(This was supposed to go up a week ago – it was ready, I just got swept up in other things and forgot. Please enjoy it now!)
I’ve been thinking, this week, about a book – Deyohaha:ge: Sharing the River of Life edited by Daniel Coleman, Ki’en Debicki, and Bonnie M. Freeman (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025).
Deyohaha:ge: means “two roads” or “two paths” in the Cayuga language, and this is a collection of essays by Haudenosaunee people from the Six Nations community and their neighbours reflecting on the foundational treaty agreements between the Haudenosaunee and Europeans, particularly the tradition that spans the Covenant Chain and the Two Row Wampum Agreement.
I read it partly because I live fairly close to Six Nations, the largest reserve community in so-called Canada, so it just feels like one small element in a slow, ongoing process of trying to figure out what it means to live responsibly in this place. And I read it because of the particular place that the Haudenosaunee, and therefore the Covenant Chain and the Two Row Wampum have in the overall development of treaty relationships in the eastern half of the continent. The Two Row in particular is often glossed as a kind of foundational commitment whereby the Haudenosaunee canoe and the European ship would travel down the river of time together, close enough to help each other when needed but still separate and distinct, with a clear commitment not to interfere in each other’s domains. That’s a vast oversimplification, but it gets at one important element.
The essays do a few different things. Some of them look to the past, and present an understanding of the Covenant Chain/Two Row tradition that situates it in the context of Haudenosaunee story, thought, legal orders, and practices in a much more sophisticated way than you would get if you, y’know, looked them up on Wikipedia or whatever. There are other essays that are more focused on learning from the Two Row for today. And a few essays explore contemporary grassroots experiments at implementing principles from the Two Row, like a pen pal project and an annual paddle down the Grand River, both deliberately spanning the Indigenous/settler divide.
Lots of the material in the book is interesting and challenging. I know there was lots that I just didn’t get, or that I’m sure I got in fairly superficial ways, and the book certainly provides lots the calls for ongoing reflection. I think the essay that spoke most directly to me was the one by Rick Hill, a widely-respected Tuscarora writer and curator and artist and speaker. His essay tackles head-on a reality that I had been thinking about already as I read – what does it mean to think about the Two Row tradition in the context of so many centuries of colonial violence, when the institutions and many of the people on the settler side of the relationship seem disconnected from and disinterested in what the Two Row requires of us and what it offers to us. He offers no magic answers, but some useful reflections.
This is definitely a slow, thoughtful book. Particularly if you approach it from settler worldviews, you should enter it expecting complex ideas and pointers towards different logics of doing and thinking and living, that perhaps allow the possibility of more liberatory futures, but only in slow, complex ways that will require imagination, determination, and patience, rather than pretending to offer clear, direct answers. I think it’s a useful book for people who live in southern Ontario to read, certainly, but also settlers elsewhere in so-called Canada and even the United States who are trying to figure out what it means to live and act in solidarity with Indigenous peoples.