Native ironworkers tradition continues on North Campus
By Melanie Lefkowitz. Reprinted with permission from the Cornell Chronicle
For six generations, Mohawk ironworkers have walked the steel.
Indigenous people began ironworking in the 19th century, when they were hired to build railroad bridges i. For access to this article please sign in or subscribe.
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When High Country News published “Land-Grab universities” last April, the two-year-long investigation shed new light on a dark open secret: One of the largest transfers of land and capital in the country’s history had masqueraded as a donation for university endowments.
HCN identified nearly 11 million acres of land, expropriated from approximately 250 tribes, bands and communities through more than 160 violence-backed treaties and land cessions. Now, in the wake of the investigation, land-grant universities across the country are re-evaluating the capital they built from these stolen Indigenous lands.
More than 150 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act the legislation that transferred the lands new discussions about the universities’ moral and ethical responsibilities have forced Americans to re-examine the law’s legacy. Land-grant institutions have long prided themselves on their accomplishments as beneficiaries: They use
For six generations, Mohawk ironworkers have “walked the steel.”
Indigenous people began ironworking in the 19th century, when they were hired to build railroad bridges in Canada. They helped craft the New York City skyline, working on projects including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the World Trade Center.
That long tradition was in evidence on the North Campus Residential Expansion project, where a crew of mostly Indigenous ironworkers flew from their crane a cloth image of the Hiawatha wampum belt, which has been used to represent the sovereignty of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
On Dec. 2, the ironworkers presented the flag to representatives from the undergraduate organization Native American and Indigenous Students at Cornell (NAISAC). The transfer acknowledged that they were creating buildings to house future generations of Native students at Cornell, that these buildings were constructed by Indigenous people and that all of it