Read an Excerpt from Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life

The title of our featured historical work, Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life, comes from a Cayuga word meaning two roads or paths. It's emblematic of the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, otherwise known as the "grandfather of the treaties." This wampum agreement was a guide to building peace between communities with different beliefs and cultures, something that is as relevant and crucial now as it was in the 17th century.

Deyohahá:ge explores the history of the Dutch and British joining this wampum agreement in the aforementioned 17th century, only to disregard its lessons and abuse their growing power in what would become North America. Most Canadians and Americans have never heard of the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, but its foundations tenets are as powerful and true now as they were those hundreds of years ago. 

Written by members of Six Nations and their neighbours, and edited by Daniel Coleman, Ki'en Debicki, and Bonnie M. Freeman, this timely and inspiring work of nonfiction reinforces how eco-philosophy, legal evolution, and ethical protocols of two-path peace-making provide a sustainable pathway forward for all people who live on those traditional lands where this agreement was made.

We're very excited to share this excerpt from Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life, free for all of our readers in advance of its official release later this month!

An Excerpt from Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life

Edited by Daniel Coleman, Ki'en Debicki, and Bonnie M. Freeman

This book brings Grand River minds together to consider how those who walk on different paths can share the river of life far into the future. That’s why it is entitled Deyohahá:ge: (Cayuga language for “two roads or paths”) and Sharing the River of Life. It is a timely book. More than at any time in history, people across Turtle Island and around the globe are asking how to repair the damaged relationships humans have with the natural world and with the Indigenous Peoples who developed ways of living that respect and nurture the animals, plants, humans, and other beings that inhabited the earth around them. This book, authored by Six Nations people and their neighbours, reflects on the founding treaty agreement made between incoming Europeans and Indigenous North Americans, commonly known as the Covenant Chain or Two Row Wampum agreement, as a guide for building healthy relations for the future. Essentially, the chapters in this book help readers see how far-reaching the Haudenosaunee philosophy of peace-making conveyed in what Oren Lyons calls the “grandfather of the treaties” is to the problems we face today: how to build just and peaceful relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people after years of American and Canadian colonial oppression; how people who live “between the rows” of Western and Indigenous ways of doing things can reconcile themselves within that charged spiritual and ethical intercultural space; how institutions such as courts, schools, churches, or universities might “decolonize” their practices and assumptions; how new generations might reconnect with the wisdom conveyed in the wampum tradition in practical, everyday ways.1 How, even in these late days challenged by a hyper-consumptive economy, climate change, dysfunctional institutions, global pandemics, and systemic injustice, “we” (Indigenous, settlers, and more recently arrived newcomers) might seek what the seventeenth-century formulators of the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum agree-ment called ka’nikonhriyo’tshera’t (trust), kentèn:ron (friendship), and skén:nen (peace).

This book and its title came from a meeting held in 2007 at Six Nations Polytechnic (SNP) in Ohsweken. It’s important that we tell readers about the community that gave us the shape and initiative to produce this book. At this meeting, Elders Lottie Skye, Ima Johnson, and Hubert Skye; SNP leaders Linda Staats and Rebecca Jamieson; Haudenosaunee professors Bonnie Freeman, Karen Hill, Dawn Martin-Hill, and Rick Monture; and non-Indigenous professors Will Coleman and Daniel Coleman (same last name, but not relatives) met to discuss a vision for a new Indigenous Knowledge Centre. The idea was for the two institutions, McMaster University and SNP, to cooperate on establishing a new research hub on Six Nations territory that would collect Indigenous Knowledge sources—particularly Haudenosaunee history, language, and culture—for the benefit of future generations. Given universities’ long-running practice of expropriating and distorting Indigenous Knowledges, the Centre would be Indigenous-led on Indigenous land for the benefit of Indigenous Peoples. The idea was that knowledge that benefits Indigenous Peoples in the first instance would be of benefit to their settler-colonial neighbours in the second. The knowledge of the ancestors would show us how to be good ancestors for future generations.

When we asked Lottie, Ima, and Hubert for their thoughts about how to conceive this jointly sponsored, Haudenosaunee-led centre, they conferred with one another for some time, then turned to us, and said: “You should call it Deyohahá:ge:, the two roads, the two paths. You will need to bring together the best of Haudenosaunee and the best of Western thought to build the knowledge that future generations need.” They were alluding to the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum’s way of conceiving relationships that goes back in Haudenosaunee thinking to the beginning of Creation, when the twins who created the world that we now inhabit showed, right from the onset, such different priorities, such different ways of being, such different paths for living. At that first meeting, the Elders posed the question at the heart of this book: how we might understand the Covenant Chain-Two Row relationship, not just in colonial and treaty history, but today. After all the betrayals, the failures to live in good relation, and the broken trust between Indigenous Peoples and settler-colonial Canadians and Americans, how might we today follow our distinctive paths and still find a healthy way—within our own minds and hearts, let alone within our political relations, not to mention with our increasingly threatened Mother, the Earth—to share the river of life? 

We three editors got to know one another and many of the Six Nations-based writers who contributed the chapters of this book by meeting to discuss the question the Elders had posed. With staff at the newly formed Deyohahá:ge: IKC, such as Rick Hill, Tanis Hill, Sara General, and Heather Bomberry, we formed a discussion group that we called the Two Row Research Partnership, and we met once a month at SNP to talk about the Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty relationship. All three of us editors are professors at McMaster University: Daniel in English and Cultural Studies, is of British-Scandinavian ancestry; Ki’en, cross-appointed in Indigenous Studies and English and Cultural Studies, is Wolf Clan Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk); Bonnie, cross-appointed in the School of Social Work and Indigenous Studies, is Algonquin and Kanien’kehá:ka, and lives at Six Nations. We knew one another from work, but we got to know one another by meeting monthly to talk about the Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty relationship—how it evolved; how it was encoded in wampum; how different generations of Haudenosaunee Rotiyaneshon (Chiefs) and Yakoyaneshon (Clan Mothers) understood it; how surrounding Indigenous Peoples such as Anishinaabe or Algonquins interpreted it; how British, Dutch, French, Canadian, and American negotiators took it up and used it. All in an effort to understand the Elders’ suggestion that the two roads or paths might lead us to healthy and good ways to share the river of life. 

Each generation, it seems, undergoes circumstances that make it urgent to “polish the wampum,” meaning to wipe off the dust and grime of neglect and disrepair. The Yakoyaneshon and Rotiyaneshon who originally formulated the rules of engagement foresaw that treaty relationships would only thrive if their “signatories” met regularly to refresh their memories and renew them. For us in our time, a host of urgencies—armed conflict at what have come to be known as the land reclamations at Douglas Creeks Estates (2006) and Land Back Lane (2019); the ongoing revelations of the extent of the genocidal violence of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system; the repeated disappearances of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people as a continuation of that genocide; the extinction of traditional languages; the enormous gaps in education, poverty, health, incarceration rates, and clean water supply; the ever-increasing rates of police lethality against Black and Indigenous kin; plus the industrial destruction of earth, air, and water—all these and more have intensified our desire to investigate ways to rebuild our relationships, to wipe off the dust of strategic indifference and enforced forgetting, in order to generate the original Covenant Chain-Two Row values of trust, friendship, and peace for our times. The track record of simply imposing Euro-Canadian and Euro-American ideas about how to build these things is not good. We, therefore, felt the importance of following the Elders’ advice to consult the Haudenosaunee model of linked arms and two paths to see what guidance it has for us to share a good way of life on a healthy river.

Our monthly meetings helped us get to know each other. They introduced us to the thinking and writing of others in the Grand River community who had been thinking about these things longer than we have. As we shared what we were learning, consulted with the Knowledge Guardians SNP had identified and honoured for their knowledge of Haudenosaunee languages and traditions, talked with language teachers and reserve-based thinkers, and gathered oral and written resources, we felt a growing responsibility to join Deyohahá:ge:’s larger project of finding permanent ways to record and share these elements of Haudenosaunee wisdom and knowledge. So we three editors applied for funding from SSHRC to host a gathering of knowledgeable people at Six Nations (there are many more people to consult than we could gather in one room!) to talk about the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum treaty relationship, both its history and its relevance for the future. Our idea was that we would then collect either video or written records of what they said for publication or posting on the web. 

We’d already received the funding when the COVID-19 virus swept through our communities and shut down public gatherings. It was a difficult time. SNP and McMaster both had to scramble to offer classes online, while both communities lost Elders to the pandemic. In a time when we were conscious of trying to restore the knowledge of Elders, the disease was targeting Elders. For Indigenous communities, in particular, where fluent language speakers are few, these losses were especially devastating. Our Two Row Research Partnership group had to move to meeting online—making us feel the distance poignantly as members of our community struggled with grief. But adapt we must. We canceled our conference plans and instead sponsored a video documentary that asked the founders in individual interviews to reflect on the formation and accomplishments of Deyohahá:ge: from the perspective of its tenth anniversary. We are now following up the video with this book that brings together essays on the Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty relationship by people who are on or near the Six Nations Reserve. Of course, unless we want to create an encyclopedia, the format of a book limits the number of chapters we can publish and keep the book to a reasonable size. There are so many other people who have important knowledge to share on this topic. This book is only a small sampling of what people in the Grand River region have to say about the Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty tradition. Indeed, Grand River-based people have a lot to share about this tradition, and readers can find another recent book on the Two Row Wampum called Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on Our Journeys that presents Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Canadian settler participants’ reflections arising from teaching circles on Two Row principles led by Gae Ho Hwako (Norma Jacobs), Elder in residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. We are pleased to follow in that book’s footsteps by bringing together a further range of Grand River Haudenosaunee thinkers’ and writers’ understanding of this tradition’s set of guidelines for how to build ka’nikonhriyo’tshera’t (trust), kentèn:ron (friendship), and skén:nen (peace).

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Daniel Coleman teaches in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His research covers Canadian Literature, cultural production of categories of privilege, literatures of immigration and diaspora, and the politics of reading. His publications include White Civility (2006) and In Bed with the Word (2009) as well as co-edited scholarly volumes.

Ki’en Debicki is a queer, Kanien’keha:ka, enby poet living and loving along the banks of Kanyatarí:io (beautiful lake) in Anonwarore’tsherakayon:ne (Hamilton ON). They are an assistant professor at McMaster University, and associate professor at Six Nations Polytechnic. Ki’en’s writing has been published in The Malahat Review, Grain Magazine, Studies in Canadian Literature and Storytelling, Self, Society, among others.

Bonnie Freeman is Algonquin/Mohawk and a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, as well with the Six Nations Polytechnic. Bonnie has published the article, “Promoting global health and well-being of Indigenous youth through the connection of land and culture-based activism.”