Indigenous Brooklyn: Ironworking, Little Caughnawaga, and Kanien'kehá:ka Nationhood in the Twentieth Century

Unknown to most people who are accustomed to speak with condescending pity of the American Indian as a dying and vanishing race in the struggle for existence, a respectable little company of real aboriginal redmen lives and thrives in the midst of New York City, the heart of the most complex civilization in the world, where competition between individuals and racial types is fiercest, prices highest, rent steepest, and conditions of living in general as far from the conditions in which the early Indians lived as anything could be.And yet, somehow, these Indians have managed to adapt themselves to the conditions they find around them making an honest living and a good one, and winning the respect of their neighbors on their merits as members of the community irrespective of their descent from the quondam owners and rulers of the land . . .Joe Delile [Delisle?] of the Iroquois descent, and from the St. Regis Reservation [Ahkwesáhsne] in Northern New York, is a structural ironworker in the city, and Walter Deer of the Caughnawaga [Kahnawà:ke] is hewing his way here.-"Indians Do Well in City: Sons of Chieftains Now Live in New York's Tall Apartment Houses," New York Times, December 15, 1912 O n May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001.Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North America's most iconic landmarks.Yet, despite their presence in the "heart of the most complex civilization in the world" and in other major urban centers throughout North America for more than a century, American popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held that these spaces-urban and cosmopolitan-were antithetical to Indigenous existence and largely void of an Indigenous presence.This notion of Indigenous absence led generations of scholars and policymakers to relegate Indigenous existence and history to the periphery of these "civilized sites of modernity" and disregard the central significance that these spaces and associated livelihoods had [192.210.128.

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