DANIEL COLEMAN BOOK LAUNCH: “Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant“
WEDNESDAY, 21 MAY 2025 | DOORS at 18:30, WORDS at 19:00
This is a FREE EVENT
Daniel Coleman celebrates the launch of his new book and will share his research on the original wampum agreements between First Peoples and the early settlers. These covenants bound nations together in mutual regard and friendship. They consisted of a promise to respect one another’s different cultures, values, traditions and ways of life, and to live peaceably together. In recalling the wampum covenants, we are presented with an opportunity to renew our original promises between settlers and First Peoples, and to consider their applicability to how we relate to the diverse peoples and beings who make up the Earth.
About Daniel
Daniel Coleman is an English professor at McMaster University, on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He studies and writes about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006, winner of the Raymond Klibansky Prize), In Bed with the Word (2009) and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).
He joins Ki’en Debicki and Bonnie Freeman as a co-editor of Deyohahá:ge: Sharing the River of Life, a book of essays by Six Nations Writers and their neighbours. Grandfather of the Treaties emerged from the Two Row Research Partnership group’s monthly discussions at Six Nations Polytechnic on the Grand River Territory.
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