Mohawk

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.

Catholic mission activity reached Mohawk communities earlier and more forcefully than most of the Confederacy, through Jesuit missionaries working under a French peace treaty that required their presence in villages holding Christian captives. The best known convert is Kateri Tekakwitha, born around 1656 at Ossernenon in the Mohawk Valley to a Mohawk father and a Catholic Algonquin mother taken captive years before. Orphaned young by a smallpox epidemic that also scarred her face and damaged her eyesight, she converted to Catholicism at nineteen over her adoptive family's objections and left in 1677 for the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, near Montreal, where she died in 1680 at about twenty-four.

Her conversion was not a private matter inside her own village. Her household opposed it, accused her of sorcery for refusing customary work on the day Christians kept as a day of rest, and her decision to move to a mission community rather than practice quietly at home reads, in the sources, as a break with people who wanted her to stay and did not want a missionary's religion inside their own household. The Catholic Church canonized her in 2012, the first Native North American recognized as a saint, and she is venerated today both by Catholic Mohawk communities, including at Kahnawake where she is buried, and by some who hold her up as a specifically Indigenous saint without endorsing the mission project that produced her conversion. The atlas records the conversion and the household conflict it caused as documented history; it does not adjudicate between the traditionalist and Catholic readings of her that Mohawk communities still hold differently today.