Mohawk Name, Skanenratti (The Other Side of the River/Street)
Tintype by Melissa Cacciola
Reproduction photography by D. Primiano
Mohawk ironworkers helped build the original Twin Towers. After September 11, they returned to Ground Zero for rescue and recovery work, and they later helped build the new One World Trade Center.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s online Skywalkers exhibition documents that multigenerational history through tintype portraits, recorded voices, and an audio tour produced in English as well as Ahkwesáhsne and Kahnawá:ke. Also worth reading is the Museum’s profile of Lindsay LeBorgne, a fourth-generation ironworker and Kahnawà:ke Council Chief who worked twelve-hour shifts for five consecutive days at Ground Zero after returning home from a trip abroad four days after the attacks.
A 2023 hour-long interview with Lindsay LeBorgne on WBAI’s Deadline NYC is available here. He talks about what’s entailed with being Council Chief of the Kahnawà:ke, the Mohawk community in Brooklyn, his family history, his life as a New York ironworker, and his rescue and recovery work at Ground Zero after 9/11.
Additional Resource
Allan Downey, Indigenous Brooklyn: Ironworking, Little Caughnawaga, and Kanien’kehá:ka Nationhood in the Twentieth Century, American Quarterly, Vol. 75, Number 1, March 2023, pp. 27-50.
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