Braiding Sweetgrass

dams, heavy industry moved in to take advantage of the cheap
electricity and easy shipping routes. Alcoa, General Motors, and
Domtar don’t view the world through the prism of the Thanksgiving
Address, and Akwesasne became one of the most contaminated
communities in the country. The families of fishermen can no longer
eat what they catch. Mother’s milk at Akwesasne carries a heavy
burden of PCBs and dioxin. Industrial pollution made following
traditional lifeways unsafe, threatening the bond between people
and the land. Industrial toxins were poised to finish what was
started at Carlisle.
Sakokwenionkwas, also known as Tom Porter, is a member of
the Bear Clan. The Bear is known for protecting the people and as
the keeper of medicine knowledge. Just so, twenty years ago, Tom
and a handful of others set out with healing in mind. As a boy, he
had heard his grandmother repeat the old prophecy that someday a
small band of Mohawks would return to inhabit their old home along
the Mohawk River. In 1993, that someday arrived when Tom and
friends left Akwesasne for ancestral lands in the Mohawk Valley.
Their vision was to create a new community on old lands, far from
PCBs and power dams.
They settled on four hundred acres of woods and farms at
Kanatsiohareke. It’s a place name from the time when this valley
was dense with longhouses. In researching the land’s history, they
found that Kanatsiohareke was the site of an ancient Bear Clan
village. Today the old memories are weaving among new stories. A
barn and houses nestle at the foot of a bluff in a bend of the river.
Silty floodplain loams run right down to the banks. The hills, once
laid waste by lumbermen, have regrown with straight stands of pine
and oak. A powerful artesian well pours from a cleft in the bluff with
a strength that endures even the deepest drought and fills a clear