The Oka crisis

Roads were barricaded and violence broke out thirty years ago during one of Canada’s most high-profile moments of Indigenous defiance and protest. The Oka crisis, a land dispute between the Mohawk people of Kanesatake and the town of Oka, Quebec, erupted after the town proposed a golf course and condominium project that would have infringed on Kanesatake ancestral land.

A Canadian soldier and an Indigenous protester engage in a tense standoff during the Oka crisis in September 1990.