This hardhat is part of the “Headdress for Modern Mohawks” series that Ric Glazer-Danay worked on for more than ten years. The hardhat references Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) prowess as iron or high steelworkers. Danay’s family left Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada, for New York in the 1920s so that his grandfather could find work as an ironworker and eventually Ric, his father, and his uncle became steelworkers. Danay humorously notes that he has blue eyes, as did his father and grandfather, “which might suggest that my family might be descended from a child that we liberated from Deerfield.”  He refers here to a 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by French and Indigenous soldiers from Canada.