Film about Brooklyn's Mohawks

Film at American Indian Museum Looks at Vanished Brooklyn Community

Mohawk Ironworkers Made Boerum Hill Their Home[B]ack in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, if you wanted to meet real-life Mohawks, you didn’t have to go upstate. There was an entire community of members of this Native American tribe, many of whom worked as ironworkers on Manhattan skyscrapers, living in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

This now-almost-forgotten era is the subject of the film “Little Caughnawaga: From Brooklyn and Back,” to be shown at the Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 6 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. in tandem with another film, “Club Native.”

“Little Caughnawaga: From Brooklyn and Back” by Reaghan Tarbell, herself a Mohawk, traces the director’s family from the Kahnawake Mohawk community of Quebec to Boerum Hill, where dozens of Mohawk families then resided while building Manhattan’s iconic skyscrapers.

Many of the Mohawks commuted back and forth between Brooklyn and the reservation, depending on the time of year. They were often featured in newspaper articles, but sometimes with mock-humorous derogatory headlines such as “Indian Ironworkers Make Heap Big Wampum.”Comment:  This movie kind of reminds me of The Exiles.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.