In April 2006, Daniel Coleman was walking to his office in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, when he noticed thirty police cars parked behind one of the campus residence buildings. He soon learned that some 200 Ontario Provincial Police officers had been using that residence as a base of operations. That morning, armed with tasers, tear gas, and assault rifles, they had raided the site of a dispute on the edge of the town of Caledonia, a half hour’s drive to the south, between Haudenosaunee people from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve and real-estate developers who were building a subdivision on land the Haudenosaunee insisted was theirs. The raid was violent, and as long as the police remained on campus, Coleman’s Haudenosaunee colleagues didn’t feel safe to come to work. “Until that day, I had felt that white Canadian academics like me who are inclined to support Indigenous justice do more harm than good by researching Indigenous topics,” Coleman writes in his latest book, Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant. “The barracks on campus changed my mind.”
That rethinking led to nearly two decades of learning about the Haudenosaunee and their treaties with settlers, helping to create an Indigenous research centre on the reserve, and developing connections with his Haudenosaunee neighbours. The Grandfather of the Treaties is one of the results of that lengthy engagement. Settlers in this country, myself included, have much to learn from what Coleman has to say about our relationships with the Haudenosaunee. Those relationships are described in two treaties, represented in wampum belts and oral stories: the Two Row Wampum and the Covenant Chain. Those treaties, and much else, are the subject of this important, even necessary book.
…it’s also about seeing the land itself as a living, agential treaty partner to whom we have obligations, something we can learn from our Indigenous treaty partners.
From the outset, Coleman is cautious to note his limitations. He’s a literary critic and a writer of creative nonfiction, not an anthropologist, an expert on constitutional law, or a fluent speaker of the Kanyen’kéha or Mohawk language. “I can only reflect upon and pass on what Haudenosaunee friends and colleagues have shared with me in their writing, conversations and public gatherings,” he cautions. Nevertheless, he presents a full and convincing account of the meanings of those two interrelated treaties. The Two Row Wampum expresses a separation between settlers and the Haudenosaunee; it depicts two ships, a Haudenosaunee canoe and a European sailing vessel, travelling in parallel down the same river without interfering in each other’s navigation. The Covenant Chain, in contrast, is about relationship: the three links of that chain connect settlers and the Haudenosaunee together. Coleman insists that these twin covenants represent two principles that ought to structure the relationships between Canada and First Nations, even though our governments have spent more than a century and a half deliberately violating them: “the treaty partners maintain sovereignty over their own governance and ways of life even as they link themselves together.” Those principles need to be recognized as fundamental to the presence of settlers here, even as the basis of our constitution; together, they would allow us to inhabit this place “with good minds, friendship and peace.”
As I read The Grandfather of the Treaties, I expected Coleman to conclude by arguing that the Covenant Chain-Two Row way of thinking needs to inform the relationships between settlers and all First Peoples. He goes beyond that argument, though, contending that the Covenant Chain-Two Row mindset needs to become the basis of our relationships with the natural world as well. The Land Back movement isn’t just about returning land to First Nations, although that’s important, he contends; it’s also about seeing the land itself as a living, agential treaty partner to whom we have obligations, something we can learn from our Indigenous treaty partners. In this time of climate crisis and ecological peril, that’s a vital lesson, one we desperately need to take seriously. Reading The Grandfather of the Treaties is a way to begin that work.
Daniel Coleman is an English professor at McMaster University who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. 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 by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island. 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).
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn (March 25th. 2025)
Paperback: 9″ H x 6″ W x 1″ L | 380pp
ISBN: 9781998408092
Ken Wilson is a settler who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario. His writing has been published in The Malahat Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan), where he teaches English and film studies courses at the University of Regina.
