We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River

Monture, a member of the Mohawk nation from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and director of Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, highlights the ways that the Grand River Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) have expressed and lived their struggle for self-determination in Canada, with particular attention to the intersection of representation and resistance. The suppression of the Haudenosaunee's religious, philosophic and legal systems has had profound political and cultural implications. Monture examines expressions of identity and integrity that span the centuries: the Two Row Wampum Belt offered to the Dutch in 1613 to define a peaceful relationship, Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant's efforts to broker cultural and legal conceptualization in the late 1700s, Pauline Johnson's poetry of the late 1800s, and the contemporary music of Robbie Robertson. Valuable not only as a scholarly undertaking, the book exposes the hypocrisy and political agendas of the British and Canadian governments. Monture handles the subject of Haudenosaunee self-representation with expertise, and the result is not only of value to indigenous people but to other Canadians as well as they too fall prey to the same misconceptions that have become a product of this history. (May)