Sources and References

• Porter, Tom. And Grandma Said… Iroquois Teachings as Passed Down Through the Oral Tradition. Xlibris, 2008.
• Hewitt, J. N. B. “Legend of the founding of the Iroquois League.” American Anthropologist 5, no. 2 (1892): 131–148.
• Maracle, Brian. “The First Words.” In Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past. Anchor Canada, 2005.
• Monture, Patricia A. “Power, Identity, and Indigenous Sovereignty.” Canadian Woman Studies / Les cahiers de la femme 26, nos. 3–4 (2007): 153–159.
• Monture, Rick. We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River. University of Manitoba Press, 2014.
• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press, 2014.
• Jacobs, Naomi (ed.). O da gaho de:s: Reflecting on Our Journeys. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.
• Akwesasne Notes. Basic Call to Consciousness. Native Voices, 2005 [1977].
• Downey, Allan. The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood. UBC Press, 2018.
• Hill, Susan M. The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River. University of Manitoba Press, 2017.
• Delormier, Treena, Kahente Horn-Miller, Alex M. McComber, and Kaylia Marquis. “Reclaiming food security in the Mohawk community of Kahnawà:ke through Haudenosaunee responsibilities.” Maternal & Child Nutrition 13 (2017).
• Sioui, Miguel, et al. “Haudenosaunee women’s water law: Reclaiming the sacred.” In Current Directions in Water Scarcity Research, Vol. 4. Elsevier, 2022.
• Alfred, Taiaiake. It’s All About the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence. University of Toronto Press, 2023.
• Obomsawin, Alanis (dir.). Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. National Film Board of Canada, 1993.
• Obomsawin, Alanis (dir.). Rocks at Whiskey Trench. National Film Board of Canada, 2000.
• Jacobs, Beverley. “Tribal Feminist Recuperation of the Mother of Nations in Shelly Niro’s Kissed by Lightning.” In Reading the Wampum. Syracuse University Press.
• Rodriguez, Jolene. A Clan Mother’s Call: Reconstructing Haudenosaunee Cultural Memory. SUNY Press, 2017.
• Phillips, Ruth B. “Disappearing Acts: Traditions of Exposure, Traditions of Enclosure, and Iroquois Masks.” In Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.
• Gabriel, Theresa E. “The Art of Resistance.” In When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance. Between the Lines, 2024.
• Rickard, Jolene. “Diversifying sovereignty and the reception of indigenous art.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 81–84.
• Hill, Rick. “Two Rows of Reconciliation.” In Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025.
• Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
• Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. Peter Lang, 2000.

Chapter 1: What Is Hodinohsó:ni Sovereignty?

The Longhouse as a Political Idea

Hodinohsó:ni (the People of the Longhouse) is more than an ethnonym: it is a political metaphor. The Confederacy imagines itself as one extended longhouse, with the Seneca keeping the Western Door, the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) keeping the Eastern Door, and the Onondaga tending the central fire. The Cayuga and Oneida sit as Younger Brothers alongside the Elder Brothers, and from the early eighteenth century the Tuscarora joined as the sixth nation. To think about sovereignty through the Longhouse is to refuse the settler habit of imagining a people as a territory surrounded by lines on a map. Instead, sovereignty here is a relational structure — a household in which kin, chiefs, clan mothers, and nations are bound by shared obligations and by a ceremonial fire that is kept perpetually alight.

This course, taught by Dr. Talena Atfield, treats Indigenous sovereignty not as a legal status conferred by settler states but as a living practice rooted in Haudenosaunee intellectual traditions. Sovereignty appears in ceremony, in cornfields, in the naming of hoyaneh, in the cut of a wampum belt, in a lacrosse passport, in a roadblock at Kanehsatake, in a film frame, in a water song. The course’s case study is specifically Haudenosaunee, but its frameworks are designed to travel: having learned to think sovereignty as ongoing Longhouse practice, students can ask more precise questions about any Indigenous nation’s self-determination.

Thinking With, Not About

A persistent colonial habit is to study Indigenous peoples — to turn them into objects of knowledge for anthropology, law, or museum display. Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus names this habit and proposes an alternative: thinking with Haudenosaunee categories rather than about Haudenosaunee life. Simpson’s framework of refusal is the course’s methodological spine. Refusal is not silence; it is a deliberate withholding that protects sovereign knowledge and insists on a nation’s right to define its own membership, its own borders, and its own history.

Tom Porter’s And Grandma Said… sets the emotional tone for this orientation. Porter opens his book with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen — the Words That Come Before All Else, the Thanksgiving Address — which greets and gives thanks to every part of creation from the people to the stars. This is not decoration. It is Haudenosaunee political theory in ceremonial form: before deliberation, one must re-establish one’s mind in right relation with the world.

Chapter 2: Creation, Origin, and the Great Law of Peace

Sky Woman and the Good Mind

Haudenosaunee history begins not with contact or conquest but with a woman falling from the Sky World. Sky Woman descends toward a water-covered earth; waterbirds catch her, and a turtle offers its back; muskrat dives and surfaces with a handful of soil that Sky Woman dances into a growing island. She gives birth to a daughter, and that daughter to twin grandsons whose contrasting dispositions — one oriented toward the Good Mind, the other toward disorder — establish the ethical polarity of the created world. Brian Maracle’s “The First Words” renders this narrative as a founding legal text: the first words spoken are words of thanksgiving, and thanksgiving is the originary law that the People of the Longhouse inherit.

The Good Mind — Ka’nikonhrí:io — is the disposition of a clear, unhurried, compassionate consciousness. It is the precondition for legitimate deliberation. Sovereignty in the Haudenosaunee sense is not the assertion of arbitrary will; it is the assertion of a mind that has been cleared of grief and vengeance, capable of sustaining the peace.

The Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Tadodaho

Long before Europeans arrived, a period of blood feud engulfed what is now the northeastern woodlands. Into that darkness came the Peacemaker (whose name is held in ceremonial restraint), who travelled by a white stone canoe and preached the message of the Good Mind. He found Hiawatha, a Kanien’kehá:ka man undone by grief for his daughters, and wiped his tears, cleared his ears, and opened his throat with strings of wampum — the first Condolence. Together they sought out Tadodaho, the tangled Onondaga sorcerer whose mind was so twisted that snakes grew from his hair. They combed his mind straight and invited him, transformed, to sit at the centre of the Confederacy as keeper of the fire. The five nations — Kanien’kehá:ka, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca — bound themselves to one another under the Tree of Peace, burying their weapons beneath it and watching an eagle circle above to warn of any approaching danger.

This origin story is the constitution. It is the Kaianere’kó:wa — the Great Law of Peace — and it sets out the councils, the titles of the fifty hoyaneh, the protocol of condolence, the duties of clan mothers, the procedure for replacing a chief, and the principles of consensus among Elder and Younger Brothers. It is not analogy or myth in the dismissive sense; it is living law.

Hewitt’s 1892 Transcription

In 1892, J. N. B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora anthropologist working at the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, published “Legend of the founding of the Iroquois League” in American Anthropologist. Drawing on the Onondaga chief John Buck, Hewitt tried to preserve the oral tradition in print. His transcription is an ambivalent inheritance: on one side, it is an invaluable record of deep Onondaga narrative at a moment when settler pressures were intensifying; on the other, it is a colonial document shaped by anthropological assumptions — including the then-controversial claim that the Great Law offered democratic and republican principles analogous to those of the US Constitution. Students read Hewitt critically, recognizing both its value and the limits of a text authored inside a colonial knowledge system. The Kaianere’kó:wa was never frozen on a page; it lives in recitation, in wampum, and in the breath of those who hold the titles.

Chapter 3: Nationhood, Belonging, and the Clan Mother System

Matrilineal Clans and Political Belonging

Haudenosaunee nations are organized through matrilineal clans — Bear, Wolf, Turtle, and others — with membership passing through the mother. A child is born to the mother’s clan, and with that birth comes a set of responsibilities toward clan relatives in every Haudenosaunee nation. Belonging is thus never purely individual; it is a relationship registered in a kin network that crosses the Confederacy’s internal borders.

The clan mothers (iakoiá:ne) are the constitutional anchors of this system. They hold the hoyaneh titles in trust for their clans: they nominate the chiefs, confirm their installation, counsel them, and — if a chief fails in his duties — “knock the horns off,” removing him from office. Barbara Mann’s Iroquoian Women stresses that this authority is not symbolic. It is executive power located in women’s hands, and it is older than any settler constitution.

Rick Monture and the Challenge of Nationhood

In We Share Our Matters, Rick Monture traces two centuries of writing and political action at Six Nations of the Grand River. He shows how Haudenosaunee intellectuals from Joseph Brant to Pauline Johnson to Deskaheh to contemporary writers have argued that Haudenosaunee nationhood predates and exceeds Canadian citizenship. Deskaheh’s 1923 journey to the League of Nations to seek recognition for the Six Nations is a pivotal moment: refused admission, he insisted that Haudenosaunee sovereignty was not a Canadian domestic question but an international one. Monture reads such moments as acts of translation — the work of rendering Haudenosaunee nationhood legible without surrendering its terms.

Patricia Monture’s essay “Power, Identity, and Indigenous Sovereignty” sharpens the theoretical point: sovereignty for Indigenous women is lived at the intersection of nation, gender, and kinship. A Haudenosaunee woman who is told by Canadian Indian Act provisions that she has “lost status” through marriage is not thereby severed from the Longhouse. Nationhood is measured by clan and language, not by settler registry.

Language in 3D

Tom Porter speaks of Haudenosaunee languages as “3D” — dimensional, embodied, oriented to relationship rather than to static objects. A Kanien’kéha verb does not freeze the world; it conjugates responsibility. To speak one’s language is, in this view, to participate in the constitution of the people. Language loss is therefore a sovereignty question, and language revitalization (Mohawk immersion programs at Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne, for example) is a form of political reconstitution.

Chapter 4: Treaty-Making as Sovereign Practice

The Two Row Wampum

The foundational diplomatic grammar of Haudenosaunee international relations is the Two Row Wampum, or Gä.sweňta’, concluded with the Dutch in the early seventeenth century at the Hudson River. Two parallel rows of purple beads on a white background represent two vessels travelling the same river: a Haudenosaunee canoe and a Dutch ship. They move in the same direction but do not steer one another. Neither passenger sets foot in the other’s boat. Neither imposes laws upon the other. The white beads between and around the rows represent peace, respect, and friendship — the conditions that keep the two vessels afloat together.

Oren Lyons and Naomi Jacobs emphasize that the Two Row is not a quaint image. It is a grammar for coexistence with three premises: equality of nations, non-interference in internal affairs, and an indefinite duration (“as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow”). When Canadian or American states treat Haudenosaunee territory as “municipal” jurisdiction, they violate the Two Row; when Haudenosaunee people travel on their own passports, they uphold it.

The Covenant Chain

The Covenant Chain extended the Two Row framework to relations with the British after the Dutch period. Initially imagined as a rope binding a ship to a tree on shore, it was rhetorically upgraded to an iron chain and then a silver chain — a periodically “polished” metaphor marking the need to renew friendship through council. Daniel Richter’s The Ordeal of the Longhouse shows how the Covenant Chain operated as a multilateral system in which the Haudenosaunee brokered peace among many Indigenous nations and European empires, exercising sovereignty through the convening power to set the agenda at council fires.

Chapter 5: Diplomacy, Alliance, and International Sovereignty

Basic Call to Consciousness

In 1977, a Haudenosaunee delegation led by chiefs and clan mothers travelled to the United Nations NGO conference in Geneva and delivered a set of position papers later published as Basic Call to Consciousness. The documents argued that the ecological crisis, the nuclear arms race, and the ongoing violation of Indigenous treaty rights were all facets of the same Western philosophical failure: the refusal to recognize humans as relatives of the natural world. The Basic Call framed Haudenosaunee sovereignty not as a particular demand but as a universal ethical critique — addressed to the world on behalf of the living earth. It is one of the clearest twentieth-century expressions of the Confederacy’s view of itself as an international actor.

Lacrosse as Sovereign Expression

Allan Downey’s The Creator’s Game tells the history of dey-hon-tshi-gwa’ehs (lacrosse) as a Haudenosaunee ceremonial and political practice. Lacrosse is “the Creator’s Game” — played for medicine, to resolve disputes, and to celebrate life. When settler sports culture appropriated lacrosse as “Canada’s national summer game,” it threatened to sever the game from its ceremonial roots. Downey traces how Haudenosaunee athletes reclaimed the game in the twentieth century, culminating in the founding of the Iroquois Nationals (now Haudenosaunee Nationals), a team that travels on Haudenosaunee passports and competes under its own flag.

The Nationals’ passports are among the most direct modern assertions of the Two Row. At the 2010 World Championships in Manchester, the team was barred from travelling when the UK refused to recognize their passports; they refused to accept British or American documents in substitution, and they missed the tournament. To an onlooker, this might look like a loss; in Haudenosaunee terms, it was a refusal that preserved the sovereignty it would have cost them to surrender. Sovereignty sometimes looks like absence.

Chapter 6: Kanehsatake and Sovereignty in Changing Landscapes

Obomsawin’s Films

Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) is the indispensable record of the 1990 standoff that settler media called “the Oka Crisis.” The trigger was local but the history was long: the town of Oka, Quebec, proposed to expand a golf course onto a pine forest (the Pines) that had been under Kanien’kehá:ka stewardship and burial since the early eighteenth century, despite continual colonial encroachment. When Mohawk land defenders at Kanehsatake set up barricades to protect the Pines, the Sûreté du Québec attacked. A police officer was killed in the opening exchange. The Canadian Army was deployed. Kanien’kehá:ka at Kahnawà:ke blockaded the Mercier Bridge in solidarity, choking commuter access to Montreal.

Obomsawin’s camera stays with the people behind the barricades — often after other media have left — and documents settler counter-protests, military posturing, and the stubborn composure of Mohawk negotiators. Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000) is the companion piece: it recounts the day Kahnawà:ke elders and children attempting to leave the community were stoned by a crowd of white Quebecers while police watched. The film is hard to watch, and it is meant to be. It documents how settler violence and state indifference co-produce one another.

What the Standoff Reveals

Read through the sovereignty lens, Kanehsatake 1990 is not primarily a story about a golf course. It is a story about a sovereign nation defending its land against a municipal claim backed by provincial and federal force. It also reveals the political geography of the Confederacy: Kahnawà:ke’s blockade of the Mercier Bridge was an act of solidarity that enacted Haudenosaunee interdependence. Audra Simpson, writing years later from Kahnawà:ke, treats 1990 as one of many moments when the everyday practice of being Mohawk becomes visible as an interruption of Canadian sovereignty.

Chapter 7: Gender, Governance, and Women’s Authority

Clan Mothers and Rematriation

To take clan mothers seriously is to acknowledge that Haudenosaunee governance has never been patriarchal. It is, rather, a balance of complementary authorities — men holding the ceremonial titles of hoyaneh, women holding the power to raise, counsel, and remove them. Jolene Rodriguez’s A Clan Mother’s Call documents how clan mothers have carried Haudenosaunee political memory through two centuries of settler disruption, serving as diplomats, knowledge keepers, and spokespeople at international forums.

Rematriation names the project of returning Haudenosaunee governance, land, ceremony, and knowledge to the authority of women. It is more than the opposite of patriarchy: it is the reinstallation of a specific political relation in which women’s councils have the last word on matters of land, children, and the continuity of the nation. Beverley Jacobs reads Shelly Niro’s film Kissed by Lightning as a cinematic act of rematriation, drawing on the Women’s Nomination Belt — a wampum record of the clan mothers’ constitutional role — to argue that artistic retellings of Haudenosaunee stories by women are themselves sovereign acts.

Why Gender Is a Sovereignty Question

Patricia Monture argues that settler policy has systematically attacked Haudenosaunee gender relations because it understood, correctly, that the clan-mother system was incompatible with Crown sovereignty. The Indian Act’s patrilineal status rules, the residential school system’s violent re-gendering of children, and the erasure of women’s voices from treaty councils all aimed at the same target. To revive women’s authority is therefore to repair the constitutional fabric itself.

Chapter 8: Refusal, Anthropology, and Museums

Ethnographic Refusal

Audra Simpson’s concept of ethnographic refusal is one of the most influential recent contributions to Indigenous studies. In Mohawk Interruptus, she describes moments in her fieldwork at Kahnawà:ke when interviewees declined to answer, changed the subject, or told her that certain stories were “not for you to write down.” Rather than treating these refusals as obstacles, Simpson treats them as methodology. Refusal names the asymmetrical power between settler anthropology (with its centuries of extracting Indigenous knowledge) and Indigenous communities (who have watched that knowledge be misused). It signals that one sovereign political order — the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks — is nested inside another (Canada/United States) without being absorbed by it. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks refuse Canadian and American citizenship. They refuse settler legal categories that would reduce them to a minority population. And they insist on Haudenosaunee sovereignty as the actual frame of their lives.

Simpson’s method has a quiet but decisive consequence for writing history: the historian must accept that some things are not theirs to know. The archive is not a universal right.

Museums and the Politics of the Mask

Ruth Phillips’s essay “Disappearing Acts” traces the long history of Iroquois false-face masks in settler museums. The masks are ceremonial; they are understood by many Haudenosaunee as living beings with obligations attached to them; they are not display objects. Yet they sit behind glass in museums across North America. Phillips describes the slow negotiations by which some Haudenosaunee communities have secured the return or ethical withdrawal of masks from public display. These are sovereignty negotiations: they ask who has the right to decide what a mask is, what may be seen, and by whom.

Museums, like anthropology, are a field in which refusal and return are the operative verbs.

Chapter 9: Land, Food, Water, and Creative Sovereignty

The Haldimand Tract

Susan Hill’s The Clay We Are Made Of is a constitutional history of Haudenosaunee land tenure on the Grand River. The Haldimand Tract was promised in 1784: six miles on each side of the Grand River from source to mouth, granted by the British in recognition of Haudenosaunee losses as allies during the American Revolution. The promise was enormous — a corridor nearly a million acres long. Today, less than five percent of that land remains under Six Nations control. The erosion of the Tract is a textbook case of the gap between treaty promise and settler practice: unauthorized leases, fraudulent sales, governmental “trust” accounts that vanished, and municipal expansion — including that of the University of Waterloo itself — all sit on land whose title has never been cleanly extinguished.

Hill reads the history from inside Haudenosaunee land law, which treats the earth as an inherited responsibility rather than as property. Land defence at Six Nations — from the Kanenhstaton reclamation site near Caledonia in 2006 to ongoing 1492 Land Back Lane actions — continues this reading.

Food and Water Sovereignty

Delormier, Horn-Miller, McComber, and Marquis describe how Kahnawà:ke has pursued food sovereignty as a direct extension of Haudenosaunee responsibilities. The Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — are not simply agricultural staples but kin whose cultivation re-teaches a community how to live with the land. Reclaiming food security means reclaiming seed, fields, knowledge, and the ceremonial cycles that accompany them. The authors show that food sovereignty directly improves maternal and child health while reconstituting political community.

Sioui and colleagues, in “Haudenosaunee women’s water law,” articulate a parallel argument for water. Water has its own law, and that law is carried primarily by women. To speak of water rights in legal-statist terms alone is to miss the point; water sovereignty means fulfilling ceremonial and practical responsibilities to rivers, lakes, and springs.

Art as Sovereign Practice

Jolene Rickard’s “Diversifying sovereignty” argues that Indigenous contemporary art is not decoration appended to politics; it is one of the ways sovereignty is enacted. A Haudenosaunee artist who paints a wampum belt, carves a mask under community protocol, weaves a cornhusk doll, or builds a video installation is rehearsing and extending the political vocabulary of the Longhouse. Theresa Gabriel’s “The Art of Resistance” reads beadwork, printmaking, and performance as tactics in an ongoing refusal of settler erasure. Art makes visible what treaty texts cannot fully carry: the sensory, affective, and ceremonial texture of sovereignty.

Chapter 10: Sovereignty into the Future

Alfred and the Refusal to “Decolonize Colonization”

Taiaiake Alfred’s It’s All About the Land collects talks and interviews that hammer a single point: one cannot “decolonize colonization” by merely adding Indigenous voices to settler institutions. The conditions of real sovereignty are material and relational — land back, language revitalization, ceremonial continuity, and freedom from the coercive economy of extraction. Alfred’s stance is uncompromising precisely because he sees how easily “reconciliation” becomes a new mask for the same old dispossession.

Rick Hill’s Two Rows of Reconciliation

Rick Hill’s “Two Rows of Reconciliation” offers a parallel vision: reconciliation, done honestly, must begin from the Two Row. Settlers and Haudenosaunee share a river, but they travel in separate vessels. Reconciliation is not assimilation; it is the ongoing labour of respecting the distance between the canoe and the ship while keeping the white beads of peace, respect, and friendship polished. Hill’s essay returns us to where the course began: to origin narratives, to wampum, to the Kaianere’kó:wa as living law.

Continuity Between Origin Law and Resurgence

Read across the whole course, a single arc becomes visible. Sky Woman’s descent gives rise to the Good Mind; the Good Mind gives rise to the Kaianere’kó:wa; the Kaianere’kó:wa gives rise to the clan-mother governance that chooses chiefs and feeds nations; governance gives rise to treaty practice encoded in wampum; treaty practice gives rise to international diplomacy from the Covenant Chain to Basic Call to Consciousness to the Haudenosaunee Nationals passport; and all of it gives rise to the everyday refusals, artworks, cornfields, and roadblocks through which Haudenosaunee people today enact a sovereignty that was never extinguished because it was never settler states’ to give.

Coda: Thinking With the Longhouse

The question this course began with — what is Hodinohsó:ni sovereignty? — does not resolve into a short definition. It resolves into a practice. To think with the Longhouse is to treat sovereignty as a verb: to keep a fire, to condole a grief, to plant corn, to bead a belt, to refuse a passport, to paddle a canoe that will not be towed. The readings assembled here are an invitation to that practice. They ask their readers to bring the Good Mind into their own work, to recognize the wampum that is already in the room, and to understand that the river the Two Row imagines has not stopped flowing.