Broken Pineby Daniel ColemanI live in Hamilton, Ontario in the shelter of a broken pine. Literally. As well as symbolically, historically, and environmentally. In its living, this misshapen tree defines the place where I belong. Or, where I do the work of belonging, of making home. For those of us who are migrants or descend from migrants, belonging is elusive. Our lives are defined by moving, not staying put. The broken pine stays put. It juts into the air at the back of our yard where the flat surface of our garden tips into what we call “the ravine” but which is technically an intervale about a kilometre wide between here and the town of Dundas. An intervale is a low, level tract of land usually found along a river. Accordingly, along the bottom of this depression wanders Coldwater Creek, hemmed in between the ridge that rises into Dundas on its other side and the parking lots McMaster University built along its floor in the 1970s. Our intervale is a little valley within the bowl of a larger one. This, because both the town of Dundas and our neighbourhood here in west Hamilton are sprinkled up and down the sand and gravel eskers left by ice age glaciers twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. The retreating ice scraped out the larger Dundas Valley that spreads west from the southwest tip of Lake Ontario. It left behind the ridges and ravines that wrinkle the valley floor as well as the limestone and dolomite cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment that rise three to six hundred feet along the valley’s north and south walls. One of the wrinkles within this large, magnificent valley is traced by Coldwater Creek. Our broken tree lives, like my wife and I do, on the edge of a valley in a valley. Like all of us in this region, it’s had its misadventures. Six years before we moved into this house, a wind storm broke the spine of this tree twenty-five feet up. This kind of thing happens around here. We live at the head of the huge inland sea of the easternmost of the five great lakes, and, on rare occasions when the wind abandons its usual westerly origin and snarls in off the water from the east—watch out, we’re in for a storm. When one such storm snapped off the top of this tree, Mrs. Forbes, who built this house and lived in it into her nineties, had the jagged break sawn off smooth just above one of the wheels of branches that shoot out like the legs of starfish from the hub of the trunk. White pines branch regularly. You could imagine them as those staircases you see in ships or fire halls, but instead of spiralling around a central spar, they ascend to the heavens branching in evenly spaced rungs that spread out from the trunk in wide, living circles. A ladder with one stout central leg. Compared to the hardwoods that predominate in the forests here, white pines grow quickly, leaping upward in search of light. They grow straight up, and they tower high above most of the other trees in the woods—except the occasional oak or black walnut. Our broken pine is not alone. It stands in a fringe of woods that sprinkles the lip of the slope that descends to the university parking lots below. Its companions include a massive white oak, a dozen softwood maples, a couple of tall black walnuts, a mid-sized spruce, a twisted basswood, and five other white pines. Two of these pines tower into the sky seventy and eighty feet up at the top of the slope. My tree book says white pines add a set of branches each year, and these two have about fifty rungs. Which makes sense, since the house was built in 1949, and these would have been planted soon after. The broken tree has the same girth as the two fifty-year-olds, so it is likely the same age. But it is, well, truncated. Hardly a ship’s ladder to heaven. More like a platform for a tree house. A friend once said we should put a lawn chair up there. We’d have a bird’s-eye view. * Last year, I attended a ceremony where the hosts gave their guests white pine seedlings as gifts. An agreement was being signed between scholars and teachers on the Six Nations Reserve and McMaster University, where I work. The idea is to establish a cooperative Indigenous Knowledge Centre, where Iroquois knowledge, languages, and culture will be revitalized through research and language study. At the ceremony, baby pines in plastic pots and wrapped in cellophane tied with bright green ribbons were given to guests, so they could take them home and plant them in their yards. White pine, known as onerahtase'ko:wa in the Mohawk language, is the Tree of Peace, and it stands at the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations or, in one of their own languages, the Haudenosaunee people. The preceding sentence is full of tricky names and words. The Mohawk writer Brian Maracle thinks the French got the name “Iroquois” in the seventeenth century from the Algonquians, whose dislike for the Haudenosaunee expressed itself in the word Irinakhoiw, “real snakes.” The Algonquian alliance of nations rivalled the Iroquois for trade, and their derogatory name likely pleased the French, who didn’t get along with those “snakes” either and spread the word (69). But I just called Maracle a “Mohawk,” another Algonquian insult, which means “cannibal” (Maracle ix). These insults spread so widely that they eventually stuck. The Mohawks’ name for themselves is actually Kanienkehá:ka, meaning “people of the flinty ground” after the rocky terrain of the territory in eastern upstate New York from which they hail. Nonetheless, Haudenosaunee people regularly use these old insulting names for themselves today as shorthand, often with the mild, self-deprecating humour that is so common in Indian country. And I just called it “Indian” country, another shorthand derived, this time, from Columbus’s Big Mistake. The ground out of which these names grow is contested and shifting. Many of my names and spellings here are cobbled together from books by writers who speak various of the half dozen languages spoken among the Six Nations, as well as from white anthropologists, from online dictionaries, and from the introductory class in Mohawk language I took last winter. So the words I use are a mish-mash: as various as the sand and cobble that compose the ridge on which we live. To the Haudenosaunee, the white pine is the onerahtase'ko:wa, the tree of the long leaves or needles, whose clusters of five correspond to the original number of nations who established the kayaneren’tsherakowa. I’ve heard various Haudenosaunee people translate this word as “the great niceness,” “the great warmth,” and, most commonly, “the great law of peace.” The founding of the Six Nations Confederacy dates back to the story of the Peacemaker. He was a Huron child born to a virgin mother somewhere near the area of the present-day town of Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Around a thousand years ago, the Peacemaker paddled across the lake in a canoe he had carved from white stone and landed among peoples who were at war. The area of the Finger Lakes region in what is now New York State was then aflame with distrust, murder, and violent reprisal. Peacemaker said it did not have to be this way. He taught the people the three principles at the heart of the kayaneren’tsherakowa, the great law— Peace (the health of mind and body that brings Peace), Power (authority and order), and Righteousness (justice). Calm deliberation, he taught, could lead the people out of violence into amity. The Kanienkehá:ka accepted Peacemaker’s message first, and it gradually spread to the other four nations—the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—in the Finger Lakes area. Together, the Peacemaker and leaders from these five nations worked out the protocols for a confederation that built the conceptual longhouse after which they named themselves—Haudenosaunee, “they build the house.” At the founding of this league, Peacemaker uprooted a towering white pine, and the people threw their weapons into the hole where its roots had been. There, the underground rivers washed the armaments away. Peacemaker then replanted the pine and declared that henceforth people from all over the earth could follow the large white roots from any of the four directions if they wished to find onerahtase'ko:wa, the Tree of Peace. The Tuscaroras did just that in the 1720s: they added the sixth rafter to the Haudenosaunee longhouse. Others could add rafters too in the future, as they saw the good way of life made possible by following the principles of the kayaneren’tsherakowa. At the top of onerahtase'ko:wa, Peacemaker placed Skadjí’nă or Eagle, whose excellent vision would see any danger approaching and warn the people. * I’ve never seen an eagle land on our broken pine. Nor even make an aerial pass above it. But I have recently seen a solitary bald eagle turn grand circles in the sky above Cootes Paradise. Birders around here are quite excited about seeing them again. Given the polluted waters of Hamilton Harbour and Cootes Paradise, bald eagles pretty much abandoned this area for the past forty years. Seeing them back in the air over our heads is a sign that the clean-up efforts are starting to pay off. For, in the 1970s Cootes Paradise was declared dead. Its waters stank of heavy metals, PCBs, and phosphorous-fed algae. Its plant life had been so decimated by bottom-feeding European carp that the marsh could no longer do what marshes do—which is filter and clean the water that passes through. Studies of water birds at the Head of the Lake showed that only 29% of Common Terns’ eggs were hatchable. When scientists tested the eggs to see what was wrong, they found concentrations of hexachlorobenzene, DDE, dieldrin, PCBs, and mercury (Weseloh 525). With over two hundred known dumps of toxic waste in the Great Lakes (McMahon), organochlorine compounds such as these in the watershed meant populations of Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, and Double-Crested Cormorants were declining dramatically. With no ready solutions for how to remove these dumps, many of them have since been capped and left where they are. I know of one right here in Hamilton Harbour. In 1972 Canada and the USA signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and identified thirty-six areas of major concern, including Hamilton Harbour. Fourteen years later, Hamilton City Council approved a Remedial Action Plan to begin to reverse the damage done to air, earth, and water. A dam was set up to keep European carp from entering Cootes Paradise. Water plants that had declined to twenty-some species were re-planted in the marsh. Water level controls were relaxed in the marsh so natural cycles of submersion and exposure in the mud flats could encourage bog-type plants to germinate. Fingerlings of native fish were released into the water. Though the damage will not be reversed overnight, these efforts, along with tightened regulations on what kinds of chemicals industries use, have had some dramatic effects. Between 1981 and 1992, for example, mercury concentrations in gull eggs in Hamilton Harbour declined 69%, and between 1981 and 2004 DDE and PCBs in those eggs declined by 90% and 86% respectively (Weseloh 528). The twenty species of waterplants in Coote Paradise have increased into the thousands. * So the eagle has not yet landed. Not at the top of our pine. Eagles are starting to think about returning to our neighbourhood, but they haven’t settled in yet. I have, however, seen racoons up there. A big, solitary male shows up once a fortnight for a day-long snooze. We affectionately call him Broadbent, after the former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada and in honour of the hump that appears on every racoon’s back and the remarkable breadth of this one’s rump. Some time after dusk he clambers down the trunk to prowl the city’s dumpsters, and we won’t see him again for weeks. We’ve also seen a mother nursing her kits in a grey and copper pile of fur on the sawed off platform at the top. Far from being a lookout post for eagle eyes, our pine is a flophouse for nocturnals. At least it’s a place of peace. * Onerahtase'ko:wa pierces the sky. It reaches toward the sun. Very often, it is the tallest tree in the forest. Likewise, it lifts people’s thoughts to the way of peace under the Creator’s sky. Onerahtase'ko:wa signifies kayaneren’tsherakowa, the set of protocols that constitutes the Great Niceness, the Great Warmth. It provides shelter, protection, and security under its branches. With the other trees of the forest and plants of the earth, it gives us the air we breathe. Under the protection of the white pine, the Confederacy Council carried out its business. The eternal flame of the council fire was kept by the Onondagas, in the centre of council gatherings. The Kanienkehá:ka and the Senecas as “elder brothers” of the League, sat on the east, while the “younger brothers,” the Cayugas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras as smaller nations, sat together on the west. A large white mat made from the feathery down of the globe thistle to symbolize the purity and peace of the kayaneren’tsherakowa was spread on the ground. A large white wing swept away the dust or dirt of discord that might adhere to it and interfere with good decision-making. A stick was used to chase away any creeping things or disturbances that might approach the mat and interfere with long-range, clear thinking, for all decisions must consider the implications for children seven generations hence (Wallace 38). * Six Nations thinking is rooted in land, and accordingly the tree of peace anchored a region known as the Dish with One Spoon. Historian Victor Lytwyn explains that First Peoples in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence valley region have long used the words “dish with one spoon” to designate a common hunting ground. The spoon indicates that in the designated area people of various nations—even hostile nations—are free to find their food within the common dish, to hunt and fish there without fear (210). Seneca writer Arthur Parker says that, just after Peacemaker and the people had thrown their weapons into the watery hole and replanted onerahtase'ko:wa, he asked the people what they should do about hunting grounds. The assembled folks said, “We shall have one dish (or bowl) in which will be placed one beaver’s tail and we shall all have coequal right to it, and there shall be no knife in it, for if there be a knife in it, there would be danger that it might cut someone and blood would thereby be shed” (103). Perhaps the most famous Dish With One Spoon treaty witnessed by Europeans is that between the Algonquian alliance and the Haudenosaunee at Kahnawake near Montreal in 1701. Over 1,000 people representing thirty nations gathered to ratify an agreement to share neutral hunting lands north of the Great Lakes. For the Six Nations, the Tree of Peace defines the Dish With One Spoon, where all might share the provisions of the earth without fear of violence or exclusion. So the Dish is an ecological philosophy and a form of international diplomacy. It is also a specific, literal, topographical place. And we’re in it. * It turns out that this exact place, this intervale in the Dundas Valley where Coldwater Creek feeds into Spencer’s Creek, which flows into Cootes Paradise, the marsh at the Head of Lake Ontario—this spot has long been a key place in the Dish With One Spoon. With the creeks feeding down from the Niagara Escarpment and into the broad and rolling plain of the Dundas Valley, and with the shallow warm waters of the marsh at the Head of the Lake, this valley was plentiful in berries, deer, waterfowl, fish, lake rice, and many other provisions. When I first moved here twelve years ago, I assumed the marsh was called Cootes Paradise after the species of water birds that frequent marshes all over North America, the American Coot. I was wrong. The coot from which the marsh got its name was not a bird but a Brit. His name was Lieutenant Thomas Cootes, and he was an eighteenth-century officer at the British fort on the Niagara River, who used to come to this valley to hunt waterfowl. Story has it that the geese and ducks were so plentiful that he could sit in a chair with his gun and pick them out of the sky as they flew over the Iroquois Bar that divides the marsh from Hamilton Harbour (Terpstra 96). Niagara was overrun in those days with refugees from the American Revolutionary War, and it’s said that Lieutenant Cootes came here to supply desperate people with food. A dish with one gun. I guess if you’re the one with the gun, that makes it paradise. At least he used the weapon to relieve the needs of others. Placed here at the Head of the Lake, Cootes Paradise is the precise spot where travellers from all directions have converged for millennia. Those traversing the Niagara Peninsula from Lake Erie to the south or from the Niagara River to the east would have encountered travellers here who were portaging from the Grand River watershed, which descends from the region of Lake Huron to the northwest, or those skirting Lake Ontario from the northeast. Given the shelter of the escarpment cliffs and plentiful valley below, Cootes was a major crossroads, a place to rest and replenish food supplies. It would be important that it remain a peaceful place, where no one feared a knife hidden in the dish. And, indeed, anthropologists have called the people who lived here “Neutrals.” They were Attiwanderonks, an Iroquoian language-speaking people, and they lived right here around the Head of the Lake, where they formed a kind of buffer zone between the Hurons to the north and the Haudenosaunee to the south and east. * Peace is a dynamic and fragile thing. You can’t just make a law and expect that everyone will live happily ever after. Even if they share a dish with one spoon. People are people. We find ways to say we need a bit more from the dish, a bigger slice of the pie, than our neighbour. We forget that our parents once shared the same spoon. It’s as if, when you officially name peace as your goal, history rises up against you. Witness Jerusalem, that ironically named city of peace. Likewise, the descendants of those who invented the kayaneren’tsherakowa have had little peace over the last 500 years. With the arrival of Europeans in this region in the seventeenth century, relationships in the Dish With One Spoon were thrown into conflict. The Dutch, French, and English newcomers did not comprehend the principles of the kayaneren’tsherakowa, with its radical ideas of matrilineal leadership, democratic decision-making, and territorial commons. They brought with them products, technologies, and diseases, from rum to guns to small pox, that spread devastation among the existing peoples. Competition for European trade in beaver pelts, fuelled by increased need for muskets and iron axe heads, fomented raiding and warfare between the Hurons and the Haudenosaunee. On the eastern side of their territory, the Mohawks battled the Mohigans for control over trade with the Dutch and then the English down at the mouth of what’s now known as the Hudson River. The League of Peace vanquished these rivals for European trade in the early eighteenth century. Including the Neutrals in what used to be known as the Dish With One Spoon. But no sooner had they consolidated power in the region than the thirteen colonies rebelled against the British motherland. Some members of the Haudenosaunee sided with their long-term British trading partners while others supported the upstart colonists. Members of the Six Nations took each other’s lives, as they found themselves on opposite sides of this dispute between Britons. During the Revolutionary War, regardless of which side they had supported, their crops were burnt and their lands confiscated during the notorious Sullivan campaign of 1779. So the Haudenosaunee broke into various refugee parties, fleeing first to Buffalo Creek (which dropped the creek from its name and, over the next century, grew into the city of Buffalo) and then to other places. A large contingent of all six nations accompanied Thaientané:ken (Joseph Brant, a Kanienkehá:ka officer in the British army) to the Grand River, where the British granted them almost a million acres, six miles on each side of the river from its source to its mouth on Lake Erie. Another group went to the Bay of Quinte on the north shore of Lake Ontario, not far from Peacemaker’s birthplace. Some, such as a group of mostly Oneida people, ended up establishing a reserve west of the Thirteen Colonies in what’s now Wisconsin, while others returned to their traditional lands around the Finger Lakes, particularly after the War of 1812 when hostilities between the United States and Britain cooled off. Unable to avoid the newcomers’ wars, the league of peace broke into a diaspora. * The folks who settled nearest here along the Grand River heaved a sigh of relief after arriving from Buffalo Creek in 1784. In recognition of their military service during the war, Governor Haldimand granted them a piece of the old dish with one spoon along the banks of the river here in lands they had recently purchased from the Mississauga. Their tenure on this land, however, was immediately contested. The story of the Grand River lands is one of legal larceny. The territory was summarily reduced in 1792 by Upper Canada’s first governor, John Graves Simcoe, by a third of its original size. It was further reduced by disputed land leases and sales conducted by Brant, and again by another major seizure when suspiciously few Confederacy Council chiefs in 1841 were coerced to sign away another large portion (Johnson). By 1850, seventy years after it was established, the reserve retained only 47,000 acres, less than 5% of the original Halidmand Tract (Dickason 164-65). And the legalized whittling continues. Because of myriad irregularities over sales, leases, and expropriations of land over the two centuries since the Haudenosaunee refugees arrived on the Grand River, the Band Council established a Six Nations Land Claims Research Office in the 1970s. After twenty years of wrangling with government, this office issued a report on Outstanding Financial and Land Issues in 1997. Between 1974 and 1994, the Six Nations Land Claims Research Office filed twenty-seven land claims with the Crown. Of these twenty-seven, one was resolved in 1980 and four others were acknowledged by Canada’s Justice Department as being valid and requiring resolution. The remaining claims were closed by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada without having been investigated in 1995. Among the disregarded claims was one that has since become infamous. This claim was registered by the Office with the government on June 18, 1987 in reference to the Hamilton-Port Dover Plank Road. Essentially, the Six Nations said these 7,680 acres had been leased to the province in the nineteenth century for a road running through the reserve from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, while the provincial government insisted that the lands had been sold. Instead of inquiring into and clarifying these transactions, the province went ahead and dispensed with these lands as it wished, and a portion was sold in 1992 to a company called Henco Industries. The developer planned to build an 200-home suburb called Douglas Creek Estates between the town of Caledonia and the Six Nations Reserve. Alarmed at seeing bulldozers and concrete mixers at work on disputed land, several young Haudenosaunee women organized folks from the reserve to reclaim Douglas Creek Estates on February 26, 2006 and stop construction. The reclaimers said the land had never been surrendered or sold and demanded that building cease until a settlement could be reached between the Six Nations and the federal and provincial governments. In Canada, building can never cease. That is not an option. It is not even a conversation. So Henco Industries obtained a court injunction to remove the reclaimers, and, after they refused to vacate, on April 20, 2006 the Ontario Provincial Police sent in 200 officers armed with M16 rifles, tear gas, pepper spray, and Tasers. Sixteen people were arrested. Despite the heavy artillery, however, folks from the reserve turned up in such large numbers that they retained control of the site. Patrols from Six Nations have remained there ever since. Violence has broken out from time to time in the intervening years between Haudenosaunee people patrolling the site and flag-waving Canadians who have staged protests against the reclaimers. There have been fist-fights, stones thrown, and insults traded back and forth. There have been games of plant-your-flag-in-the-other team’s-zone. Because of the violence and in tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Six Nations’ unresolved concerns, the police, with an apparent change of tactics after the raid, have maintained a buffer zone between white protestors and the Six Nations people at the site. This change has been seen by some of the Maple Leaf-wavers as favouritism for the Haudenosaunee reclaimers, who, according to the court injunction, had been ordered to leave the site. In the meantime, the Ontario government bought the land from Henco Industries and is holding it in trust until a settlement can be negotiated between the Confederacy Council of the Six Nations and the two levels of government. The negotiations are pretty much stagnant four years later. * This is where we live, then, under the shelter of a shattered pine. And it is undeniably thriving. Its branches grow long and heavy. They bristle with huge cones. Its clusters of five long needles continue to photosynthesize, continue to transform carbon into oxygen. This battered tree is putting the life in our lungs. This is no minor contribution here at the Head of the Lake, where the crossroads of lake, creeks tumbling off the escarpment, and travelways on the shoreline attracted first grist mills, then canals, then railways, and eventually steel smelters whose smoke stacks send black plumes floating into the sky. The eagerness to turn the gifts of this dish into warehouses of spoons and knives and forks and car parts made folks overlook the organochlorines running into the lake from open sewers, the toxins billowing into the sky from the coal fires of the mills. A century of peeing in our own bathwater transformed the abundance Thomas Cootes took back to starving refugees at Niagara into unswimmable waters, carcinogenic air, dead paradise. A recent article in the Hamilton Spectator links our city’s necrotic air to its poverty rates. Sixteen percent of Hamiltonians live in poverty. That’s almost one in five. Almost one in four children go to school hungry each day. In 2005, Hamilton produced 2,240,453 kilograms of air pollutants such as lead and mercury. If we add air contaminants such as sulphur dioxide and other causes of smog and acid rain, Hamilton released 58,788,549 kilos of air pollution that same year. The article suggests the obvious: one reason for the city’s high poverty rates is that the polluted water and air keeps housing costs down, so people with low incomes can afford the rent (de Lazzer). It’s a new idea of the dish: we’re killing the water and the air. Making a common chamber pot. Join us. There’s some for everybody. * The pine is broken. There’s no chance that it can be restored to its original height or shape. No eagle watches from its top. The League of Peace is scattered. Its dispersed members are embroiled in disputes, internal and external. The water that feeds its roots is tainted. The air its needles breathe is suspect. Nonetheless, it thrives. It distils oxygen from the fetid air. It fights against necrosis. It shelters new soil at its roots. They fan out in all directions. They draw dirty water up to the magic of light. Despite the scattering, despite the fragmentation and the interference, the Tree of Peace and the Dish with One Spoon have not been forgotten. They are still here in the land, still flickering in the vision of those who thirst for peace, power, and righteousness. Every day, this beleaguered pine in the middle of the city puts the air I need in my lungs. Its branches shade the earth at its roots. It greets the feet of squirrels, woodpeckers, chickadees, wrens, and the occasional owl. It offers racoons a place to sleep. It grows. This broken pine gives us a place to belong. It shows the way to live, the only way anyone can—by breathing every day, each day making life. References de Lazzer, Rachel. “Poor and Dirty: In Great Lakes, Hamilton Hardest Hit by Troubling Mix of Pollution & Poverty.” Hamilton Spectator Friday, November 28, 2008, A3. Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2002. Johnson, Charles M. (Professor of History, Emeritus, McMaster University). “A Report on the Six Nations Land Surrender of 1841.” Unpublished paper. Lytwyn, Victor P. “A Dish With One Spoon: The Shared Hunting Grounds Agreement in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region.” Papers of the Twenty-Eighth Algonquian Conference. Ottawa: Carleton University, 1994. 210-227. McMahon, Kevin (dir.). Waterlife: The Epic Journey of Water. National Film Board of Canada, 2009. Parker, Arthur C. The Constitution of the Five Nations, or the Iroquois Book of the Great Law. Originally published in The New York Museum Bulletin, Albany, NY 184 (April 1, 1916). Iroqrafts Reprints, 2006. Six Nations Land Claims Research Office. Outstanding Financial and Land Issues and Summary of Six Nations’ Claims. Oshweken, ON. May 19, 1997. Terpstra, John. Falling Into Place. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2004. Weseloh, D.V. (Chip). “Studies of Contaminants and Population Levels of Waterbirds in Hamilton Harbour, 1970-2005.” Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas. Ed. Robert Curry. Hamilton Naturalists’ Club, 2006. 523-541.
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Broken Pine
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