Mohawk filmmaker’s work explores a historic treaty and her people’s struggle

The two row wampum belt symbolized two peoples walking forward side by side. Photo courtesy of onondaganation.org

By Corey Jacobs

BELLEVILLE – Indigenous filmmaker Candace Maracle uses her latest documentary to point out the long struggle that the Haudenosaunee people (the Iroquois) have faced in having a treaty that was signed by their ancestors honoured.

Indigenous filmmaker Candace Maracle came to Loyalist College to talk about her latest documentary on Nov. 30, 2016. She also gave advice to the student journalists who attended.

Maracle, who comes from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory but now lives in the Six Nations Territory, will be at Loyalist College to talk about the film on Wednesday.

Her film The Grandfather of All Treaties is about a wampum belt – a traditional symbolic belt made of shells and leather – that the Haudenosaunee consider the original treaty between them and North America’s Dutch settlers. The treaty was made in what is now upstate New York early in the 17th century. The Haudenosaunee see the belt, called a two-row wampum, as a living treaty, though the United States and Canada no longer honour it.

In an interview last week with QNet News, Maracle said she had wanted to do the film for some time but the story is a lot older than she is.

“It’s been approximately 400 years since the original two-row wampum belt agreement was made,” she said. “My documentary looks at where we are 400 years later, and the indigenous grassroots movements as a response to now honour what we consider to be a fundamental treaty.”

In the film, historian Rick Hill of the Six Nations Community of the Grand River Territory gives a brief lesson about the wampum belt. He shows a two-row wampum used by Haudenosaunee to create living treaties between them and nations like Britain, Canada and the United States. The treaty ceremony would involve each faction giving the other a two-row wampum, with the two horizontal rows of shells representing the mutual relationship and the straight path the two nations would walk together.

Maracle says each wampum belt has beauty and meaning, but she wanted to use the original two-row wampum as a jumping-off point in her film.

“It allowed me to go more in-depth about our wampum belts while giving a little bit of context: about the beauty of our culture, our wampum belts, why we do the things we do today, why we’re still fighting to have our treaties upheld, why we are fighting for the land and water,” she said.

“I guess I wanted the rest of my audience, whether they be indigenous or non-indigenous, to understand that as well.”

Maracle went to Ryerson University for her master’s degree in journalism, but says journalism wasn’t her original education plan.

“It was more of an academic strategy for me to increase my (grade point average), because I had applied to medicine and got denied. But while I was there, my master’s thesis really ignited this passion for me to be able to tell our stories from my perspective, an indigenous perspective. It wasn’t until I was in school that I really wanted to become a journalist and filmmaker.”

Maracle also faced language barriers. She is still learning to speak Kanien’kéha, a Mohawk tongue, and had to use translators from Tyendinaga and the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory outside Montreal to help with her pronunciation for the voiceover on the film.

Her next project is a short film completely in Kanien’kéha called Three Generations of Iroquois Basket Makers. 

Maracle’s talk at Loyalist on Wednesday takes place in Alumni Hall at noon.