Fire renews cries for local police force in Kanesatake
An arson at the old Kanesatake police station is renewing calls for the Quebec government to fund a detachment of Mohawk peacekeepers on the territory.
According to early reports from the community, a Chevrolet pickup truck was seen driving away from the abandoned building as it caught fire shortly after 2:30 a.m. Monday. By the time fire trucks from Oka, Mirabel and Pointe-Calumet arrived on scene, the station had burned to the ground.
The vehicles had to carry their own water because Kanesatake does not have a system of fire hydrants. The Sûreté du Québec, which has patrolled the territory since 2004, sent arson investigators to the station.
Reached for comment Monday afternoon, Grand Chief Serge Simon was furious, claiming the lack of a local police force has created a “free for all” environment in Kanesatake — a Mohawk settlement with a population of about 1,400.
“Same old story, we’ve had three fires in recent years, all arsons,” said Simon, the band’s Grand Chief since 2011. “Two years ago, it was a small administrative building next to the gym. Then it was some vandals trying to burn down the canoe club. Now this. I’m sick and tired of it.”
Simon and other locals claim that, in recent months, outside construction companies have been using Mohawk territory to dump discarded materials along the shores of Lac des Deux Montagnes — about 45 kilometres west of Montreal.
“I’ve got idiots coming in here and they’re burying old plywood, insolation foam, concrete, shingles, you name it,” he said. “There’s this attitude of, ‘Oh, go dump on Indian land, there’s no law over there, no one’s going to stop you.’ We’ve been lobbying the provincial government to try to put a stop to this.
“If we had our own police force, our own conservation officer, we could put a stop to this, kick these companies out and sue them for damages,” Simon continued. “We’ve tried with Quebec, we’ve tried with the federal government because this is Crown land, but they keep passing the buck to each other.”
The old peacekeeper station was the site of an armed standoff in January 2004, when Grand Chief James Gabriel brought in 50 outside police officers to seize the building from local officers. Gabriel said the raid was meant to rid the reserve of corruption and drug dealers, but his tactic was met with fierce resistance.
Just minutes after the takeover began, local men and women surrounded the station and eventually ran the outside police force out of town. A fringe, but infuriated, group walked over to Gabriel’s house and burned it down.
The peacekeepers were subsequently disbanded and the building was abandoned. For years, the band council tried to fund projects that would see the station converted into a local gym or another type of service for Mohawk youth but nothing materialized.
Monday’s fire, Simon says, reminds his community of a moment in its history that’s best forgotten.
“Seeing the station burn down, it’s reliving a trauma,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking people to come forward if they saw anything. We’ve had calls about a pickup truck driving away as the fire started. There’s tire tracks in the parking lot. We need to find the people responsible for this.”
Between 2004 and 2009, the SQ spent $36 million policing the territory, whereas a funding agreement between Quebec and the Mohawk peacekeepers cost less than $2 million a year.
Only a handful of the province’s 34 First Nations communities are patrolled by the SQ. Most indigenous territories have either a locally-run police department or operate alongside the SQ to overcome language and cultural barriers.