also originated in negotiations with the Dutch and then was later extended to the English (Hill 2017, 79–131; Venables 2010). One notable account comes from the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, published by Benjamin Franklin (Virginia and Six Nations of New York 1744). As Haudenosaunee orators envisioned it, the first Dutch ships to anchor off the shore of Turtle Island were tied by a bark or reed rope to a tree on land. Recognizing that the Dutch seemed weak and perpetually in need, the Haudenosaunee diplomats offered for the Dutch to tie their ship metaphorically to the Great Tree of Peace that stood at the center of their confederacy, at Onondaga (or to the Great Hill there). As the relationship between the nations strengthened, they spoke of replacing the rope with an iron chain, and later a silver one. Both sides had an obligation to keep the chain bright and free of rust.

When they met in treaty it was to polish the chain of friendship. Often the reason for a meeting between Haudenosaunee and Dutch or English ambassadors was some breach of their agreement: for example, at the 1744 treaty three Native men had been killed in Ohio. The Haudenosaunee orators said to the English, in effect, You have let down your end of the agreement and allowed the chain of friendship to become rusty. Now we are prepared to do what is necessary to polish the chain and make it bright and strong again. But next time please remember your obligation.

The Covenant Chain goes beyond the live-and-let-live ethos of the Two-Row Wampum. It says that settler and indigenous nations have an active relationship—we are actually bound to each other, and not as equals. Settlers depended on Native people for survival in the early colonial period, and their prosperity has been derived from Native land ever since, including its crops and the knowledge of how to grow them. The perilous state of our environment after settlement and industrialization is a sign that settlers do not actually know how to survive in this land. Settlers need the ancient wisdom of America’s indigenous peoples to save them from the damage they have done. Native people do not need settlers’ help nearly as much as the reverse.

At the 2024 Caneadea Field Day, the former Town Supervisor Philip Stockin’s remarks, following President Armstrong’s teaching about the Two-Row, drew on the image of the Covenant Chain:

It’s my privilege and honor to be part of this historic gathering once again, the second annual Seneca Caneadea field day. We welcome each of you from near and far.

Last year I mentioned that I grew up right across Route 19 from here and spent many hours exploring this area being fully aware that this was Seneca land. Indeed the history of the Seneca nation here in the Genesee Valley is deeply woven into the fabric of this place and we are honored today to welcome members of the Seneca nation back to their ancestral land while also celebrating our growing friendship for a second year. When nurturing a friendship the Senecas compare it to polishing a chain and not letting it become rusty. May today’s events in a park along the banks of the beautiful Genesee River polish that chain that connects us.

We trust that today will be an opportunity to listen to learn and a chance to gain new appreciation for the timeless traditions and culture of our Seneca neighbors. In a moment when politics and people are so polarized, our hope is that this event continues to serve as a positive model of renewed friendship, bringing people together in a spirit of respect and honor. So on behalf of the town of Caneadea we welcome you to this special place where the heavens rest upon the earth.

Though the Covenant Chain was a specific agreement of the peoples in a particular region, the basic concept applies throughout North America, which is that settlers are guests on Native land and that every non-Native person living on this continent today has inherited a legacy of relationship between Native people and settlers that preceded them. Settlers are already bound to Native people; it is just that they have allowed the chain of friendship to rust, even to break, or to be buried and forgotten. So part of how I (Andrew) can be faithful to my own settler ancestors is to honor the commitment I was born into, and find, restore, polish, and strengthen that Covenant Chain. Settlers don’t need a PhD in indigenous studies to connect with Native people, they don’t need to have an Indian fetish or a beadwork hobby, they don’t need to believe their great-grandmother was an Indian princess—they are already connected in a reciprocal relationship, and the question is simply what kind of relationship they will cultivate from now forward.

The Covenant Chain is not one of penance or guilt, nor of exploitation and control; it is a chain of friendship. People don’t conduct studies on their friends and present theories about them at academic conferences. They don’t steal from their friend, present their friend’s work as their own, or improve it by changing it into something radically different that the friend wouldn’t recognize.

The Covenant Chain embodies relationship work that requires both sides to be actively involved. A strong link results from ongoing, never-ending, and hopefully joyful work.

The Relational Goals of This Project

The Songs at the Woods’ Edge project is explicitly intended to contribute to reciprocal relationships between Seneca people like Bill and their settler guests like Andrew. Much as we are concerned about harmful appropriation, we are more worried about erasure and ignorance. Better to make good, authentic material available with proper context than to allow people to continue thinking Haudenosaunee people exist only in history books, if that.

For me (Andrew) this project provides a way to polish the Covenant Chain of friendship that my own ancestors passed on to me, whether they knew it or not. What I initially envisioned as a traditional Western research project, where I extract sources from the field like minerals and then refine them into a scholarly product, turned into something much more interesting, rewarding, challenging, and unpredictable—a relationship. I hope that it can be the beginning of a new relationship for you, too.