Chief George H.M. Johnson, Onwanonsyshon

Chief George H.M. Johnson, Onwanonsyshon is a biographical memoir by Horatio Hale (1817-1896), the American philologist and ethnologist who spent his later career in Ontario as the principal English-language student of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The book is a portrait of George Henry Martin Johnson, the Mohawk hereditary chief and government interpreter at the Six Nations Reserve, who served as Hale’s main collaborator and informant. Johnson was the father of the poet Emily Pauline Johnson. Hale records Johnson’s family background, his role in mediating between the Confederacy and the Canadian government, and his work on language and ritual. The piece is one of the early English-language ethnographic biographies of an Indigenous leader and remains a useful source for Six Nations history in the late nineteenth century. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.