25 YEARS LATER
Kahnawake band council autonomous
Perspectives on the 1990 standoff that lasted for 78 days.
KAHNAWAKE, Que. — Early on July 11, 1990, when Bryan Deer’s radio crackled with news the Surete du Quebec was moving in on Kanesatake with tear gas and concussion grenades, he and his fellow Mohawk Warriors in Kahnawake knew what had to be done.
Within an hour, they had seized the Mercier Bridge, preventing rush-hour traffic from crossing the vital link between their reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River and Montreal.
It was a show of support for their brethren in Oka, a community 45 minutes away. The Mohawks there had set up a blockade to protest the expansion of a golf course into a pine forest they considered sacred.
Many Kahnawake Warriors had already joined the fight at Oka, but taking the bridge shifted attention from a remote road to the doorstep of Quebec’s biggest metropolis.
“We knew the outside was going to be upset, but that’s what we wanted,” says Deer, now 51.
The two sides dug in: the Canadian Armed Forces eventually replaced the Surete du Quebec. The blockade was lifted in late August after negotiations.
Since then, though, the spirit of independence that gave rise to the clash has not only endured, it has hardened.
Today, Kahnawake in many ways operates as an autonomous jurisdiction. The band council discourages members from voting in provincial or federal elections. Its economy is driven by cigarette and alcohol sales, and gambling operations outside governments deem illegal but have been powerless to stop.
Its membership law forces residents to leave the reserve if they marry non-natives — the Charter of Rights and Freedoms be damned. The community runs its own schools, court and police force. Traditionalists travel the world on passports issued by the Iroquois Confederacy.
Asked whether the Warriors would once again take up arms to defend themselves against an outside intervention, Deer says simply, “We’re prepared for any incursion.”
On a recent morning, five kilometres from the foot of Mercier Bridge, players sat around tables at Playground Poker with chips stacked high in front of them.
Under Canadian law, such gambling is legal only in provincially sanctioned casinos, but Playground Poker does not have a lot of time for Canadian law. It and a few other poker rooms on the reserve are the most recent examples of Kahnawake flexing its jurisdictional muscle.
Kenneth Deer, Bryan’s father, points to the establishment as an example of Kahnawake asserting itself.
“We have this growing sense of entrepreneurship, how we can use this community to do things that maybe other people can’t do, to assert our kind of sovereignty and develop an economy that can employ people and contribute to the community,” he says.
Kenneth Deer is secretary of the Mohawk Nation Office in Kahnawake. During the 1990 crisis, he was dispatched to Europe as an ambassador for Kahnawake, pleading the Mohawk case before the United Nations in Geneva.
“You have to believe you’re sovereign, and if you believe you’re sovereign you act like you’re sovereign,” he says. “That’s how Kahnawake really survives, because it pushes the envelope in that way. This is who we are. This is our territory, and we’re going to do what we think is important to us here.
“We don’t back down. We don’t shiver and shake because somebody says something,” he says.
That sort of resistance stretches back centuries among the Mohawks, says Gerald Reid, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut and the author of Kahnawake: Factions, Tradition, and Nationalism in a Mohawk Community.
It includes activism during the colonial period, resistance to the Indian Act system in the mid-19th century and a defiant strain of nationalism that emerged in the 1970s, focusing, among other things, on learning the indigenous language, which had been suppressed but not extinguished in residential schools and Roman Catholic day schools on the reserve, and a new emphasis on bloodlines that resulted in a violent clash in the 1970s when the Warrior Society moved to evict non-natives.
Since 1990, the elected council has moved closer to the traditionalists’ vision of self-rule, called the Two-Row Wampum. Based on a 17th-century treaty between the Iroquois and European settlers, it puts the two peoples on separate, but parallel, paths.
As the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake declared in 1993, “The concept of mutual respect embodied in the Two-Row Wampum, in which Natives and Nonnatives will not interfere in each other’s affairs, must now be brought to life. Our ‘row’ must be made strong enough to withstand any and all attempts by foreign powers to control it.”
Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, a Mohawk from Kahnawake and professor of political science at the University of Victoria, says a disregard for outside governments’ wishes was deeply ingrained when he worked for the band council in the 1990s.
The approach was, “We’ll do it, based on our values and our principles, and the imperatives of our nations, and then we’ll defend it,” he says. “There was little attention paid to the need to have other communities and other governments validate what people in Kahnawake were doing.”
Joe Norton was grand chief during the Oka crisis and held the post until he retired from politics in 2004. Last month, he staged a return to politics, winning election as grand chief.
In an interview with Norton before the election, he says outside authorities send spies into Kahnawake to target activities they consider illegal.
“That’s why we should have checked you first that you’re not here on a mission. I’m not dramatizing here.”
Norton supports the growth of the gambling industry on the reserve. It and moves by Kahnawake entrepreneurs into cigarette manufacturing are examples of Mohawks “walking our talk.”
Tobacco is historically a product of First Nations, he says, but “there is such a tremendous amount of work to become legal in that industry that it just prompts us to say, ‘The hell with it.’ We don’t need that. We’ll create our own industry, create our own regime and we’ll go. Because trying to do it the white man’s way isn’t working.”
The Mohawks’ indifference to outside opinion is also on display in the debate over membership. Under Kahnawake law, anyone who marries a non-native is expected to leave the reserve.
Some Mohawks married to non-natives, including Olympic athlete Waneek Horn-Miller, are challenging the residency rules as a violation of the Canadian Charter. Federal Indian Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt has called the rules racist and the Department of Indian Affairs maintains it has final say over who is a member of the community.
But Kenneth Deer says race is not the issue. With just under 8,000 people on the outskirts of Canada’s second-largest city, “The issue is assimilation. We’re going to resist assimilation,” Deer says. “It’s the government’s goal for us to assimilate, and inter-marriage accelerates that process.”
Geoffrey Kelley, Quebec’s minister of native affairs, describes himself as the government’s “eternal dove” — a crucial role, considering the mess the hawks stirred up in 1990. But even he says there is always a delicate balancing act whenever Kahnawake is involved. “The Mohawks, if I can say this respectfully, always try to push the envelope,” he says.
Sometimes there is room for it to be pushed, and he says he sees “a lot of progress” in relations since the Oka crisis. One example that hasn’t made headlines is legislation adopted in December allowing Kahnawake to create its own workplace health and safety regime, which cleared the way for Mohawks to work on major construction projects on the reserve. There is also discussion of expanding the reach of Kahnawake’s court, which now handles-summary-conviction and traffic offences.
But Kelley is unbending in his opposition to the sale of tax-exempt tobacco to non-natives. He hopes to persuade the Kahnawake leadership the easy-money tobacco economy provides a shaky foundation for the future.
“You’re 19 and you can get $30 an hour to sit in one of those trailers; why go to CEGEP? Why go to university?” he says. “Sooner or later, I don’t think there’s a great future for the tobacco industry in Canada in general.”
His view is echoed by Kyle Delisle, director of Kahnawake’s Economic Development Commission. Nicknamed Dr. Doom, he warns the tobacco trade, now in decline, has removed the incentive for education — creating a troubling 25-per-cent youth unemployment rate, nearly double the national average.
It would be a stretch to call Kahnawake a model, Alfred says. “Time has proven that no other First Nation is willing to do what we did in terms of confrontation.”
In Kahnawake, confrontation is a way of life. Bryan Deer says if necessary, he would be on the front lines again “in a heartbeat.” And his 22-year-old son would be there faster.