Last Thursday, May 28, 2026, my sister Tanis and I went on a journey to get her a passport. Tanis was here on a visit from California. She’s lived out there for almost thirty‑five years, but she was born right here at Six Nations — at the old Lady Wellington Hospital in Ohsweken. She has never had a passport, and when she tried to apply for one in the United States, she was told could not get one there as she wasn’t a U.S. citizen. So, while she was here we though she should apply for one of the new Haudenosaunee Confederacy Council (HCC) passports.
We first started out at the Six Nations Lands and Membership office; I wanted to go there to give them two documents that my friend Tammy Martin keha gave me shortly before she passed away. I had mentioned to Tammy back then that I had requested a letter of blood quantum and was told by the Membership official that I was only 87% indigenous. She stated that to her understanding, my maternal grandmother’s paternity was in question. The two documents she sent me would sort those questions out and then they could redo my blood quantum letter so that it would be updated to 100%. I thought this is something I should get done now as Tanis would benefit from this genealogical information being straightened out as well. After I explained this to the official behind the plexiglass partition at the Membership Office, she seemed irritated and responded to us “Well, I’m not even 100%.” I wasn’t really sure what to make of her response, so I didn’t respond. We will wait two weeks and I will return to their office to pick up the newly revised blood quantum letter.
After completing our task at that office, we then travelled to #19th School on 6th Line, where we were told we could get the new Haudenosaunee Confederacy Council passport. We stopped in and there was an older gentleman there who instructed us that we needed to go to the HCC building on Oneida Road, right beside Buck Spittle’s old property. We drove down 6th Line to Oneida and found the very modern, beautiful HCC building. When we walked in, we were greeted by a woman named Sue. We explained who we were, who our family is, and spoke about our ancestry, and that we were there so my sister could apply for a passport.
That’s when everything shifted.
Almost immediately, Sue asked if we wanted to apply for an HCC card — a status card issued through the Confederacy. Then she said something neither of us expected to hear. She told us, “You probably think you’re Mohawk Turtle, but you’re not. You’re Onondaga Deer.”
We just stared at her. For most of my sixty‑five years, I have believed I was Mohawk Turtle. That’s what I was always told. My mother always said she was Mohawk Turtle. That identity shaped how I understood myself, my place in the Confederacy, and the stories I carried.
But thinking about how this confusion came about made everything make a painful kind of sense.
How the Canadian Government Rewrote Our Lineages
Haudenosaunee nations have always been matrilineal. Clan identity, nation identity, and political belonging pass through the mother. That is our law, our governance, our worldview.
But in 1869, the Canadian government passed the Gradual Enfranchisement Act, which forcibly replaced our matrilineal system with a patrilineal one. These rules were later absorbed into the Indian Act of 1876, and they stayed in place for more than a century.
The result?
Women lost their status if they married outside their nation. My mother had lost hers when she married a non-native and then an American Indian.
Children were assigned to the father’s nation, not the mother’s. Entire families were reclassified. Clan identities were scrambled. Generations of Haudenosaunee people ended up with incorrect or incomplete records. The status card I was currently carrying lists me as Six Nations Tuscarora, that is what my husband’s status is, and I am therefore listed under his nation, his father’s nation. My sister Tanis is currently listed as Upper Cayuga on her status card, that is what my mother is listed under, her father’s status.
So, when Sue told me I wasn’t Mohawk Turtle — that I was Onondaga Deer — I felt the shock in my bones. But I also felt the weight of that colonial policy, still reaching into my life 155 years later.
Reflection: What Does It Mean to Have Your Identity Shift?
I’ve been sitting with this for days now. There’s a strange grief in realizing that the story you’ve carried your whole life — the one you were told, the one you believed, the one you passed on — might not be the whole story after all.
It’s not just about clan or nation. It’s about belonging. It’s about the women who came before me. It’s about the laws that tried to erase them.
And in the middle of all this confusion, I keep hearing my grandmother Vera’s voice. She used to say something that always made perfect sense to me:
“It’s always made sense to be matrilineal. You always know who your mother is — there’s never a doubt, you are the fruit of her loins. But your father… well, that could be iffy.”
She’d say it with that dry humour of hers, but underneath it was a truth older than any government policy. Our people knew exactly what they were doing when they built a system around women, around mothers, around certainty and continuity. Colonial law didn’t just change paperwork — it disrupted a worldview that had worked for thousands of years.
I keep thinking about my mother, who always said she was Mohawk Turtle. I keep thinking about how many Indigenous women had their identities overwritten by a government that didn’t understand — or didn’t care — how our nations work.
And I keep thinking about how many of us are walking around with pieces of our lineage missing, altered, or misrecorded.
This isn’t just a personal story. It’s a generational one.
Reclaiming What Was Interrupted
Learning that I am Onondaga Deer didn’t just surprise me — it unsettled me. It cracked open something I thought was solid. But it also reminded me that our identities were never meant to be defined by colonial paperwork.
Our clans come from our mothers. Our belonging comes from our people. Our stories come from the land beneath our feet.
So yes, my identity shifted in a single afternoon — but maybe it shifted back toward the truth, not away from it.
And now, instead of feeling lost, I’m beginning to feel curious.
Curious about the women I come from.
Curious about the clan I didn’t know I belonged to.
Curious about what it means to reclaim something that was interrupted, not erased.
This is not the ending of my story.
It’s the beginning of a new chapter — one rooted in truth, in lineage, and in the strength of Haudenosaunee women who carried our clans long before any government tried to rewrite them.
