What if the most radical way to commemorate a war … was peace?
As the United States gears up for its 250th anniversary in July, the usual pageantry is already taking shape: fireworks, reenactments and the familiar theater of patriotic memory. But a few miles east of Rochester, at Ganondagan State Historic Site, the celebration will look very different.
The juried Hodinöhsö:ni’ Art Show returns April 8-11 for its eighth year, filling the Seneca Art & Culture Center with work by 32 Haudenosaunee artists. The exhibition revolves around a deceptively simple question: what is a Haudenosaunee peace?
The title offers the first clue. Sgë:nö is a Seneca word that translates as “peace,” but the concept reaches further — toward wellness, balance and a right relationship with the natural world. Framed against the anniversary of a war that reshaped the continent, the idea carries quiet force.
Long before the United States declared independence from British rule, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations — had already established a complex system of governance built on consensus and diplomacy. Known as the Great Law of Peace, the structure emphasized balance among nations and responsibility across generations.
The Revolutionary War shattered that equilibrium. Haudenosaunee communities were divided by alliances with opposing sides. Villages were burned. Land was seized. The political and cultural reverberations continue today. Yet the exhibition unfolding at Ganondagan doesn’t dwell on loss. Instead, it asks how peace continues to live, and evolve, within Haudenosaunee culture.
“This is about showing what peace means to us today,” said curator Kristin Asche. “How it appears in our lives, our stories, our work.”
That framing immediately shifts the show away from the museum trope of “heritage display.” These artists aren’t presenting artifacts from a distant past. They’re working in the present tense, using clay, fiber, paint and wood to think through sovereignty and survival.
For Mohawk ceramic artist and filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox, the theme begins with the physical act of making. Working out of the Mohawk Nation territory of Akwesasne, Fox builds pottery using traditional Haudenosaunee techniques; coiling, burnishing and hand-forming clay without a wheel. The surfaces sometimes reference figures like the Great Peacemaker or the Tree of Peace, central to Haudenosaunee cosmology. But the work isn’t nostalgic. Fox treats tradition as a living language, capable of speaking directly to the present.
What does it mean, her ceramics quietly ask, to lay down weapons today? Not only physical weapons, but ideological ones: the habits and assumptions that fracture communities or sever people from the land. In Fox’s hands, peace becomes less an abstract ideal and more a continual act of repair.
Painter and writer Kristin Witbeck Lee approaches the same theme through family memory. A descendant of Seneca artisan Luis R. Lee, she grew up moving between Seneca territories and suburban Connecticut—two worlds that rarely seemed to speak the same language. Returning to Ganondagan, she says, carries the feeling of homecoming.
“Ganondagan is like a Mother Country,” said Lee. “Visiting this land feels like visiting a grandmother.”
In the exhibition she presents a portrait of her great-grandmother Nora “Rocking Boat,” a Seneca Clan mother whose teachings shaped Lee’s sense of identity. The painting blends personal memory with cultural symbolism, suggesting how knowledge travels quietly through generations.
For Lee, peace is rooted in listening. The idea reaches back to the story of Jigonsaseh, the woman who first heard the message of the Great Peacemaker and helped spread the Great Law of Peace. Listening, in that tradition, is not passive, it’s a civic responsibility.
Other artists ground the theme in everyday cultural practice.
Seneca artist Penny Minner, whose work spans black ash basketry, cornhusk dolls, watercolor and graphic art, approaches storytelling as a form of stewardship.
“We live our culture every day, alongside our neighbors,” she said. “I have a duty to tell our stories and history for generations, even those we will never meet.”
Her cornhusk dolls begin with techniques passed down from her mother. At first glance, they resemble traditional craft figures. Look closer, though, and contemporary narratives emerge. Women appear as central characters, reflecting the matrilineal structure of Haudenosaunee society and foregrounding the leadership of Indigenous women.
The dolls carry a subtle lesson: peace is sustained not only through diplomacy but through daily acts of care and cultural continuity.
Onondaga painter Barry Powless takes a different route, turning to agriculture and portraiture. His painting, “Three Sisters: Harvest,” draws on the traditional Haudenosaunee planting system in which corn, beans and squash grow together, each crop supporting the others. The composition shows Haudenosaunee women presenting a bowl of the harvest.
The symbolism runs deeper than agriculture. Communities flourish, the image suggests, when each part contributes to the wellbeing of the whole.
Powless grew up on the Onondaga Nation, surrounded by the teachings of hereditary leadership — his father and grandfather both served as chiefs. Portraiture, for him, becomes a way of honoring not just individuals but the spiritual frameworks guiding Haudenosaunee life.
And all across the exhibition, materials carry their own meanings. Black ash basketry encodes generations of ecological knowledge. Clay connects artists to ancestral pottery traditions. Beadwork demands patience and discipline. Wood and fiber record relationships with specific landscapes. In each case, the act of making becomes a form of thinking.
The show’s juried format underscores that seriousness. Works compete across five divisions— beadwork, basketry, traditional arts, fine art 2D, and fine art 3D — with $15,000 in total prizes, including a $2,500 Best of Show award. Each piece will also be photographed for Ganondagan’s archives, expanding a growing visual record of contemporary Haudenosaunee art.
Still, competition isn’t really the point.
The deeper energy of the show comes from the conversation it creates between artists, between generations and between visitors and the ideas embedded in the work. By centering the exhibition around a single question — What is a Haudenosaunee peace? —curators invite viewers to encounter Indigenous art not just as aesthetic experience but as philosophical inquiry. The timing sharpens the question.
Across the country, the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution will likely emphasize battlefield heroics and nation-building mythology. At Ganondagan, the response is quieter, but arguably more radical.
Peace, here, isn’t a pause between conflicts. It’s a discipline; something cultivated through balance and respect for the land. Seen through that lens, the exhibition’s title begins to feel less poetic and more pointed. “Sgë:nö: A Revolutionary Peace” suggests that the most enduring revolutions may not arrive through violence or spectacle at all. Sometimes they begin with a different way of understanding responsibility—to one another, to the earth, and to generations yet to come.
Inside the Seneca Art & Culture Center this April, clay, beadwork, fiber and paint carry that message forward. Peace isn’t being remembered. It’s being practiced. ganondagan.org/hodinohsoni-art-show
George Cassidy Payne is a writer and journalist exploring the intersections of art, culture and social justice in Western New York. He also works as a crisis counselor and community organizer, bringing a deep commitment to storytelling and human connection.
