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Picture three people in Brantford. A 29-year-old with a job sleeps in her childhood bedroom, because no one will rent to her at a price she can pay. Her grandmother, who raised four children around a full table, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment she can barely afford to heat. Her cousin, laid off in the spring, is on a friend’s couch. Three households, one family, three separate rents. It is what a market produces when the family is treated as something to be divided into units and sold apart.
Across Ontario, rents have climbed faster than wages for years, young adults stay home into their thirties, and the old are alone in rooms they cannot afford. We would suggest an older answer: our ancestors solved this problem with a building.
A building that was an answer
The longhouse was a frame of poles, bent and lashed and covered in bark, often a hundred feet long and sometimes far longer, with a corridor down the middle and a fire at intervals along it. Each fire served the families on either side. The household was built on the mother’s line: the women of a clan, their children, their husbands, their elders. The Mohawk clans, Turtle, Wolf and Bear, were not abstractions. They lived under one roof.
None of this was nostalgia. It was engineering. A fire shared by two families heats twice as many people on the same wood. Children were raised by many hands. No one grew old alone, because the old stood at the center of the building and not at its edge. Food was stored in common, so one family’s failed harvest was a shared problem. It was housing, childcare, elder care and law in one structure, held together by kinship and not by rent.
The longhouse and the long body
The Mohawks, like the other Iroquois nations, are people of the longhouse: builders of the extended house, and then of the extended family, the longhouse and the long body. The longhouse is the extended house. The long body is the same idea carried out of the building, into time and past the people themselves. It holds those who came before and those not yet born, the mother’s line running back through the clan and forward through the children. It holds every living creature too, the deer and the corn, the fish and the river, the trees: our relations. One living thing, stretched across centuries and across species. The longhouse gave the long body a place to sleep.
That is why the building was the length it was. Add a family and you added a fire and a compartment, and the house grew by one more bay. The body grew the same way, by marriage and by adoption, and the Nation’s law of adoption can be read on that principle: those it receives are joined to the body, not set down beside it. A people that counts the corn and the deer as kin does not strip them or sell them apart. It plants for them and takes what it needs. A member of the long body is not a customer of the Nation or a name on a list. A member is a part.
It also explains an old rule, that a part cannot be sold apart. You cannot sell a hand and keep the body. Household, clan and nation were understood as one thing at three scales, which is exactly what the state spent a century trying to take apart.
What broke it
The household was the first thing the state went after, because it was the thing that held everything else. Rules written in the nineteenth century tied a woman’s standing to her husband’s and stripped it from her when she married out. Land held and used in common was cut into individual lots that could be sold, mortgaged and lost. And children were taken. The Mohawk Institute, which ran in Brantford from 1828 to 1970, was among the first and longest-running of the residential schools, and survivors called it the Mush Hole. Children were raised in dormitories, and the households deprived of them were told they had failed.
What we live with now is the result: a people dispersed across single rooms, on lots too small for their families, with elders alone and the young unhoused. For us the housing crisis is the end of a very long policy, and it can be answered by putting the household back.
Use and enjoyment
The Nation’s reading of the Haldimand interest is that it confers exclusive use and enjoyment. Those two words describe living, not owning. Use is what a household does with land: plants, builds, raises children. Enjoyment is what it gets back. A grant that no one can live on is only paper, and so is a right that is argued in rooms and never appears on the ground. If the interest is real, it should be visible, in wood and fire, on land that people can walk onto.
The Nation’s position is that when Crown land within the Tract is no longer needed, the decision about its use should come back to the Nation, and not be settled by a disposal list in a ministry. What should we do with the land when it comes back? We propose a first answer: build one longhouse.
What we would build
Not a replica. A living building. A long, low structure, built to code and beyond it, with ten or twelve households ranged along a shared corridor, a common kitchen and hearth at the center, a wing for elders at the middle of things, space for children to be minded by many, a workshop and a garden. Households would be linked by clan and by adoption.
The units would not be commodities. They would be kept in the Nation’s hands for the class named in the instruments and its posterity, with the right to live in a place passing in the family and not at auction. A household cannot be a speculative asset and also a home. We would choose the home.
And it would be an address for the dispersed. The posterity of the three villages is scattered around the world, and most of it is on no list. A longhouse is a place a grandchild in Vancouver or Glasgow can come home to, and a door to knock on is part of what makes a nation a body and not a mailing list.
How it would run
A building is only as good as the law it is run by. In the longhouse the women of the clan held the household, the fires were tended in turn, and disputes were settled by people who knew everyone involved. A modern longhouse would need its own version. We would propose a household council on which every adult has a voice, with the clan mothers deciding who belongs to the household; a rota for the fires, the kitchen and the children; and a common fund into which each household pays what it can and from which the building’s costs are met. No landlord, no lease, and no one put out for being poor.
It would also be a small economy. A shared kitchen can feed a school lunch program or run a market stall. A garden can grow corn, beans and squash for the building and the neighbors. An economy of our own begins in a household that does not have to pay a stranger for everything it needs.
The objections
Some will say this is nostalgia, that our people want a house with a driveway. Some do, and they should have one. We propose an addition, not a replacement.
Some will ask who pays and who permits. First, start small: one building, one fire, one hundred feet. Second, codes and permits are a conversation with the Crown, and the Nation’s reading is that the Crown is bound to observe what it granted. Carry that conversation on with a design in hand. A drawing on the table is worth more than an argument in the air, so publish the plans.
Some will say people do not live that way now. Elsewhere, planners are trying shared kitchens, multi-generational units and co-operative ownership. We are not behind. We are early, and we have the original design.
Kin, not stone
Every people that wanted to outlast time has built something big. The Hopewell moved earth by the basket to write the moon in the ground. The Inca fitted stone without mortar, and most of their knotted-cord records can no longer be read. Others raised pillars and circles whose builders’ names no one knows. The ice that lay two miles thick over this country scraped the north clean, so whatever may have stood here before it is gone, and the plough took most of what was built after. Even where stone survives, the meaning often does not.
That is the lesson of every monument: stone outlasts the people but not the meaning. What outlasts both is the line. A people that has lost its villages, its river, even its language for a time, can still be a people if it keeps its kin, because kin is the one structure that carries its own instructions. A child learns the names, the clan and the duties, and one generation tells the next. The long body does not need a ruin to be read. It needs to be fed, housed and told who it is.
Originally published in the Two Row Times, October 14, 2026 (Volume 14, Issue 9), page 6.
