Gilbert Martin and his new bride Lana, pioneers in the Mohawk Valley, live and protect their land through weather disasters, love and hate and Indian attacks.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a wonderfully written novel about a small town in New York whose citizens have fallen on hard times. "Immensely readable and sympathetic.... Mr. Russo has an instinctive gift for capturing the rhythms of small-town life." —The New York Times Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work—because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart. In Mohawk, Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
The first collection of its kind, this anthology by members of the Mohawk Warrior Society uncovers a hidden history and paints a bold portrait of the spectacular experience of Kanien'kehá:ka survival and self-defense. Providing extensive documentation, context, and analysis, the book features foundational writings by prolific visual artist and polemicist Karoniaktajeh Louis Hall (1918–1993)—such as his landmark 1979 pamphlet, The Warrior's Handbook, as well as selections of his pioneering artwork. This book contains new oral history by key figures of the Rotisken'rhakéhte's revival in the 1970s, and tells the story of the Warriors’ famous flag, their armed occupation of Ganienkeh in 1974, and the role of their constitution, the Great Peace, in guiding their commitment to freedom and independence. We hear directly the story of how the Kanien'kehá:ka Longhouse became one the most militant resistance groups in North America, gaining international attention with the Oka Crisis of 1990. This auto-history of the Rotisken'rhakéhte is complemented by a Mohawk history timeline from colonization to the present, a glossary of Mohawk political philosophy, and a new map of Iroquoia in Mohawk language. At last, the Mohawk Warriors can tell their own story with their own voices, and to serve as an example and inspiration for future generations struggling against the environmental, cultural, and social devastation cast upon the modern world.
Here is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped. Combating hardships almost too great to endure, they helped give to America a legend which still stirs the heart. In the midst of love and hate, life and death, danger and disaster, they stuck to the acres which were theirs, and fought a war without ever quite understanding it. Drums Along the Mohawk has been an American classic since its original publication in 1936.
In 1634, the Dutch West India Company was anxious to know why the fur trade from New Netherland had been declining, so the company sent three employees far into Iroquois country to investigate. Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert led the expedition from Fort Orange (present-day Albany, NY). His is the earliest known description of the interior of what is today New York State and its seventeenth-century native inhabitants. Van den Bogaert was a keen observer, and his journal is not only a daily log of where the expedition party traveled; it is also a detailed account of the Mohawks and the Oneidas: the settlements, modes of subsistence, and healing rituals. Van den Bogaert’s extraordinary wordlist is the earliest known recorded vocabulary of the Mohawk language. Gehring’s translation and Starna’s annotations provide indispensable material for anthropologists, ethnohistorians, linguists, and anyone with a special interest in Native American studies. Michelson’s current additions to the wordlist of Mohawk equivalents with English glosses (wherever possible) and his expert analysis of the language in the Native American passages offer a valuable new dimension to this edition of the journal.
These essays, produced and published over thirty years, are prescient in the prophetic tradition yet current. They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence. Sovereignty, cultural roots and world view, land and treaty rights, globalization, spiritual formulations and fundamental human wisdom coalesce to provide a genuinely indigenous perspective on current events.
Hislop writes living history. Father Jogues is there, as are Sir William Johnson and Molly Brant, Nicholas Herkimer, DeWitt Clinton, Eliphalet Nott, the Remingtons, Charles Steinmetz, and a host of others. Fur trading, land grabbing, Dutch, Palatines, Yankees, the Battle of Oriskany, the Erie Canal, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, General Electric are all part of the story of The Mohawk. Hislop's presentation of this unique region is both informative and compelling.
"In the quiet Indian summer of 1953, two young journalists set out to rediscover the North American steam locomotive on the even of its retirement. it was the first of severl forays tht would span four years and thousands of miles. For writer David P. Morgan and photographer Philip R. Hastings, the mission was to commit to word and photo a mechanical institution caught in an inevitable farewell performance. Their search for steam yielded both drama and diversity: a work-worn Pennsylvania E6 Atlantic in charge of a bedraggled New Jersey local, an antique New York Central Ten-Wheeler plying the weeds of a southern Ontario branch line, and a triumphant Chesapeake & Ohio 2-6-6-6 No. 1624, reprieve from the scrap line in hand, marching up the New River Gorge with 8000 tons of coal." --From inside of book jacket.