Under the Cover: “No neutral place” – writing Grandfather of the Treaties

Daniel Coleman shares how his work on the Two Row Research Partnership – an ongoing investigation into the history and relevance of protocols for Indigenous-settler relations – led to the publication of his new book Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant (Wolsak & Wynn).

The cover of Grandfather of the Treaties by Daniel Coleman, showing an illustration of a Wampum belt.

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Under the Cover

Grandfather of the Treaties emerged, alongside its companion, the anthology Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life, from the ferment of where I live—from the people and environment I encountered when I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, from the prairies in 1997. I had been born and raised by Canadian parents in Ethiopia and went to Regina to attend university in 1980. As a graduate student there, I taught literature at what is today First Nations University (FNU). From the folks I worked with there and from the Indigenous authors in our classes at that time—Maria Campbell, M. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Erdrich, Lee Maracle—I thought I knew something about Indigenous North America. But within weeks of moving to teach at McMaster University, I met Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe colleagues and students and realized I knew nothing about Indigenous life in this part of the continent. Proximity to the Atlantic seaboard meant the First Peoples here navigated European settlers earlier than people on the prairies did. Colonials first learned Indigenous protocols here, and those protocols were conveyed in wampum.

When I was teaching at FNU, I thought I might do a PhD on Indigenous literatures, but the cultural appropriation debates hit national awareness in the late ‘80s. Indigenous writers such as Leonore Keeshig-Tobias warned outsiders to “Stop Stealing Indigenous Stories”: misinformation was rampant leaving little airtime for Indigenous writers themselves. There’s a long history of knowledge extraction from Indigenous communities that has been used to contain and dismiss them rather than build them up. So I decided to study something closer to my own experience of moving as a teenager from Ethiopia, and I wrote about Canadian immigration instead.

When I arrived at McMaster, then, I felt that respect for Indigenous peoples meant “keep out.” Indigenous literature should be by not about Indigenous people. That’s still my basic view. Two experiences adjusted my thinking: April 20, 2006, I rounded the corner of Mary Keyes residence on campus and saw 30 police cars parked behind the building. I guessed the police were using it for a conference now that students had gone home for the summer. I learned later that McMaster was housing the 200 officers, armed with M-16s and tasers, who raided the site of the land reclamation between Caledonia and Six Nations. I realized there is no neutral place in Canada outside the relationship with Indigenous people. My supposedly neutral workplace (this is true for most Canadian institutions) is already deeply invested in the displacement of Indigenous stories, culture, and life—we’re already writing Indigenous stories, even when we think we aren’t.

That same year, I attended a meeting between McMaster professors and Haudenosaunee leaders at Six Nations Polytechnic to establish a Haudenosaunee-led research centre on the reserve. Elders Lottie Keye, Ima Johnson, and Hubert Skye conferred quietly during the meeting and then told us we should call this research centre “Deyohahá:ge”—the Two Roads or Two Paths in Cayuga language—a clear reference to the Two Row Wampum. “You’ll need to bring together the best in Haudenosaunee and Western ways,” they said, “to preserve our Haudenosaunee knowledge in this research centre.” The work of Indigenous resurgence is relational; it’s carried out within Indigenous communities as well as with their neighbours and allies. You could say that our own cultural regeneration as Canadians is interdependent with Indigenous cultural resurgence.

Their advice stimulated Rick Hill, Tanis Hill, and me to launch the Two Row Research Partnership (TRRP), which meets each month, to investigate the history and current relevance of the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum protocol for building healthy relationships between Indigenous communities and their neighbours. For the past 15 years, we have met with and studied the work of the writers who contributed to Deyohahá:ge: (eds. Ki’en Debicki, Bonnie Freeman, and me) and others. Rick and I co-authored an article on The Covenant Chain-Two Row as a guide for university-Indigenous research relations, and the TRRP has documented the research centre’s work in the YouTube film Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre 10th Anniversary. At the same time, I collected a group of McMaster professors and graduate students to produce Different Knowings, a YouTube series featuring short videos by Indigenous and Diasporic thinkers and artists about ways of knowing beyond the Western canon.

The TRRP gatherings shaped my writing of Grandfather of the Treaties (with Foreword and Illustrations by Rick Hill). We discussed chapters of the manuscript at TRRP gatherings, and a couple of the Haudenosaunee participants read my manuscript front-to-back and gave me detailed edits on it. I gave the reams of research notes, articles, and bibliography to the archives at Deyohahá:ge: for the use of future researchers in the community, and all the proceeds of publication go to Deyohahá:ge as well. All told, these two books about Canada’s founding agreements to link arms and make family with autonomous Indigenous nations were developed in the space of “peace, friendship, and respect” that we all hope encourages Indigenous resurgence through the best of Haudenosaunee and Western ways.

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A photo of writer Daniel Coleman. He is a light skin-toned man with grey hair at the sides of his head, wearing bright blue-framed glasses and a blue patterned shirt.

Daniel Coleman was born and raised the child of Canadian missionary parents in Ethiopia, an experience he has written about in The Scent of Eucalyptus: A Missionary Childhood in Ethiopia. He moved to the Canadian prairies in the 1980s and completed his PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Alberta in 1995. He went on to publish scholarly books on Canadian immigrant writing and on how Canada became a white, British place. Since 1997, he has lived in Hamilton, Ontario, where he teaches Canadian Literature at McMaster University.

Photo of Daniel credit Geoffrey Skirrow.