Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant
Daniel Coleman
February 11, 2025
400 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-09-2
When Daniel Coleman went into his office in McMaster University on a beautiful April morning in 2006 he was startled to see over thirty police vehicles parked on campus, and soon discovered that the campus was providing lodging for the officers who had raided the site of an Indigenous land dispute near the town of Caledonia. This discovery changed how Coleman thought about Indigenous issues, which he’d long supported, bringing home that there is no part of life in Canada where you are outside of the broken relationship between the nation of Canada and the Indigenous nations who have lived here since time immemorial. This began Coleman’s journey, working closely with Indigenous scholars, to understand more fully that relationship and to find a way to repair not only it, but our relationship with the land we call home. In Grandfather of the Treaties Coleman introduces the founding Wampum covenants that the earliest European settlers made with the Haudenosaunee nation and shows how returning to these covenants, and the ways they were made, could heal our society.
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About the Author
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).
