Overview

When Daniel Coleman went into his office in McMaster University on a beautiful April morning in 2006 he was startled to see over thirty police vehicles parked on campus, and soon discovered that the campus was providing lodging for the officers who had raided the site of an Indigenous land dispute near the town of Caledonia. This discovery changed how Coleman thought about Indigenous issues, which he’d long supported, bringing home that there is no part of life in Canada where you are outside of the broken relationship between the nation of Canada and the Indigenous nations who have lived here since time immemorial. This began Coleman’s journey, working closely with Indigenous scholars, to understand more fully that relationship and to find a way to repair not only it, but our relationship with the land we call home. In Grandfather of the Treaties Coleman introduces the founding Wampum covenants that the earliest European settlers made with the Haudenosaunee nation and shows how returning to these covenants, and the ways they were made, could heal our society.

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9781998408092

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Reviews

""Coleman's work is well-researched into the local lore of Hamilton, the families who settled there, and the Indigenous people who lived on the land prior to European settlement. He is inclusive of those stories; of recorded family history in old Bibles, the ceremonial and oral narratives of Indigenous peoples."" -- ""The Goose"" ""Daniel Coleman's analysis of the pervasive metaphor of 'civility' in Canadian cultural discourse is a fascinating and eye-opening study that provides a welcome genealogy of this discourse in Canadian literary texts published between 1850 and 1950 . . . It provides a history and critique of the project of normative civility in English Canada, while also highlighting its continuing impact in popular understandings of Canadian identity today."" -- ""Canadian Literature on White Civility"" ""The book brims with life, and the family of life - the system of living things which brings the larger city into play. Yardwork has in it some of the sacramental feel, soil sifted through one's fingers, of Thoreau and Annie Dillard . . . His research into the native umbilical here and the Haudenosaunee stories of creation is exhaustive; the distillation of it lyrical."" -- ""Hamilton Spectator""

"""Coleman's work is well-researched into the local lore of Hamilton, the families who settled there, and the Indigenous people who lived on the land prior to European settlement. He is inclusive of those stories; of recorded family history in old Bibles, the ceremonial and oral narratives of Indigenous peoples."" - The Goose ""Daniel Coleman's analysis of the pervasive metaphor of 'civility' in Canadian cultural discourse is a fascinating and eye-opening study that provides a welcome genealogy of this discourse in Canadian literary texts published between 1850 and 1950 . . . It provides a history and critique of the project of normative civility in English Canada, while also highlighting its continuing impact in popular understandings of Canadian identity today."" - Canadian Literature on White Civility ""The book brims with life, and the family of life - the system of living things which brings the larger city into play. Yardwork has in it some of the sacramental feel, soil sifted through one's fingers, of Thoreau and Annie Dillard . . . His research into the native umbilical here and the Haudenosaunee stories of creation is exhaustive; the distillation of it lyrical."" - Hamilton Spectator"

Author Information

Daniel Coleman is an English professor at McMaster University who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He studies and writes about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006, winner of the Raymond Klibansky Prize), In Bed with the Word (2009) and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).

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