Career
He was a Seneca, born into the Turtle clan on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, located in western New York State. John Mohawk was a major visionary of the Haudenosaune Confederacy of Nations who played a singularly important role in fashioning the intellectual bridge of the traditional Indian movement toward the national and international community. Firmly based in the traditional Seneca Longhouse, he was a practitioner and master singer and orator.
He was a writer, journalist, researcher, and lecturer.
A specialist in the field of culture and community economic development and an activist and commentator on the cultural survival of indigenous peoples, Mohawk was a resolute traditionalist, social activist, and negotiator in local and international conflicts. He helped negotiate the conflict between the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Miskito people in 1983, and was a peace guide at armed standoffs between Native traditionalists and government agencies in North America.
He worked tirelessly to revitalize indigenous agriculture, healthy food (eg, Iroquois white corn) and the "Slow Food" movement. He was a journalist, a longtime editor, and contributor to "Akwesasne Notes", "Daybreak", and "Indian Country Today," and director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at the Center of the Americas State University of New York (State University of New York) in Buffalo, New New York
His books include:
The Iroquois Creation Story: John Arthur Gibson and JNB Hewitt"s Myth of the Earth Grasper
Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World
The Red Buffalo
Thinking in Indian, a posthumously published collection of essays, edited by Jose Barreiro, is in print (Fulcrum).
He was also a co-editor of Exiled in the Land of the Free (with Oren Lyons), and primary author of A Basic Call to Consciousness (Akwesasne Notes/Farm Publishing Company), the classic collective work of the Haudenosaune Grand Council (c 1976-1977) on the meaning of traditionalism as a guide to political activism. Basic Call to Consciousness is perhaps the most significant volume in the early documents of International Indigenous activism.
