Indigenous Brooklyn: Ironworking, Little Caughnawaga, and Kanien'kehá:ka Nationhood in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001. Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North America's most iconic landmarks. Beginning in the 1880s, ironworking quickly became a principal source of employment for Haudenosaunee men who traveled to jobs throughout Canada and the northeastern United States. By the 1920s, Haudenosaunee families from Ahkwesáhsne and Kahnawà:ke began relocating to Brooklyn, where they opened a string of boardinghouses and established a new community: "Little Caughnawaga." Together, ironworking and "Little Caughnawaga" became a nexus between Kanien'kehá:ka family life, nationhood, and self-determination. This is particularly significant when we consider that Indigenous peoples were conceptually and physically removed from urban spaces that were reframed as "modern" and juxtaposed to perceptions of "Indian authenticity." Yet Kanien'kehá:ka citizens were at the center of building these sites of "modernity," an undertaking that influenced their own rearticulations of Kanien'kehá:ka nationhood.