“The Haudenosaunee remember the Revolutionary War as a whirlwind. In its wake, we were dispossessed of our extensive homelands through pressure and fraud.” Alan Michelson




What is George Washington's legacy among Native Americans? To the Haudenosaunee (also called the Six Nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora), he is known as Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), a title inherited from his great-grandfather John Washington, who murdered five Native chiefs during a 1675 parley. George Washington earned the title for himself by ordering the brutal 1779 Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, which methodically devastated Haudenosaunee crops and forty villages that sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. Some historians have described this campaign as an attempted genocide. Michelson, a Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River who was raised in Boston, projects imagery of this painful history onto a familiar bust of Washington: colonial maps, an historical marker commemorating the destruction, flickering flames, the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua between the United States and the Haudenosaunee; and finally, the George Washington wampum belt ratifying that treaty. In this final photograph, Washington almost disappears into the darkness, highlighting the significance of the wampum belt as a representation of Indigenous diplomacy, sovereignty, and survival.

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