CHAPTER IV
Lodge Life
"Right now those forty-foot pythons in Virginia are looking pretty damn good to me," Ed told Uncle Jack over breakfast, after spending a fitful night on a straw mattress in a cold, primitive looking, bark-covered longhouse. The good news was that there was limited indoor plumbing and limited electricity available in the lodge. A florescent lamp hung from the rafters helped to light the cavernous interior of the longhouse. The bad news was that electricity was solar-panel powered, and only present on sunny days. "What the hell have you gotten us into here?"
"It's the adventure of a lifetime, my boy!" enthused Jack, between mouth-fulls of whatever it was they were eating. "Wait until you hear about it!"
They were sitting in the longhouse common room at a crude wooden table on crude wooden chairs. The big common room they sat in ran down the center of the entire length of the longhouse, perhaps a hundred feet or so. From the bark-lined roof twenty feet above them dozens of bundles of corn-cobs, tobacco leaves, and dozens of baskets and bags were hung, most containing drying foods that would feed the household through the coming long winter. Woven mats formed walls and covered hard-packed soil floors.
Ed and Mary had over the years many times watched 'reality' TV 'house hunter' programs that showed snooty perspective buyers going psycho when during the course of a home inspection they discovered wallpaper on walls, or floors that weren't real hardwood, or counter tops that weren't granite, or bathrooms and kitchens that were 'outdated' or painted the wrong color. What would they think of a home that essentially lacked what modern folks considered to be actual walls, ceilings, floors, or kitchens? This lodge and its furnishings were 'outdated' by maybe a thousand years!
To either side of the narrow common room were more than a dozen small rooms, two of which had been assigned to Ed and Mary. One was essentially a bedroom for the couple; the second was now a storage room into which all of the contents of the U-Haul truck had been moved by Tribesmen. The Tribe even thoughtfully returned the empty rental truck to a U-Haul office in the next county, relieving Ed of an arduous drive. They also moved the Ford to the Tribe parking lot and added some sort of gunk to the fuel tank to extend the life of the gasoline. After all, Ed was told, winter was due very soon and they wouldn't be able to drive anywhere at all anyway. Swell.
Ed and Mary were grateful to have their things unloaded and with them, but what useful purpose most of their belongings could serve was quite uncertain. Ed had heard several of the Tribesmen mutter something about "firewood" as they piled crumpled boxes and damaged furniture into the storage room, completely filling it from top to bottom.
Uncle Jack occupied two rooms opposite to theirs. One was his bedroom, while the other, much larger room was crammed with ancient artifacts and bookshelves full of books and papers. A third of the room was occupied by stacks of wooden crates that carried specimens from decades of his previous archeological efforts conducted mostly throughout North America. Most of the room had crude wood tables that were piled high with old bones, pottery, wood carvings, and other items collected in Mohawk County.
"Most of my current collection occupies two more rooms at the far end of the lodge," Jack explained. "Excavation activates have ceased now until summer."
A wood fire nearby the table where they sat spat flames and provided welcome heat and light. Most smoke from it rose to the center of the common room and escaped through small openings. Several wood fires ran the length of the longhouse, tended by a pair of young Mohawk girls that constantly added wood.
An older teenage girl tended a wicker basket where breakfast was still being cooked. Occasionally she used green-wood sticks to skillfully pluck a grape-fruit-sized hot rock from one of the fires, rinse the ashes off of the rock with a splash of water, then artfully drop the stone into a big water-tight basket containing a thick porridge that Jack had identified as mush. Presumably it was the same gooey stuff that already filled the big plate in the middle of their table and smelled and tasted wonderful when combined with sweet syrup.
"Tell us about our adventure right now, Jack," Mary demanded.
"Can't," said Jack. "Tribal secrets are involved that I can only guess at. Mouse or Turtle Man will have to tell you most of it. I have my own twist to things but that too will also have to wait. Want more maple syrup with your mush?"
"Figures," Ed remarked, as he indeed poured more sweet syrup over his mush and mixed it in. "Hey, exactly what is this goopy stuff we're eating anyway? I've had corn-meal mush plenty of times but this is different."
"It's very different, Ed," said Jack. "This is mostly acorn mush, the first of the season. There is traditional white corn-meal in it also, as well as some beans, wild onions, and various herbs. The syrup is made from several tree saps that include sugar maple. Very tasty, isn't it?"
"Acorns?" Ed exclaimed. "People don't eat acorns!"
"Of course they do, Ed!" Jack informed them. "They have to compete with squirrels and bears to get them, of course, not to mention little worms and so-forth."
"I can assure you that they are safe and highly nutritious, young man!" proclaimed a new voice. "Once the dried nuts are pounded into flour and the bitter tannin is leached out of them they become a near-perfect food. We're lucky to have acorn mush so early in the season, but I suppose that early cold weather isn't altogether good news. The growing season gets shorter by the decade, I'm afraid. At some point soon the acorns won't have long enough of a growing season to mature and a key sector of the ecosystem will collapse."
Jack followed by Ed and Mary rose from the table to greet the newcomer, a short rotund white man of past middle age, with receding grey hairline, bushy grey beard and mustache, and thick bifocals. "This is my very good friend and colleague Dr. Richard Tuttle," Jack announced. "Call him Doc."
"And these are of course Mary and Ed," Doc Tuttle noted, as he quickly shook their hands before occupying an open seat at the table and reaching for the food. "Jack has been telling me a lot about you two, much of it positive."
"He has told us absolutely nothing about you, Doc," Mary noted, "except that we could expect another person for breakfast."
"I'm the token white-man medical doctor," Doc explained, as he helped himself to several big scoops of acorn mush and poured syrup over it. "I run a little health clinic near the Administration Building."
"Five years ago the Doc helped me come aboard here as the token white-man archeologist," Jack explained. "We've been working together ever since."
"The Tribe strictly regulates outsiders and the IA would only pay for the two of us," Doc added. "I could have used an entire science team here but I've had to settle for Jack. There are many things here that I needed help with in understanding."
"Things that I suppose you can't tell us about because they are Tribe secrets," Ed guessed.
"Yes I suppose that's pretty much true for now," Doc agreed. "Some things should be eased into. But we can certainly start to give you background information that will help you better understand the general situation here."
"That's our marching orders from the Tribe anyway," said Jack.
"OK," Said Mary. "How many people live on the Reservation?"
"About ten thousand or so," Doc replied, "most of them are centered here near the Mountain."
"With you extending their lives with modern medical care, why are there only ten thousand of them?" Mary asked.
"Good question," said Doc. "Electricity is limited, which leaves a lot of free time in the evenings for couples to procreate."
"Worldwide, electricity normally provides an enormous amount of birth control," noted Jack.
"Nowadays I provide modern birth control," said Doc. "Traditionally women would chew on pine needles to abort an unwanted fetus."
"Yuk!" Ed had to say. "Do many non-Mohawk people live on the Reservation?"
"Nope; everyone in the County is full-blood Mohawk except for the four of us," said Jack. "This club is very exclusive with its membership. Not even the
Indians of other tribes are very welcome here, not even the Mohawk of other tribes."
"So these folks are isolationists," Ed noted.
"Rabid isolationists, historically," agreed Doc. "Over the last couple of decades however, they have by necessity begun to open up to the outside world. They have introduced selected technologies into their society, including some water and sewer technology, thank the gods! They use an off-Reservation post-office box and a growing number of them even have TVs and the internet via satellite. They send some of their best and brightest to visit the outside world for education and earnings. They farm most of their own food, but have introduced several new crop varieties to augment traditional foods and to adapt to the shortening growing season."
"Traditional corn, beans, and squash remain the primary foods," Doc noted, "and they also grow traditional artichokes, pumpkins, sunflowers, tobacco, and herbs. Additionally they harvest wild nuts, onions, and berries. They practice techniques that sustain soil resources, things that other organic farmers of the world would envy. They have practiced agriculture here for over ten thousand years. That's a very long time to practice agriculture without wearing out the soil."
"I suspect that they may have originated agriculture in this part of the world," added Jack. "They had a necessity to stay here and the only way they could do it was to develop agriculture that was sustainable."
"Historically many ancient civilizations have risen and fallen based on their agricultural practices," Ed noted. "It is a lesson that many modern societies still need to learn. What else do they eat here?"
"There are trout and all sorts of wild game," Jack added. "They have a really nifty recipe for roasted raccoon. Wait until you taste it!"
"Swell," Ed managed to respond without puking as he sought to quickly change the subject. "Tell us about clans," he requested. "We keep hearing about clans."
"The clans are matrilineal organizations that cut across tribe boundaries," said Jack. "The Mohawk have wolf, bear, and turtle clans, usually with woman clan leaders. Other Haudenosaunee Confederation tribes have those clans and several others. All the members of a clan are considered to be of one family, and members of the same sub-clan are considered to be such close family members that they are forbidden to marry each other."
"That leads to some very healthy gene mixing between clans." noted Doc, with a wink.
"What does Haudenosaunee mean?" Ed asked.
"Haudenosaunee means 'people who build a longhouse' Jack explained; that is what the Iroquois call themselves. The term 'Iroquois' is actually a somewhat derogatory Algonquian term that means bark-eater, referring perhaps to porcupines, but they don't very much mind being called Iroquois. The longhouse concept is central to the Iroquois Confederacy. A traditional longhouse has a door at each end. The Confederacy regards itself to be one big happy family that lives in one big metaphorical longhouse with a door in the west and a door in the east. The Mohawk tribes are the keepers of the eastern door of the Iroquois Confederacy."
Ed shook his head in wonder. He was familiar with the history and traditions of dozens of different European nations, but knew almost nothing of the Native American peoples that inhabited his own country.
"And what does matrilineal mean?" Mary asked.
"Families are defined by the linage of the mother," said Jack. "The marriage of a bear clan man and turtle clan woman results in a turtle clan family that will live with the turtle clan and produce turtle clan children. Clan mothers provide leadership and frankly they do most of the work and make most decisions. In the old days that used to free the men for warfare. The women tend to choose men as chiefs and sometimes as clan leaders but at the end of the day they hold most political power."
"The men no longer engage in warfare, but instead of war parties many of them go off-Reservation to school or to iron worker jobs," added Doc. "But gender boundaries are disappearing. Nowadays many men help around the Reservation doing chores that were traditionally woman's work, including farming. Likewise women are becoming more involved in what men traditionally do. Many of the women are becoming educated now, and English is universally used in the Tribe as their second language."
"And how do they keep them down on them farm once they have seen New York City?" Mary asked.
"Like most Iroquois, they have very strong tribal and clan loyalties," said Doc. "Most Mohawk iron workers still retain homes in the Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River regions of Canada."
"And not just for tax purposes," Jack added. "The Tribe that lives here is strongly united around performing a secret mission that they have pursued for millennia."
"Millennia?" Ed responded. "You guys keep claiming that this tribe has been here for thousands of years. I thought that Native Americans tended to be somewhat nomadic. Hell, any group of humans, Native American or not, will move around a bit every few generations to find better hunting grounds or whatever."
"Not the Tribe that lives here," said Jack. "They were established here before early Egyptian, Sumerian, or East-Asian societies arose. My carbon dated artifacts indicate that they have been here at Giants' Rest for well over ten thousand years. Not even encroachment by other tribes or by the Europeans has budged them out of this valley."
"That sounds like a very long time," Mary commented.
"Much longer than there have been Mohawks or an Iroquois Confederacy," said Jack. "The Tribe joined the Mohawks a few hundred years ago and adapted much of their way of life, but they are distinct from the other Mohawk tribes. To be sure there has been some exchange of genes between this tribe and others, but that has been minimal."
"My genetic testing has confirmed that," said Doc. "Even with other Mohawk tribes there hasn't been much exchange of spouses."
"But all of this is astounding!" Ed said. "Why haven't I heard about this in the news or history journals or reality TV shows?"
Jack and Doc exchanged nervous glances.
"This relates to even bigger secrets, doesn't it?" guessed Mary. "It has to do with a Tribe mission involving Giants' Rest Mountain and the reason why this tribe has guarded it for thousands of years."
"AND THE REASON WHY YOU ARE HERE," confirmed a voice in Ed's head. He turned in his chair to find Tsino:wen standing behind him, grinning. Mouse had snuck up on the token white folks as quiet as a mouse.
"Great A'no:wara Ronkwe will see Ed Rumsfeld now," she announced with a small squeaky voice that nevertheless wielded great power and resonated telepathically in Ed's head.
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