The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, have been one of the most widely written-about Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. But seldom have the voices emerging from this community been drawn on in order to understand its enduring intellectual traditions. Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters offers the first comprehensive portrait of how the Haudenosaunee of the Grand River region have expressed their long struggle for sovereignty in Canada. Drawing from individualsas diverse as Joseph Brant, Pauline Johnson and Robbie Robertson, Monture illuminates a unique Haudenosaunee world view comprised of three distinct features: a spiritual belief about their role and responsibility to the earth; a firm understanding of their sovereign status as a confederacy of independant nations; and their responsibility to maintain those relations for future generations. After more than two centuries of political struggle Haudenosaunee thought has avoided stagnant conservatism and continues to inspire ways to address current social and political realities.

Rick Monture is a member of the Mohawk nation, Turtle clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. He is also the Director of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University.

Rick Monture's profile page

“An important and ambitious endeavor that makes a significant contribution to Indigenous studies’ scholarship and to our understanding of Haudenosaunee-settler relations in both the past and present.”

H-Net Reviews

“Long considered a laboratory for outside ethnographic research into Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) culture and history, the Six Nations of the Grand River community possesses a long-overlooked but rich intellectual tradition of its own. Monture, a Turtle Clan Mohawk and member of the Grand River community, captures 230 years of Haudenosaunee thought, writing, and activism originating in this unique North American indigenous locale.”

CHOICE

“With We Share Our Matters, Monture takes his place in the long history of Grand River intellectual tradition. For all the Six Nations struggles Monture describes, his overarching tone is one of optimism: as he states in his acknowledgements, “This is a book that will always be ‘in progress’”.

The Goose

"In this study Rick Monture, a Mohawk and an academic, turns our attention to the ways that the Haudenosaunee remember and tell their story through literature, poetry, art, and letters to reveal a history understood by few beyond the Six Nations."

Canadian Journal of History