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John Fadden sits in the storytelling room of the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center in Onchiota in 2014. Behind him is a dugout canoe that was found at the bottom of Lake Placid lake in 1960.
(Lake Placid News photo — Andy Flynn)
ONCHIOTA — John Fadden stands on the shoulder of County Route 60, in front of the four-room Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center. His arms are open wide, as if to say, “Welcome. Would you like a hug?”
That was the image posted on Facebook on July 1, announcing the Cultural Center’s opening day of the 2022 season. Yet Fadden’s 68 years of welcoming visitors to the family business came to an end last week; he died on Friday, Aug. 12 at the age of 83 after a brief illness.
The facility has been closed since the family emergency and is expected to reopen on Tuesday.
The news of Fadden’s passing to the spirit world — posted on the Cultural Center’s Facebook page last weekend — sent shock waves throughout the North Country. By Friday, more than 600 comments had been left on the post, offering condolences to the family and kind words from those who had crossed paths with Fadden throughout his life. Many came from his former students; he was an art teacher.
“My absolute favorite art teacher in school who inspired me to love and appreciate art in many things in life, and to be creative and to pursue creativity in a chosen career,” commented Daniel Venne.
“He taught us much, not only about creativity and art but also about kindness and respect. A teacher who made a difference,” wrote Kathleen Randall.
“He had a really gentle way of teaching and encouraging his students,” wrote Heidi Houston. “He also wrote to me when I was in college to offer me encouragement and praise. It meant so much to me.”
Glenda Smith Rowe worked with Fadden at the Saranac Junior High School.
“His gentle way and strong spirit enlightened the world,” she wrote. “He left us all better people.”
Fadden, as his students pointed out, was much more than an art teacher.
“Dedicated to us as students, committed to community and his culture,” former student Michelle Frechette wrote.
Fadden taught seventh- and eighth-grade art at the Saranac Central School District until retiring in 1994, and his illustrations and artwork appeared in more than 90 publications, films and periodicals. Yet he made an impact on the lives of people who didn’t even know he was a teacher or an accomplished artist. Carrying on the legacy left by his parents, Ray and Christine, who founded the Cultural Center as the Six Nations Indian Museum in 1954, John told stories about his people of the Mohawk Nation, and he used art as a storytelling tool.
“His art helped me understand the Mohawk people and culture back in Akwesasne’s first days,” commented Barbara Hebert.
This tiny museum is packed with artifacts, artwork and exhibits, from the floor to the ceiling, on every wall and outside, where a stone monument stands. A gift from the Akwesasne Mohawk Counselors, the monument lets visitors know that the Iroquois Confederacy was America’s oldest ally:
“Founded by Deganawidah and Hiawatha, who planted the tree of peace at Onondaga (Syracuse) some time before the coming of Columbus.
“They excelled in statesmanship and the art of war, after the white man came, during more than a century of intercolonial strife, they loyally protected the infant English colonies, showed them the way to union, and so helped to prepare the American people for nationhood.”
Through the museum’s onsite programs and outreach, countless media interviews and collaborative projects with fellow historians and college professors, John educated the public about the bigger picture. He told stories about the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, known as the Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse; the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe communities at the Akwesasne Reservation, straddling both sides of the Canadian border; and all the Indigenous peoples of North America. The Iroquois Confederacy began with five nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca — and the Tuscarora Nation was added in 1722.
On the museum’s grounds, visitors will see an exhibit on the Three Sisters — corn, beans and squash. According to Iroquois tradition, the origins of the Three Sisters come from mythic stories handed down from generation to generation.
Inside the storytelling room, John told many stories he learned from his father, who used to give visitors a presentation about the food contributions from Native Americans in North America and South America.
“There was a stereotypical view generally about Native Americans, like they all lived in teepees and rode horses,” John told the Lake Placid News in 2018, “and part of that stereotypical view was that Indians were hunters, period, not even a thought that they had gardens or not. So he would give a good section of his talk about the different food plants, and he’d name them off: corn, of course, potatoes, tapioca, pineapple. ‘That didn’t come from Hawaii,’ he’d say. ‘That came from South American Indians, and it was brought over to Hawaii.’”
Nathan Koenig, who knew John for more than 40 years, commented: “Generously contributed his art and knowledge to our documentary series ‘Iroquois Power for the 21st Century.’ I could always trust him to tell it like it is.”
In the Facebook post, people used many words to describe John: Generous, kind and funny. Talented, caring and compassionate. Patient, humble and inspiring.
“Kind” was Amy Catania’s word of choice, when asked Wednesday how she will remember John.
“Just a joyful person, always looking to laugh and smile about things,” she said in a phone interview.
Catania is the executive director of Historic Saranac Lake, and while she didn’t know John very well personally, she did collaborate with him on the Saranac Laboratory Museum’s expansion project. She wants Historic Saranac Lake to broaden its educational message to include stories about the Indigenous peoples of the Adirondack region, and she hopes to refer visitors to the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center. She asked John for his assistance on how to tell those stories.
After Catania heard the news of John’s passing, she turned to her husband and talked about John’s kindness.
“There’s really a handful of people you can name or you say that person is absolutely kind the core,” she told him. “All the rest of us have our sharp edges and certain devious things that we may think or do, but there’s a few people that just really shine through as being very kind, and I think John was one of those people.”
Catania sees the importance of the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center, not just to tell stories about the past, but to remind the public that the Mohawk families who occupied this land centuries ago are still here.
“Having the museum right here in the center of the Adirondacks reminds us that Indigenous history does not end at the border of Akwesasne,” Catania said. “The museum and the ongoing work of the Fadden family also shows us that Indigenous culture is alive and around us today.”
Paul Smith’s College natural sciences professor Curt Stager also collaborated with John on projects, such as carbon dating the Cultural Center’s dugout canoe, which was found submerged in Lake Placid lake in 1960 and sold to the museum a year later.
“I will remember him first as a longtime friend, but also an inspiration and a person who helped us see with new eyes who we are as Adirondackers,” Stager said on Wednesday. “He helped me understand basically that people have been part of this landscape for longer than the trees themselves. … He helped me understand better what our place in the natural world is.”
There’s an artifact in the Cultural Center’s collection that helps tell the story about Mohawk life in the Adirondacks — a clay cooking pot found near Silver Lake Mountain. The discovery of cooking pottery and dugout canoes at multiple locations around the Adirondack Park works against the long-held belief that Native Americans never lived year-round in the these mountains, that they only hunted and fished here seasonally.
“There’s never been any archeological effort to find out whether that’s true or not; however, things are found, including this canoe, and just by accident,” John told the Lake Placid News during a 2014 interview about the Lake Placid dugout canoe. “My personal opinion is that it reflects the demographics of today. Today you have the larger populations that are down in the valleys, but there are still hardy folk that live here year-round. And I think it was like that in the old days.”
Moreover, the discovery of cooking pottery in the Adirondacks shows that there were more than Mohawk hunters visiting the mountains.
“What it does suggest is a more permanency of habitation in these Adirondack Mountains,” John told North Country Public Radio in a 2010 interview about the Silver Lake pottery. “If a hunting party came up into these mountains, into this forest, they wouldn’t carry a pottery bowl. It would be too delicate, too cumbersome. And so with the bowl, that suggests women and children and others, in other words, more permanency.”
When offering his opinion on Mohawk permanency in the Adirondacks, John didn’t criticize the opposing viewpoint or the people who continued to spread that belief. He always leaned on the fact that not enough archaeological studies have been conducted to confirm or deny one side or the other. Yet there have been enough artifacts found, and firsthand accounts, to convince John that there were Native American communities here well before the Europeans showed up in the 1600s. And John was consistent with that message.
“I admired his willingness to just repeat, repeat, repeat that story. There’s so much evidence that folks were here at all times of the year,” Stager said. “As an educator myself, I always respected his ability to get hard lessons across in a positive way, that left people open to hearing what he had to say. He had a gentle way of telling us that there are a lot of misconceptions out there … and showing us how we can move forward by basically learning our real stories here.”
In 2017, Bloomingdale’s Ed Kanze interviewed John Fadden and Curt Stager for a public television episode titled, “Hidden Heritage: New Findings About the Adirondacks’ Native Americans.” Kanze is a naturalist, author, Adirondack guide and co-producer of the “Curiously Adirondack” television series on Mountain Lake PBS.
“I just totally liked the guy, found him spellbinding to listen to,” Kanze said of John. “I like thoughtful people who are not know-it-alls, the conversation is open-ended. They don’t know entirely where it’s going to go, and you don’t either, and that’s one of the things that I really liked about John. He just had a wonderful intelligence, a kindly way of speaking. Even when speaking about treatment of the American Indians that might be on the contentious side, he had that gift of being able to talk about the things without rancor.”
Kanze had corresponded with John since the 2017 interview, and he was hoping to visit Onchiota someday to see John and his pet rock.
“I bond with rocks myself,” Kanze said, “so I always thought that was really cool that John had this rock that he saw as his pet that he really loved. But it didn’t happen and that’s upsetting and disappointing. It’s a huge loss to the community around here.”
As Ray Fadden’s educational legacy at the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center continued with John, it’s now John’s sons’ turn — Dave and Don — to carry the torch.
“I’m just so amazed at the Fadden family’s ability to keep this flame going,” Stager said. “They are dedicated bearers of that important torch. Part of the legacy that John has left us is the gentle but effective way of teaching, and his son Dave in particular embodies that talent as well.”
John David Kahionhes Fadden was born on Dec. 26, 1938 in Massena. He was the only child of Ray and Christine Skawennati (Chubb) Fadden and is a member of his mother’s Turtle Clan.
John was raised in Hogansburg, where he attended the St. Regis Mohawk School and the White School. He graduated from Massena Central High School in 1957 and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1961.
A year later, he met Elizabeth Eva Karonhisake Thompson of Akwesasne. They married in 1965 and eventually settled in Onchiota, where they raised three sons: Donald, David and Daniel.
Like his father, who retired in 1967, John chose education as a profession. This gave him summers off to help the family run the museum in Onchiota. In a 2002 interview with the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, as the museum was celebrating its 48th anniversary, John said he didn’t speak Mohawk, but his wife was one of the 3,000 people who were fluent.
“I only know enough to get myself in trouble,” he said.
Fadden, however, isn’t a Mohawk name. It’s Scottish. One artifact in the museum’s collection is a late 19th century Glengarry Iroquois hat, which was worn by the woman who crafted the beadwork.
“That’s my heritage,” Dave Fadden told the Enterprise in 2002. I’m both Scottish and Mohawk, hence the word Fadden. It used to be MacFadden.”
During the same interview, John explained the history behind another artifact, a bell-shaped pestle in a glass case. It was found by John Lewis in western New York’s Cattaraugus County, where the Seneca Nation’s Cattaraugus Reservation is located.
“My father went to school with John Lewis,” John said, “and I was named after him.”
Funeral arrangements for John Fadden are in care of the Fortune-Keough Funeral Home in Saranac Lake. As per John’s wishes, there were no calling hours or funeral services. Memorial donations may be made to the Tri-Lakes Humane Society, Inc., 225 George H. Lapan Memorial Highway, Saranac Lake, NY 12983.
Learn more about the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center at www.6nicc.com.
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