A Mohawk history lost, a Mohawk history found
Rope Loft, highrise ironworker, discovers he has ancestors in high places
Rope Loft lives in Six Nations on the Grand River and works mostly in the Mississauga and Toronto area, but you won’t see him there unless you’re in a helicopter.
He’s a Mohawk ironworker, often up high building skyscrapers, in the tradition of the Mohawk Skywalkers. As such, he can see for miles out into space. But, until recently, not so far through time, into the past. He couldn’t even see the horizon of his own personal ancestry.
Then one day about six years ago, Rope was poking around on the internet, one thing led to another, one website to the next, several links to several more, and much to his astonishment, over the course of a computer search that day, he realized he is the great-great grandson of Frederick Ogilvie Loft.
That name, Frederick Ogilvie Loft, might not mean much to many people now, but in the early 20th century, during and before the First World War and well after it, on into the 1920s, it was in the news often and prominently. Probably the foremost Indigenous activist of the day.
Frederick Loft raised alarms about the residential school system as early as the late 1800s. He wrote for the Brantford Expositor and the (Toronto) Globe. He once was accorded a personal audience with King George V for his efforts recruiting Indigenous soldiers from Canada to fight in the First World War, and later he went on to found the League of Canadian Indians, which led to the Assembly of First Nations.
Why don’t we know more about Frederick Loft? The reasons are both obvious and complex. For one, the history of Indigenous people in North America is too often a history of history itself being lost, taken away.
Whatever the reasons, his descendant, Rope Loft, has devoted the past half decade to redressing the omission, compiling information and trying to spread the news, if one can call it news after 100 years.
“It has been said,” Rope remarks, “that when you lose your history, you lose your people.”
Him finding out about his great-great grandfather by accident is like someone named Bell stumbling across a forgotten ancestor who, it turns out, had invented the telephone. Can we imagine that? No, I didn’t think so.
“I’d been wondering about my grandfather Emerson, who died in 1967. My mom remembers a Freddie Loft, Emerson’s father. So I punched in Freddie and this guy (Freddie’s father Frederick) comes up.”
Now Rope has created a bound book of newspaper clippings, pictures and entries from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and such. It’s not as though Frederick Loft was left out of the historical record — he’s there — but it’s just that so little regard has been paid, despite his achievement.
“His Mohawk name was Onondeyoh: beautiful mountain,” Rope says.
Frederick Ogilvie Loft, born in 1861 in Six Nations on the Grand River, was fluent in Mohawk and English and took strongly to education, completing high school and getting a scholarship for bookkeeping training. He worked first as a lumberjack, then a lumber inspector and, at one point, he was a reporter for the Brantford Expositor.
It was his work in journalism that set Frederick Loft on a course of activism on behalf of First Nations people; he lobbied for more rights and autonomy. Though he had no official political standing in his early career, he built relationships and contacts both with governments and on reserves nationwide.
By the outbreak of the First World War, those connections, his natural leadership and his standing in many circles enabled him to enjoy great success at recruiting natives for military service. He himself was a lieutenant in the Forestry Service overseas. And it was his concern for the challenges Indigenous soldiers would face after service — for instance, pensions and their exclusion from voting — that planted in him the seeds of an idea for the League of Indians.
His efforts were complicated by the hostility of the Department of Indian Affairs (which disallowed him from addressing Parliament and one of whose officials tried to have his status revoked). But he persevered and his role as founder of the league made him a leading figure, even though his loyalty to the Crown would not reflect the consensus of Indigenous activism today. They were different times.
The league ultimately lapsed but not before evolving into the Assembly of First Nations. In other ways, Frederick Ogilvie Loft’s legacy endures even if the contributions he made are not always connected to his name. He died in Toronto in 1934.
If history hasn’t been as faithful to his spirit as he was to the spirit of history, perhaps the future will be better. He has a great-great grandson seeing to that, in the present, composing proclamations, which he copies out in beautiful handwriting, marking occasions like Remembrance Day and historic anniversaries.
In one of Rope’s drawings, there is a depiction of the Hiawatha belt, signifying the original Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The line connecting the five symbols, says Rope, “means if anyone gets lost, they can find their way back.” History — it ties us together.