• Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant

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

March 25, 2025 | ISBN 978-1-998408-09-2 | 380 Pages

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For decades Daniel Coleman has worked closely with many Indigenous scholars to understand the land he calls home and the complex and painful histories between Indigenous and European nations that have formed Canada. In Grandfather of the Treaties, he has drawn on this experience to craft an extensive study of the wampum covenants that underpin our nations, one that takes readers from wampum’s first emergence among Indigenous nations to how these covenants can help us shape a better future for all. In this wide-ranging book Coleman seeks to fill a deep hole in most Canadians’ knowledge of how our nation was… Read more
    • Power Q & A with Daniel Coleman (River Street Writing, 13/06/2025)
      "We need to renew these understandings today. Our ancestors’ first agreements for how to live in this continent, how to share the river of life, were framed within these ground rules—because, in the end, ground rules."

  • Daniel Coleman is a recently retired English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He taught in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He has studied and written 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.

    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).