Many metropolises of the world are cut by the same pattern: buildings of cement, brick, steel and glass, monolithic facades, rows and rows of skyscrapers. What betrays that this advertising photo of 1951 corresponds to New York? In the center the television antenna that crowns the Empire State is distinguished. And, comfortably sitting in the middle of the antenna, as if moving up there was the most natural thing in the world, there is a Mohawk Indian, a metal worker. At the end of the 1880s, a Canadian company specializing in bridge construction hired several Mohawks from the Kahnawake Reserve, near Montreal, to work on a construction site.
The members of that tribe turned out to be immune to vertigo even in the most extreme heights and, in the words of a manager of the company, "agile as goats". That fame earned them job offers in the United States; Mohawks are still traveling to Canada to perform "high" jobs.
Over the last century generations of Mohawks working in the metal sector have been hired to build almost all of New York's skyscrapers and bridges. For their poise when walking on the steel beams at dizzying heights they have earned a reverential nickname: the "eagles of construction."
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