Indigenous Tribes & Culture: How Colonialism and Borderlands Affected Tribal Nations

The Mohawk Indians

Smoke rose from inside the longhouse where the men were meeting with the outsiders. Many winters ago these fiercely proud people had fought against the strangers for encroaching on their land, these people were strange to them. Pale of skin with light eyes, hungry eyes that desired all that they see, eyes that could not satisfy their hunger for the land on which the Mohawk were born. Now the fighting has stopped, and the proud Keepers of the Eastern Door of the Iroquois Confederation sat in conference with the strangers from a land called "Denmark" far across the sea. The conference business was about trade, the Danish people wanted the furs from the animals that the Mohawk hunted. In return the European traders would provide the Mohawk with weapons in which to defeat their enemies and increase their strength. Some of the men in the longhouse were pleased with this arrangement, for since the arrival of these Europeans they had benefitted from trading with them. Then there were those men, older wiser men who watched with sad eyes and empty hearts. They had seen the change that the Europeans had brought to their people, and they had watched how the Mohawk became more dependent on the goods from the white traders. They were the only ones that remember the hungry eyes that first arrived in their land, and they knew in their heart that those eyes would envelope not only the Mohawk, but the entire Iroquois Confederation. 


 

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