If I was so content with the lack of nosy journos knocking at my door this summer about the Oka Crisis, why was I scratching that itch?
The 1990 Oka Crisis officially ended on September 26, exactly 33 years ago today. Also on this day 33 years ago, my younger brother, Joe, gone these many years, walked out of the Treatment Centre and into a military jail.
What kind of self-respecting agent of chaos would I be if I didn’t scratch even a little?
In the previous post, I left you with a mind worm about “a power imbalance” at Kanehsatake. It existed almost from first contact with the Sulpician Church and New France and continued to much later with Quebec and Canada.
That imbalance is still there. The words have changed since colonial days but the song is still the same.
Indigenous policies may have gone from brutal mass incarceration to touchy-feely today but the ultimate aim not so much.
Phrases like “forced assimilation” and “enfranchisement” were replaced by more subtle terms like “legislated self-government” and “reconciliation.”
Tomato, tomahto.
The political stripes of governments matter little. The giant ship called Canadian bureaucracy hauling Indigenous affairs plows on no matter who’s in the wheelhouse.
Kanehsatake is in a particularly vulnerable place historically and legally. It exists in a no-man’s land between Canadian law and government policy.
It’s not a “reserve” with some protection in Canadian law. Yet it has a federally-funded band council that administers the Indian Act.
The band council registers membership and status, assigns “certificates of possession” (permission to plots of land), and has limited authority to regulate the territory via “BCRs,” or band council resolutions.
There’s also a traditional council or Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) Longhouse at Kanehsatake. It has three male title holders; one each for Bear, Wolf and Turtle clans. Clan mothers consult their respective members on issues and direct title holders based on the general will. It’s participatory governance, a form of democracy that pre-exists Canada and the United States.
Neither council works well at Kanehsatake.
The band council is dysfunctional despite all that federal money, recognition and support. It’s a victim of its own failings in basic governance, nasty habits ingrained after decades of closed meetings, secret decisions and corruption.
Elections to the band council are more like unpopularity contests; about who is less disliked or distrusted than any other candidate. They all promise change but never deliver. It’s Groundhog Day all over again.
The traditional council is non-functioning. Its very existence is denied by long-standing federal wizardry as though the historic Mohawk Nation never existed. The Longhouse conducts occasional ceremony but otherwise has little support because it cannot buy love or loyalty like the band council.
That’s the situation ever since Canada imposed band councils and the Indian Act onto Haudenosaunee communities a hundred years ago. Not much changed even after the Oka Crisis.
Except… After the Oka Crisis, Canadians began to learn about and understand more distinctions between band councils and traditional governments. For example, read stories about who’s on the frontlines of Indigenous rights over pipelines across British Columbia and who isn’t.
Except… Canadians became more concerned about Indigenous issues like land rights (claims), justice, housing, health, education, child welfare, and economic dependency in First Nations across the country.
Except… Canadians demanded government commissions and inquiries to examine problems, abuses, and failures in Indigenous affairs and suggest answers.
Increased awareness about Indigenous issues led to improvements in communities and lives everywhere across the country… except at Kanehsatake where it all started.
What happened?
After three months, millions of dollars, thousand of police and soldiers sent to put down a small insurrection at a previously insignificant Mohawk territory, shaming itself on the global stage in the process, Quebec and Ottawa had had enough of the joint.
The band council already abandoned its people once the shoooting started and refused to come back long after the barricades came down. After awhile, it moved HQ from a distant hotel to an office in Oka, of all places. It didn’t fully return to Kanehsatake until almost two years later.
Most people who lost jobs during the Crisis didn’t get them back. Problems predicted by Health Canada about blaming and shaming, lateral violence, increased depression, alcohol, drug abuse and crime became everyday things families endured. The welfare account mushroomed.
Crime and corruption flourished in such conditions. Both loved the vacuum created by the lack of any authority or accountability at all levels. Pot fields grew, patrolled at night by kids with AK-47s. Pushers peddled hard drugs and locally-produced porn in the school hallways.
Parents’s complaints went nowhere. And who was there to listen? Gangs shot up homes and threatened anyone who spoke out publicly. Reporters who tried to break the code of silence got chased out and even received death threats at work.
A group of grannies, despite threats, took their stories to Indian Affairs’ and the Solicitor-General’s offices in Ottawa as well as to the Mohawk Roundtable where heads of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake sat with government officials. But these men did nothing. The women went home empty-handed to face even more threat.
People determined to do something about the escalating violence in their community created a neighbourhood watch. Over time, this morphed into a community police force complete with a board independent of the band council. This was a huge step toward developing civil society, fundamental for responsible governance.
It came too little and too late for the then-head of the band council. He didn’t trust them, disbanded the board and fired the cops. Instead, he made a deal with Ottawa to bring in 25 or so Indigenous cops from around Quebec.
This sparked a mini-revolt. A small mob surrounded the new cops in their shiny new police station until Kahnawake Peacekeepers arrived to escort them safely off-territory. The mob then ransacked the police station before burning down the home of the head councillor.
This is just a quick outline of events at Kanehsatake during the ten years immediately after the Oka Crisis. Indigenous peoples across Canada felt breakthroughs had taken place with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), and serious land rights negotiations underway again. Canadians realized that Canada’s history needed to include – not exclude – Indigenous peoples. It seemed to them that Canada was finally listening.
Meanwhile, the situation at Kanehsatake went from bad to worse. The community imploded, collapsed, and became a place where rules didn’t apply. However, even chaos can create opportunities. That’s exactly what happened during the next 20 years.
For that, however, you’ll need to come back for Part 3: the conclusion.
Shmohawk 
Leave a comment