When Daniel Coleman went into his office in McMaster University on a beautiful April morning in 2006 he was startled to see over thirty police vehicles parked on campus, and soon discovered that the campus was providing lodging for the officers who had raided the site of an Indigenous land dispute near the town of Caledonia. This discovery changed how Coleman thought about Indigenous issues, which he’d long supported, bringing home that there is no part of life in Canada where you are outside of the broken relationship between the nation of Canada and the Indigenous nations who have lived here since time immemorial. This began Coleman’s journey, working closely with Indigenous scholars, to understand more fully that relationship and to find a way to repair not only it, but our relationship with the land we call home. In Grandfather of the Treaties Coleman introduces the founding Wampum covenants that the earliest European settlers made with the Haudenosaunee nation and shows how returning to these covenants, and the ways they were made, could heal our society.

After finishing high school in Ethiopia, Daniel Coleman earned university degrees at the University of Regina and the University of Alberta. He now holds the Canada Research Chair in Critical Ethnicity and Race Study in the English department of McMaster University. Daniel Coleman is a leading researcher in the depiction of immigrant men in Canadian literature. He has won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for his study of how literary texts produce and reinforce categories of cultural identification such as gender, ethnicity and nationality. His critically acclaimed book, Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in "New Canadian" Narratives, published in 1998 by University of Toronto Press, is considered the foundational Canadian work in the field. While being a bahir-zaff throughout his childhood brought Daniel Coleman the pain of never fully belonging, it also gave him the immeasurable benefits and insights of an intercultural life. Several of his essays on his missionary childhood have appeared in magazines and journals. "The Babies in the Colonial Washtub," included in a revised form in The Scent of the Eucalyptus, won a Silver Medal in the National Magazine Awards. 

Daniel Coleman's profile page