The Mohawk are the easternmost of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and in the confederacy's own image of a single longhouse stretching across what is now upstate New York, the Mohawk hold the office of Keepers of the Eastern Door. On the Grand Council's three benches, Mohawk sits with Seneca as one of the two Elder Brothers, opposite the Younger Brothers, Oneida and Cayuga, with Onondaga presiding as Firekeeper between them; the historian William Fenton's political history of the confederacy traces this bench structure, along with the Mohawk's nine chief titles among the fifty the founding five nations divided among themselves, back through Haudenosaunee oral tradition and the written colonial record both.
The historical Mohawk homeland lay in the Mohawk Valley of eastern New York, the closest of the Six Nations territories to European colonial settlement, which put the Mohawk first in line for both alliance and encroachment from the earliest Dutch and English contact. Mohawk communities today are divided by a border neither asked for: Akwesasne and Kahnawake both straddle the line between New York and Ontario or Quebec, and Kanesatake sits wholly in Quebec, while Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario holds Mohawk families alongside every other Haudenosaunee nation. Kanien'keha, the Mohawk language, is taught today through immersion schools at several of these communities, a deliberate response to a language that colonial boarding schools worked for generations to suppress.