Mohawk Indian Steelworkers 

   On Manhattan's East Side, I watched a gang of them at work. High above my head, they operated with hammers and tongs and red-hot rivets, moving as surefootedly as cats, as calmly as if they were standing on the sidewalk.

   What were Mohawks doing in Manhattan? Why, stranger still, should Indians be raising the steel frame for a skyscraper?

   I found the answers a few miles away, in the Borough of Brooklyn. There I visited a small but well-settled Indian village, where some 400 of these same Mohawks live as neighbors in comfortable, modern apartments. Almost every man in the community, I learned, earns his living in "high iron."

   Working 500 to 1,000 or more feet in the air, balanced precariously where one misstep means death-this is specialized, skilled work, and most of the Indians who do it have spent their lives at it.

   The first Mohawks I saw were putting up steel for the United Nations' new General Assembly building next to the East River. But even the lofty UN buildings were dwarfed by some other structures I could see against the horizon. Mohawks had helped erect them too: the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet tall), the Woolworth Building (792 feet), the RCA Building (850 feet), and, out-reaching them all, the Empire State Building, which, with its new television tower, soars 1,472 feet, more than a quarter of a mile.

   For Mohawks to help build the United Nations was strangely appropriate. More than 300 years ago, the ancestors of these same Mohawks belonged to a United Nations of their own-the mighty Iroquois federation, or…"