Dance honors courage of the steelworkers

. . . . Local 440 in Utica, N. Y., where 270 of the 340 members are Mohawks.

By Maria Garcia, Windspeaker Contributor, New York

Jerry McDonald remembers that rain had just begun to fall when he and his fellow ironworker, Dennis LeBorgne, emerged from a 60-foot pit at Ground Zero. A few hundred firefighters, police officers and rescue workers were gathered around. They were saluting the "man basket" attached to a crane where a firefighter lay covered by an American flag.

The two Mohawks had just cut through rod and rebar, with tons of steel hovering above them, to remove him from the rubble.

"It's something I'll never forget," McDonald said, "the respect and the honor they had for the fallen fireman."

It had been three weeks since the collapse of the World Trade Center. McDonald, from Akwesasne (Wolf clan), and his colleague from Kahnawake, had volunteered for the clean-up task.

Nearly eight months later, McDonald is still working near Ground Zero but he's back to building things.

"I worked on the pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway, and now I'm on a job at the Winter Garden atrium in the World Financial Center," he said. "It was badly damaged on 9/11."

The ironworker is a member of Local 440 in Utica, N. Y., where 270 of the 340 members are Mohawks. These Mohawks "boom out," or travel from their reserves in Ontario and Quebec to find work. Many of them are second-generation ironworkers, like McDonald, who started at age 17; others remember their grandfathers who were "booming out" in the 1930s.

In New York City, Mohawk ironworkers are legendary. Walk into any skyscraper, or drive over any bridge in the city, and you're treading on steel a Mohawk put there.

"We're Haudenosaunee, people of the longhouses," McDonald explained, using the word Mohawks call themselves, which refers to their traditional wood-frame dwellings. "We were always builders."

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