Faces Yet Beneath the Ground
The Teaching
…Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground — the unborn of the future Nation.
— Gayanashagowa, Article 28, Newhouse version, in Arthur C. Parker, The Constitution of the Five Nations, 1916
Make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming. Those faces looking up from the earth, layer upon layer waiting their time.
So because I stand here as a representative of our Nation, still carrying the titles, seven generations ago someone was looking out for me or else I wouldn't be here. So each one of us are any seventh generation and ahead of us are our responsibilities.
— Oren Lyons (Joagquisho), Faithkeeper, Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation, University of Arizona, 17 April 2008
Commentary
The charge is spoken at the installation of a chief. That setting is most of its meaning: it is addressed to a particular person taking a particular office, and it is bracketed by instructions about being proof against anger and casting self-interest into oblivion. It is a job description, not an aphorism.
A correction belongs on this page, because the sentence most often quoted as this teaching is not from the Great Law. "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations" appears in no published version of the text. The words seven generations do not occur in it at all. The earliest traceable circulation of that sentence is a US company's branding from 1988, taken by its own account from an employee's recollection rather than from any document, and it acquired quotation marks on the way. The principle is real and the Haudenosaunee state it in their own words, in their own current publications and through their own Faithkeepers. The sentence is not theirs.
Which is an object lesson for the subject at hand. A real thing was passed on, and a false thing was passed on beside it, and the false one travelled further because it was easier to repeat.
The genuine continuity is the better material anyway. Parker's 1916 text has faces yet beneath the surface of the ground. Oren Lyons, speaking in 2008, out of an oral tradition that long predates the printing, reaches for the same image: those faces looking up from the earth, layer upon layer waiting their time. Ninety-two years apart, and the second is not quoting the first. That is not evidence about transmission. It is transmission, observable.
Two cautions on sourcing. The Great Law is an oral constitution, and every English text is a written recension produced under particular circumstances; the Newhouse version was not adopted by the Confederacy Council, which is why Parker printed a chiefs'-endorsed version alongside it. Saying "the Great Law says" without naming a version overclaims. And the other seven in these articles — the thickness of a chief's skin, seven spans — is a separate instruction about imperviousness to criticism. Letting the two sevens touch is precisely how the surrounding fabrications were manufactured.