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The Dish with One Spoon wampum is an agreement to take only what is required and to make sure that all living things are able to sustain their lives. This includes caring for the waters and their ecosystems – the soil, the rocks, the vegetation, the mammals, and the birds. The Dish with One Spoon is wide-reaching and covers much of the Great Lakes region, the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, and parts of New York and Michigan.

Some contemporary readings of the Dish with One Spoon bring up three key teachings that mediate how we should conduct ourselves in shared or contentious spaces. These teachings can be summarized as: take only what you need, keep it clean, and leave some for the future. These can be viewed as ways to govern sharing with others, but also as self-regulating mechanisms for guiding our daily choices.

Take two blank sheets of paper.

Divide one page into four long columns.

Label the headings of each column: Shared Stuff, Take Only What You Need, Keep It Clean, and Leave Some for the Future.

Fill column 1 with Shared Stuff: words and/or symbols representing goods in life that sustain us, including common spaces and resources.

Here are some examples of Shared Stuff: rare books, bike shares, wild berries, public parks, precious metals, seafood, office kitchens, an Elder’s time, a campground, waterfront access, intergenerational wealth, foodbank food.

Think up ways to apply each of the three teachings (the headings for columns 2, 3, and 4) to each item in the Shared Stuff column. Explore these concepts as though you were making policies to regulate physical and conceptual commodities. Make notes in text or symbols for each subject. Repeat for the rest of the Shared Stuff you have listed.

Configure the second page into three sections in any way you wish. Each of these sections corresponds to one of the three teachings: take only what you need, keep it clean, and leave some for the future.

Choose one item from the Shared Stuff column to focus on.

Rearticulate the item’s management plan through symbols and illustrations, creating a step-by-step how-to visual guide for the sharing. Title it. Put it somewhere you will notice it.

The first page is your working document, your source for subsequent rearticulations. Keep this for the future. Repeat as many times as you like, addressing each of your Shared Stuff items.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF FOOD

The question of whether Europeans had ever formally entered into the Dish treaty remains. The Seven Nations of Canada, a group of Indigenous Christian-allied communities, including some Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Anishinawbe, delivered a speech to the English around their understanding of sharing the Dish in 1794:

When the King of France set foot on our ground he did not conquer us, he came as a Father who wishes to protect his Children. We communicated to him a parable of the Dish and the Spoon, he approved of it and encouraged us to continue in our way of acting. He did not tell us children, ‘I want to share in your Dish and have the best bit in it.’ When our Father the King of England drove away the King of France, we were so earnest in nothing as communicating to him this Parable, He did more than the King of France for he had the goodness to prop up the Dish telling us that he did not wish that we should make use of Knives to eat our Meal, lest they should hurt us as a proof of it we preserve his word. He did not tell us that he wished to eat with us, being accustomed to a different kind of food.³

The mnemonic object requires lifetimes of passed-on references and hidden codes to interpret. We continue to mention that ‘there will be no knives.’ I wonder if this offer to share in our vision of the land went over the kings’ heads. Did they think we were only talking about food? How many times must something be repeated to preserve the words? What are we not talking about enough? What symbols need to be on the ground, in Toronto, to remind us to keep talking these ideas through with others? What metaphors of authority are needed to back up our act?

Because I don’t want to be a person of authority.

What business do I have in relating treaty stories here? I’m not Mississauga. Ojibwe Methodist missionary Peter Jones took notes for a reading of the Yellowhead Belt where my community is mentioned, stating that we had already emptied the Dish. Did we take more than we needed? Probably. I’ll need to do more research about my community’s relationship to the Dish. What old grudges are affecting how we talk about this place? How do we keep learning from each other, layering new findings, knowing they don’t negate old knowledges? I imagine us locked together, hand to forearm, propping each other up, strong enough to keep the bowl from being emptied again.

SEPARATE AND UNCONNECTED

An Indian agent was put in place at York with the duty to prevent the Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee negotiator Joseph Brant from working together to gain better prices for the lands they were being pressed to sell. The Indian Agent was given the following instruction:

The primary duty of the new appointee is fomenting the jealousy which subsists between them and the Six Nations, and of preventing, as far as possible, any junction or good understanding taking place between those two tribes. It appears to me that the best and safest line of Policy to be pursued in the Indian Department is to keep the Indians separate and unconnected with one another, as by this means they will be in proportion more dependent on the King’s Government.⁴

What I understand to be power is that you’re able to hold up a tree, literally, by holding hands with your neighbour. It’s our duty to hold up the people next to us and to teach, if we can. I teach knowing that I don’t know everything, and that I am one of many. I’m always so afraid to put things down in writing. We know how that can go wrong.

How many people do we need to hold up all this shared Indigenous history? Is Indigenous history also a shared resource? When we have conflict on shared territory in academia, social media forums, and cultural venues, can we look to the Dish for some rules for sharing? How do we take what we need from Indigenous histories, keep them clean, and keep them for the future?

Dish with One Spoon wampum belt, 1701.

NO SHARP UTENSILS

The Dish with One Spoon Belt has a white background with a symbol of a rounded dish in the centre of the belt. The land is to be viewed as a dish/bowl or kettle from which all can eat together. The white wampum beads in the centre of the bowl represent a beaver’s tail, a favourite dish of many nations around Ontario.

The Lords of the Confederacy shall eat together from one bowl the feast of cooked beaver’s tail. While they are eating they are to use no sharp utensils for if they should they might accidentally cut one another and bloodshed would follow. All measures must be taken to prevent the spilling of blood in any way.⁵

I do a lot of the Talking Treaties performance work at Fort York, and I like to imagine its role as a place to keep the talk going, with dance, big puppets, and lots of people. If the federal government would like to host an annual ‘Polishing the Chain’ event there, I’m sure it could be arranged. I’ll bring the giant beaver costume.

Who on the government’s side can play the ‘Corlaer’? Who takes this role if the federal government will not? Will the old Crown come to clear up their perspective? Who are their knowledge keepers? What responsibilities did Canada agree to take on? Will displaying our symbols of governance be enough to remind them? What foundational understandings will they need to have to be able to come to the table with us?

LOCKING THEIR HANDS AND ARMS TOGETHER

In 1840, Mississauga historian Peter Jones wrote of the 1701 renewal at the Credit River Grand Council meeting:

A treaty of peace and friendship was then made with the Nahdoways residing on the south side of Lake Ontario, and both nations solemnly covenanted, by going through the usual forms of burying the tomahawk, smoking the pipe of peace, and locking their hands and arms together to call each other Brothers … [T]he treaty of peace mentioned has from time to time been renewed at general councils.

With the origin of Toronto’s name being made ambiguous over the years, what did it make easier to forget? What federal and provincial bodies have a stake in maintaining a minimal narrative for this place? Who put trees in the water? They weren’t around Toronto at the time the French made the maps. That made it easier to set up shop along these rivers, staking claim to territory that was seemingly unowned. The simplification of the hundreds of years of relationship between the nations here to three large movements of people does a disservice to the kin maintenance and peacemaking initiatives between us.

There are webs of alliances here, understandings which unite us and keep us stronger together. As we pick up more and more Indigenous history in Toronto, who will we task with remembering? As political representatives change, who needs to keep conversations about shared space going? How many people do you have to involve for it to make meaning? Imagine the federal government, coming to the table and enacting all the relationships and responsibilities of the Corlaer and Onontio.

Imagine if they wanted to remember as much as we do.