Chapter One

Reintroducing the Linked Arms

It matters which origin stories we tell and retell as we try to place ourselves in the land. I was taught the story of martyrs and savages in my high school class in Canadian history. I had never heard the stream of stories about linking arms until I moved to Hamilton, Ontario in my thirties. It takes an adjustment of mind to begin to hear stories that differ from the ones to which we are accustomed. As I’ll discuss later in this book when I introduce myself more directly, it took armed conflict in my neighbourhood and at the university where I work for me to begin to listen to the stories of how Indigenous people made peace in the northeast part of this continent. I’d been hearing a little bit about wampum diplomacy ever since I arrived at McMaster University as a new professor in 1997, about ancient agreements known as the Covenant Chain of Friendship and the Two Row Wampum from the days of Europeans’ first arrival in this part of the world, but these stories seemed remote to me until conflict over Indigenous land rights in my neighbourhood made them immediate.

Kiotsaeton’s linking of arms with his enemies was taken straight from the Haudenosaunee vocabulary for family-and-alliance making.

“Gripping each arm of the adoptee, one sponsor on each side, recalls the [Haudenosaunee] adoption ceremony,” writes Kanyen’keháka author Amber Meadow Adams about this scene. “The lightning Kiotsaeton describes represents a force even stronger than that of a falling tree, which is the force that can’t break the rotiyaneshon’s [chiefs’] grip on one another’s arms.”

She is referring, in the first instance, to the Haudenosaunee ceremony for adopting an adult, when a representative of the adopting family walks the adoptee, arm in arm, up and down the longhouse, singing atónwa, their personal song of thanksgiving.

And she refers, in the second instance, to the image of the linked arms of the fifty Haudenosaunee rotiyaneshon that make up the Confederacy Council, the chiefs who form a circle of joined arms to protect and uphold the Tree of Peace at the centre of their way of life.

Every one of Kiotsaeton’s scenes, pictured in one of the belts of wampum hung up on the cord for all to see, represents a step in the Haudenosaunee ceremonial procedure for making peace and friendship.

And the French know it. For they, then, respond in kind with “presents,” “collars,” and oratory of their own. Marie L’Incarnation report that “Monsieur the Governor’s presents were bestowed by Couture, who [familiar with Haudenosaunee ways from having lived among them for the last two years, spoke] in the Iroquois tongue and with the gestures and manners of that nation, to correspond to those of the ambassador.”

His first “present” was “to thank the one that made heaven and earth for being everywhere, and for seeing into our hearts, and for now uniting the mind of all the peoples.” You could think of this as a French and Catholic approximation of the Words Before All Else. Couture’s fifth wampum, following Kiotsaeton’s order precisely, was “to make the river easy, the lake firm, and the way free so that the smoke of the fires of the French and the Algonkins may be seen.” Peace in the environment opens the way to peace between nations. The eighth wampum offered by the French signified “a mark of the happiness we receive from their [Haudenosaunee] alliance with us and the Algonkins and from the fact that we shall eat together in peace,” while the tenth, corresponding exactly to Kiotsaeton’s tenth linking-arms wampum, was given “To assure them that the French will have the Hurons come as soon as possible so that they will put their arms down like the Agnerognons [Mohawks] and to show that we wish to be the friends of Ognoté [Oneidas] and that they discuss later in this book when I introduce myself more directly, it took armed conflict in my neighbourhood and at the university where I work for me to begin to listen to the stories of how Indigenous people made peace in the northeast part of this continent. I’d been hearing a little bit about wampum diplomacy ever since I arrived at McMaster University as a new professor in 1997, about ancient agreements known as the Covenant Chain of Friendship and the Two Row Wampum from the days of Europeans’ first arrival in this part of the world, but these stories seemed remote to me until conflict over Indigenous land rights in my neighbourhood made them immediate.

Kiotsaeton’s linking of arms with his enemies was taken straight from the Haudenosaunee vocabulary for family-and-alliance making. “Gripping each arm of the adoptee, one sponsor on each side, recalls the [Haudenosaunee] adoption ceremony,” writes Kanyen’keháka author Amber Meadow Adams about this scene. “The lightning Kiotsaeton describes represents a force even stronger than that of a falling tree, which is the force that can’t break the rotiyaneshon’s [chiefs’] grip on one another’s arms.” She is referring, in the first instance, to the Haudenosaunee ceremony for adopting an adult, when a representative of the adopting family walks the adoptee, arm in arm, up and down the longhouse, singing atónwa, their personal song of thanksgiving. And she refers, in the second instance, to the image of the linked arms of the fifty Haudenosaunee rotiyaneshon that make up the Confederacy Council, the chiefs who form a circle of joined arms to protect and uphold the Tree of Peace at the centre of their way of life.

***Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant*** (Wolsak & Wynn) by Daniel Louis Coleman

More about Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant:

Grandfather of the Treaties shares Coleman’s extensive study of Haudenosaunee wampum agreements with European nations, which was done in close consultation with many Indigenous scholars, shows how we can chart a new future for everyone living in what we now call Canada—Indigenous, settler, more recent arrival—by tracing wampum’s long-employed, now-neglected past. The Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty tradition models how to develop good minds so that we can live peacefully together on the river of life that sustains us all. It is a philosophy, an ethical system, a way of learning to live as relatives with our human and more-than-human neighbours. This covenant has been called the “grandfather of the treaties,” and is also considered the grandmother of Canada’s Constitution.

More about Daniel Louis Coleman:

Daniel Coleman is an English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He teaches in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He studies and writes about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented in by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.

Daniel has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has published numerous academic and creative non-fiction books as an author and as an editor. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006; winner of the Raymond Klibansky prize), In Bed With the Word (2009), and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).