A Mohawk Tale

An Eclectic Humanist

This episode ended up taking me on an unexpected journey. When I started out, the plan was simply to tell the story of the Six Nations First Nation near Brantford, Ontario applying for membership in the League of Nations in 1923, and the underhanded ways in which the government of Canada, and especially Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, opposed and punished them for their application. But when I finished that part of the recording, the episode seemed incomplete, and as I sat at my desk, staring at my bookcase and wondering what I might do to turn the tale into more than a mere historical lecture, the name Beth Brant and the title of her first collection, Mohawk Trail, kept tugging at me, as did the fact that Scott was not merely a bureaucrat but also a highly regarded poet in his time. Would a comparison of texts be a useful way to bring the story more fully to life? Maybe, but how much better would it be if there were a family connection between Beth Brant and the Mowhawk war chief who, with his sister, established the Six Nations First Nation and after whom the city of Brantford is named? Well, it turns out there is. So it turns out that I was able to explore the questions at the heart of this episode not merely from a bureaucratic and historical perspective but also from the deeply human perspective of literature, and to do so through the work of the arch villain of the story, himself, on the one hand, and a bearer of the protagonists' heritage on the other. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you find it as enlightening to listen to as I found it to make.