with Rick Hill & Daniel Coleman
Deyohahá:ge:, "two roads or paths" in Cayuga language, evokes the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, known as the "grandfather of the treaties." Famously, this Haudenosaunee wampum agreement showed how Indigenous people and newcomers could build peace and friendship by respecting each other’s cultures, beliefs, and laws as they shared the river of life.
Rick Hill and Daniel Coleman, two of the multiple authors of Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life, delve into the eco-philosophy, legal evolution, and ethical protocols of two-path peace-making. They describe the sacred, ethical space that many of us navigate between these paths. They show how people today create peace, friendship, and respect—literally—on the river of everyday life.
Borrow Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life from our collection
Rick Hill is from two farming families—the Hill’s from Six Nations of the Grand River and the Wilson’s from the Tuscarora Nation. He is a member of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation and a leading knowledge specialist at the First Nation Technical Institute. A historian and museum curator, he has led a 40-year campaign to repatriate wampum to their original Haudenosaunee owners and makers. He is also celebrated at Hamilton’s Mohawk College for educating new generations of Indigenous learners in Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous intellectual, social, political and artistic traditions.
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. 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 used before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.
If you need an accessibility accommodation during this program, please register early so we can confirm arrangements a few days before your visit.
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