![]() ![]() Storekeepers supplied ingredients for favorite Mohawk recipes like cornbread with beans. David Munroe Cory, who even learned the Mohawk language to give sermons in their native tongue. Many frequented the Wigwam Bar and attended a church run by Rev. They even established a neighborhood of their own in Brooklyn, New York.īy 1960 Atlantic Avenue and the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn was home to about 800 Mohawk ironworkers and their relatives. The Skywalker tradition was passed down for many generations as Mohawks worked the high steel from Ontario to Chicago and Philadelphia, and as far away as San Francisco. What began as a high-paying vocation became a tribal tradition as fathers and grandfathers taught their sons and grandsons to handle their fears effectively. “They would choose leaders because they knew about their boys’ characteristics from infancy to manhood.” “Women always chose the chiefs because they lived in matrilineal clans and saw the boys grow up,” she said. They would instead work in dispersed riveting gangs, lest another disaster wipe out such a wide swath of one family.īeauvais said it was typical for women to call the shots. The resilient Skywalkers rebounded, but only after Mohawk women demanded that they not work together in family groups. More than two-thirds of these men were married, leaving behind dozens of children and 24 widows. The Skywalker tradition nearly came to an end in 1907 when 33 Mohawk men from Kahnawake died during a collapse of the Quebec Bridge near Quebec City. These indigenous riveting gangs spoke their native languages on the job while helping to build the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza and many other structures that shaped the New York City skyline in the 1920s and 1930s. Having once hunted, trapped and farmed throughout the northeast woodlands, the Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, eventually took to the high steel in burgeoning metropolitan areas. ![]() ![]() Just as early European settlers had observed Mohawks walking fearlessly across rivers on narrow logs, early ironworkers showed an unusual aptitude for climbing and working on steel beams. Lawrence River, which borders their reserve near Montreal. The Mohawk Skywalker tradition began in 1886 when some daring Mohawk men from Kahnawake took jobs helping build the Victoria Bridge across the St. Undated photograph of Robert McComber, from Caughnawaga Indian Reserve, working on high steel constructions site in downtown Montreal as a welder. ![]()
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