American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It is said that during the American War of Independence the roll-call wampum, the sacred beads that designated where the representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy grouped themselves about the council fires, was buried for safekeeping. After the war it was unearthed and reused when Sir Frederick Haldimand, the Governor of Quebec, granted members of the tribes an extensive tract of land on the banks of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. Today the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford in Ontario is the largest of the Iroquois reservations and the only one that includes groups from all the Six Nations. These Indians are descendants of those who, as a result of their siding with the British at the time of the revolution, were forced to take refuge in Canada and were given in 1784 the Grand River lands. The arrangement which the Canadians call the Haldimand Deed is to this day regarded as a legitimate treaty by the Iroquois. The Iroquoian-speaking Peoples of the Northeast lived in a large expanse of territory stretching from Lake Nipissing in the present province of Ontario southward to the Susquehanna region of Pennsylvania. Their domain extended from the Adirondacks to the shores of Lake Erie. Some scattered bands had even pushed farther westward along the Ohio River and settled there.