Mohawk Erotic

The Mohawk call themselves Kanien'kehá:ka, People of the Flint, and for centuries they have been the Keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy outsiders named the Iroquois. The position was literal: their Mohawk Valley villages in what is now upstate New York faced the Hudson, the Dutch and then the English, and they handled the confederacy's eastern diplomacy and defense. Tradition holds they were the first nation to accept the Peacemaker's Great Law, the constitution that bound five nations, later six, into one longhouse. The name Mohawk itself is an Algonquian exonym, not their own.

Society is matrilineal and organized into three clans, Turtle, Wolf and Bear. Clan mothers hold the chiefs' titles, choose the men who carry them, and can remove them, and land and descent pass through women. Clan mothers still sit in the traditional councils at Akwesasne, Kahnawake and elsewhere, often alongside elected councils created under Canadian or US law, and the friction between the two systems is a live political fact.

The American Revolution cost the Mohawk their valley. Most sided with the British under leaders like Joseph Brant, and after 1783 they rebuilt on the Grand River and the Bay of Quinte in Ontario. Other communities had formed a century earlier at Catholic missions near Montreal; Kahnawake is the best known, and Kateri Tekakwitha, canonized in 2012, lived and died there. Kanien'kéha, a Northern Iroquoian language closest to Oneida, is spoken by a minority today but taught in immersion schools that Kahnawake and Akwesasne have run since the late 1970s. Religious life runs on parallel tracks: Longhouse ceremonies, many following the Code of Handsome Lake, Catholicism at Kahnawake, and Anglicanism at Tyendinaga, home to one of the two Royal Chapels of the Mohawks.

The skyline of New York City is partly Mohawk work. Kahnawake men took up high steel after a railway bridge was built beside their reserve in the 1880s, and generations of ironworkers commuted to Manhattan, keeping a Brooklyn enclave called Little Caughnawaga into the 1960s. The Mohawk also sit astride an international border. Akwesasne is cut by the line between New York, Ontario and Quebec, so one community answers to two countries and three of its own councils. The 1990 standoff at Kanesatake, when a golf course expansion threatened a burial ground, became a 78-day national crisis in Canada and reshaped Indigenous politics there. Lacrosse remains a Haudenosaunee gift to the world, and the Haudenosaunee Nationals travel on their own passports. The haircut that borrows the Mohawk name owes more to Hollywood than to the Mohawk Valley.