The Mohawk Skyline
For reasons that don’t quite take a doctorate in sociology to fathom, employment and ethnicity are often interrelated, especially when it comes to certain service-sector trades. Haitians dominate the taxi industry in Montreal; Greeks are well-represented in the ranks of Western Canadian pizzeria owners; and the Hui have a lock on the sale of barbecued brochettes in the streets of Beijing. Another interesting example? Mohawk high-steel workers.
In High Steel, a 1965 documentary short by Don Owen, we are introduced to the men who travelled between Kahnawake, a Mohawk town in the Montreal suburbs, and New York, where they arduously pieced together the city’s iconic skyscrapers. By then, high steel construction was a Mohawk speciality, dating back to 1886, when the Dominion Bridge Company built a railroad bridge over the St. Lawrence River. In order to pass through Kahnawake, the bridge company agreed to hire local Mohawks for the project, and a generation of men was trained in the delicate act of lifting heavy steel on high and narrow structures.
That experience was passed down through the generations. Beginning in the mid-1920s, so many Mohawks moved to New York, they formed their own small neighbourhood in Gowanus, a working-class part of Brooklyn, recreating the community life they had known in Kahnawake.
Mohawks lived in other cities, too, working wherever their skills were in demand. In 1924 or ‘25, however, the United States tightened restrictions on immigration, and native people were often lumped into the same undesirable category as Asians, making it harder for them to cross from Canada into the United States. In 1926, one Kahnawake man, Paul Diabo, was working on the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife Louise. Police arrested them for working without papers and they were ordered deported to Canada. In response, Diabo filed an injunction. His lawyer argued that, as a Mohawk, he was entitled to free movement between Canada and the United States. He was deported anyway, but Diabo persisted, returning to the United States to contest his deportation. This time he won, establishing an important precedent for First Nations people.
All of this has been very well-documented but, somehow, the Mohawk contribution to cities like Montreal and New York remains an historical footnote. In Montreal, Kahnawake sits on the fringes of the city’s imagination, seen mainly as a place to buy cheap booze and cigarettes. The same is probably true in the United States. How often, I wonder, does this Mohawk history come to mind when people gaze at the bridges and skyscrapers of Montreal, Philadelphia and New York?
Tags: Migration, Montreal, New York
Montreal Apartments
MB says:
Great post. I love the NFB!
I was working at Ontario College of Art when the new weird building was going up in 2004 and guess who did the steelwork…
The Mohawk Ironworkers.
Here’s a shot of the building:
http://www.andrewblum.net/typepad/2003/11/how_to_make_a_b.html
We live amidst their fine work.
March 7th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Christopher Szabla says:
I’ve actually seen quite a bit of acknowledgment of Mohawk construction workers’ roles in the building of New York. In fact, the famous Charles Ebbets photo series of construction workers having “lunch on the girder” in the 1930s (http://sistersandsparrows.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/an-unusual-place-for-a-nap/) is often used to illustrate the Mohawks’ work, although it’s far from certain that anyone pictured was even a member of the group.
Granted, they aren’t the first thing one thinks of when gazing upon the Manhattan skyline. Blame Ayn Rand, maybe, for making us all associate it with ravenous capitalism instead.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:38 pm