We Share Our Matters
Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, have been one of the most widely written-about Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. But seldom have the voices emerging from this community been drawn on in order to understand its enduring intellectual traditions.
Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters offers the first comprehensive portrait of how the Haudenosaunee of the Grand River region have expressed their long struggle for sovereignty in Canada. Drawing from individualsas diverse as Joseph Brant, Pauline Johnson and Robbie Robertson, Monture illuminates a unique Haudenosaunee world view comprised of three distinct features: a spiritual belief about their role and responsibility to the earth; a firm understanding of their sovereign status as a confederacy of independant nations; and their responsibility to maintain those relations for future generations.
After more than two centuries of political struggle Haudenosaunee thought has avoided stagnant conservatism and continues to inspire ways to address current social and political realities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
