Q: Your book, Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) is being hailed as an essential read for Canadians looking to understand our nation’s complicated history. What do the founding wampum agreements have to offer us today?
A: They can teach us a better understanding of trade at a time when trade wars are giving us lots of grief. The 16th and 17th century encounters between Indigenous people in Turtle Island and merchant sailors coming from Europe constitutes the meeting of two very different ways of seeing and living in the world, two very different approaches to trade. The French, Dutch, and English who arrived at the mouths of rivers flowing into the Atlantic were the envoys of a new way of making wealth. These were not aristocrats who stood to inherit their fathers’ land and properties, they were sailors from Europe’s emerging merchant class who were looking for trade goods and resources—spices from Asia, minerals from “El Dorado,” manufactured items from China or India. They had recently developed the capacity to navigate across huge oceans, and they were learning that they could become independently wealthy by exploring the world’s coastlands and islands and bringing back objects they could sell at home.
These new bourgeoisie met Haudenosaunee people on the Hudson River, who were also traders. But traders of a very different mindset. These inhabitants of Turtle Island understood “trade” as conducted between all the beings of the living world, not just between humans. So they were interested in the goods that the Dutch brought in their ships—copper kettles or iron knife blades—but they knew that the plants and animals and water systems all around them were influenced by trade, not just the people. Trade, to them, meant that whoever was involved, including non-humans, were part of the equation of exchange. Good trade meant exchanging what was necessary to the flourishing of the entire environment.
This is what makes the early wampum agreements that the Haudenosaunee made with the Dutch and then with the English so unique and so relevant for us today. When the Haudenosaunee diplomats explained that the Two Row Wampum (circa 1613) represented the Dutch trading ship and their own canoes as two vessels traveling down the river of life, they were emphasizing that the agreement made between the two vessels’ “culture, beliefs, and laws” must benefit not just the people in the vessels but also the river itself, which, after all is what kept everyone afloat (let alone hydrated). The Two Row Wampum which was renewed as the “Silver Covenant of Friendship” wampum agreement with the British (1674) is as much ecological philosophy as it is political philosophy. To make peaceful, healthy agreements between humans was not a separate undertaking from making agreements to secure the peace of the land, the earth, the watershed. “No one can claim Mother Earth,” the Haudenosaunee said when they were working out the Two Row agreement with the Dutch, “except the faces rising in the earth to be born.” Those “faces” were like seeds, the embryos of future plants, animals, or humans. The point is that the wampum agreements that shaped Dutch and then British relations with Indigenous North Americans understood that the eco (Gk: “home”) of “economy” is the same as the eco of “ecology.”
The Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum agreements have been called the “Grandfather of the Treaties,” because the British learned these ground rules for treaty-and-trade-making from them, and they went on to make wampum covenants with First Nations all across northeastern Turtle Island. They then expanded from these to the written and numbered treaties, so these principles lie latent in our country’s constitutional DNA. We need to renew these understandings today. Our ancestors’ first agreements for how to live in this continent, how to share the river of life, were framed within these ground rules—because, in the end, ground rules.
So many of our legal arrangements have been twisted away from these early agreements. The extractive and exploitative understanding of trade, which disregards non-humans as participants in, let alone beneficiaries of, trade, has polluted and abused the river of life. The current battles over trade tariffs show how twisted our understanding has become. An obsessive focus on asserting sovereignty over dead objects (“resources”), distracts us from trade agreements aimed at benefitting the faces waiting in the ground to be born.
Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant by Daniel Coleman (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)
More about Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant:
Grandfather of the Treaties shares Coleman’s extensive study of Haudenosaunee wampum agreements with European nations. It was written in close consultation with many Indigenous scholars and shows how we can chart a new future for everyone living in what we now call Canada—Indigenous, settler, more recent arrival—by tracing wampum’s long-employed, now-neglected past. The Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty tradition models how to develop good minds so that we can live peacefully together on the river of life that sustains us all. It is a philosophy, an ethical system, a way of learning to live as relatives with our human and more-than-human neighbours. This covenant has been called the “grandfather of the treaties,” and is also considered the grandmother of Canada’s Constitution.
Daniel Coleman
More about Daniel Coleman:
Daniel Coleman is a recently retired English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He taught in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. 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 in by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.
Daniel has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has published numerous academic and creative non-fiction books as an author and as an editor. 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).