ABSTRACT
This chapter repositions the concept of resilience within a trans-systemic framework so that it emphasizes rather than tries to resolve different ways of knowing and doing resilience. For four hundred years, Haudenosaunee people (a.k.a. the Six Nations) have continuously re-asserted the legal precedence of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain agreement first made with the Dutch, then the English, and subsequently with Canada and the USA. As a settler Canadian scholar who lives near the Six Nations of the Grand River, Daniel Coleman has been learning alongside Haudenosaunee neighbors to understand the implications of this ancient treaty for our times. Indigenous peoples often appear in discussions of resilience, but often as “objects” of resilience whereby resilience research, for example, has targeted Indigenous people for social initiatives aimed at improving the resiliency of their children. This chapter highlights Haudenosaunee ways of knowing as reflected in the history of the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement not so much to present Haudenosaunee people as “subjects” of creative resilience, but more importantly to show how a trans-systemic approach to resilience can loosen our grip on the term itself so that it is not so readily metabolized by neoliberal appropriations of resilience.
