By Joe Tehawehron David (Mohawk Nation)
October 4, 1991
Published in the book Semiotext(e) Canadas (1994)
The voice on the other end of the telephone said, “Congratulations.” For what? I wondered. “It’s been a year since you were released from jail last fall.” The fact that someone else was marking the calendar, when I wasn’t, surprised me.
Until then, I hadn’t even thought about it. Since that phone call, I’ve hardly thought of anything else.
Sometimes it even seems as if people would like to forget the whole thing. When they invite me to speak at churches, universities, or meeting halls, it seems as if they consider me entertainment. It’s as if they’re watching me spill my guts in front of them. They seem detached, untouchable, like they’re watching something on TV.
I get tired of it, because I want them to take responsibility individually and collectively. They seem to want me to do something for them; to keep fighting the battles and never give up. To ease their guilt. They can’t understand that I don’t have the answers and I can’t fight for them. They can’t see that I need help.
One professor drew me aside one evening. He told me how guilty he felt about the way his country treats Aboriginal people. I understood how he felt. But I also got pissed off at him because I couldn’t fathom his not doing anything or not knowing what to do. After all, he was the educated man in an influential position and he had the power to influence others. Instead, he chose to do nothing.
I’m tired of the lip service. I’m the one who comes from a powerless group of people. Yet I’m always asked to suggest what to do, that they write letters, that they lobby, that they demonstrate, somehow. The constant refrain of, “I’m only one person” or “I feel so powerless” is a cop out. Because I know it always starts with just one person.
One year ago today, I was just being released from army custody. I have been wrestling with so many strong emotions since last year that I feel I’m only now beginning to regain my balance.
I’ve watched the media come and go in this story. I’ve watched as politicians and Native leaders postured and discussed “Oka”, the dry analysis rarely helping my community or the people most hurt in the “crisis”. I’ve become disheartened by the empty rhetoric, the almost assured and predictable end to this tale.
On February 5, 1991, I began acting as a coordinator for the legal defence —my own defence and the defence of the Mohawks from my community who were charged. It was on this day that we showed up in court and our lawyers announced they were withdrawing from our files, citing lack of funds. They weren’t being paid, they said.
Confusion. It caught most of us by surprise. Until then, we assumed we were being taken care of. I remember pandemonium in the courtroom, panic and maybe a little fear. I remember thinking it’s a much less honourable place to fight for our rights than in the pines, and that we weren’t prepared for this kind of battle. I think we all thought that the amount of support would have translated into enough donations to pay for the lawyers. Or, at the very least, some lawyer or lawyers would surely volunteer their services. I suppose it was naïve to think that, having just come out of a showdown with the Canadian army, we were going to be allowed to rest. Naïve also to think that at some point I would get my life back; this land dispute has already eaten up almost two years of my life.
In February 1991, some of us with charges got together. Not having any lawyers and not feeling confident in the people who had, until then, been acting as a coordination team, I felt that if anyone should be giving direction to the lawyers, it should be someone from Kanehsatà:ke able to bring up issues in court specific to that community and speak of what happened at Oka with authority; and people with charges representative of the three communities most directly involved. I teamed up with Joe Deom from Kahnawá:ke and Lorne Oakes for Akwesasne. Since that time I feel I’ve been on a treadmill, being whipped and urged on by the possibility of jail. When we brought in our latest lawyer, he went to St-Jérôme and tried to get a sense of how things were going in court. He said the Crown prosecutors were walking on air, they felt they had the whole case in the bag. It’s an infuriating position to be in, with almost no money to pay these lawyers and not a lot of help on the scale we need. In the face of the massive propaganda campaign against the Warrior Society sowing doubt and confusion, chipping away at our support, it’s imperative to point out that not everyone charged is a member of the Warrior Society. In fact, it’s not only Mohawks, but also five other nations from British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and one French Canadian who have been charged; and that the issue had nothing to do with contraband cigarettes or gambling, it was purely a land claim issue.
My life has always been fairly quiet and uncomplicated in Kanehsatà:ke. I kept a low profile, concerned myself with my art and my friends. I watched the ongoing political problems of my community from the outside, rarely getting involved.
I grew up with a rich family history that few Canadians can identify with. The Mohawks have occupied this territory from time immemorial, thousands of years. My parents often talked about my grandmother Lena, and how in 1950 she tried to stop a sawmill in the same pine forest that I was arrested in. She was beaten up by one of the men working for the company that claimed to own the pines, charged with assault, and hauled off to jail in St-Jérôme, the same town, where forty years later over sixty Mohawks are being criminalized for the “Oka Crisis”, myself included.
Nothing’s changed. History just keeps repeating itself.
Dating from the first days of the Christian intrusion into our lands there has been a steady stream of petitions demanding to have the various levels of the colonists’ governments recognize our legitimate claim to our territory. In 1781, 1788, 1794, 1802, 1818, 1828, 1839, 1848, 1869 —all the way to 1990.
Throughout our history my people have been oppressed to the point of slavery, forbidden to cut wood even on our own lands. “The Indians would cut wood for making lacrosses or snowshoes or baskets for sale,” wrote Armand Parent, the Methodist missionary who arrived in Oka in 1871. “They would be arrested, and dragged twenty miles for trial. There they would be bailed out. Some months after, they would be heard before the court. The juries would disagree, or acquit them. They would hardly arrive home again before another arrest, and the round would be followed once again.”
We, at least my generation, have grown up being taught some of the things my parents knew and we’re learning more all the time. That the goal of the government is total domination over Native people, and if that can’t be achieved in such ways as assimilation, then it will be done by annihilation.
I’m thirty-four years old, and the intensity of my life these days is hard to cope with. I’m really amazed at how pervasive and deeply rooted racism is in this country. I’ve tried to cope with racism all my life because, from learning about my history, my culture, I learn about the Indian nations wiped out by guns, starvation, and smallpox-infected blankets.
I’ve become a racist. My people are becoming racist.
I don’t want to be. And I don’t want them to be.
Today we know so much more about our history. It makes us both proud and angry. It’s a deep anger, one of betrayal. My people have tried so hard to accommodate, but when you corner or attack any animal or person, their instinct is to fight. We are backed against the wall. We have almost no land left, and the government has successfully stalled our land issue long enough for the Canadian public to think it’s all taken care of. Long enough for people to forget.
I really believe a similar confrontation will come to pass, that history is going to repeat itself. Because the paternalistic attitude will be maintained, if only for economic reasons.
July 11, 1990 was not the first time there’s been an armed confrontation. In 1909, Joseph Kanawatiron Gabriel, my great-grandfather rallied forty men to try to stop a Canadian Northern Railway track that would have crossed two hundred and fifty meters of what we considered our traditional land. The Sulpician priests had been selling land, in violation of the land grant of 1717, and they also gave permission to the Canadian Northern to pass through the territory.
INDIANS THREATEN WAR AGAINST RAILROAD MEN, the headlines read. CANADIAN NORTHERN CONSTRUCTION GANG AT OKA STOPPED BY FORTY ARMED WITH REVOLVERS, SHOTGUNS, AND BLUDGEONS. CHIEF KENNATOSSE GABRIEL THEIR LEADER THREATENS SERIOUS TROUBLE IF THEIR LAND IS CROSSED.
They were successful, but Joseph Kanawatiron Gabriel was forced to go on the run for years. Thousands of dollars were spent in the hunt to have him arrested. Eventually the charges were dropped.
I’m told the “Oka Crisis” cost upwards of two hundred and fifty million dollars. Apparently, the bills are still coming in. It would have been much cheaper to have dealt honourably with us for once. Maybe Corporal Marcel Lemay would still be alive, too.
Why does it take so much? Especially in a country that would like to see itself as a leader in the field of human rights. “Might is Right” is still the doctrine practiced. Manifest Destiny is alive and well in Canada, and as long as nobody says anything against the policies except the Indians, it will stay just as it is.
I’ve gotten so cynical over the past year, but then, my entire community has been the victim of a massive assault: government, police, army, media, the curious and the wannabees have all been such a drain on my energies.
I don’t believe I’ll see justice. There’s no such thing as justice for Native people. The court system is just another big stick to intimidate my people. Tie us up. Make us toe the line. Meanwhile, International law and human rights are being violated. I’m caught up in the genocide machine and, if anything, I’m getting more militant, more angry, becoming more of a nationalist Mohawk. I’ve been radicalized, and all I wanted was a peaceful, quiet family life.
I remember being in the treatment centre last year, thinking I was never going to leave that place alive. My memories of that time are very hard to deal with. The psychological warfare used to wear us down and demoralize us has, for the most part, worked. Very high level propaganda and psychological experts were brought in to use against us, but when I tell white people that, they can’t believe their governments would do such a thing.
I opposed the weapons throughout the spring of 1990, and I was called “Gandhi” because of it. Yet I’m one of the few from Kanehsatà:ke charged with possession of a weapon. But both personally and for my community I don’t believe there was ever any choice. The “crisis” happened as much because of the governments’ attitude as because of our resolve to finally have our title to our land recognized.
My role in the “Oka Crisis” was inevitable because of my great-grandfather and my grandmother, my parents and the history of my community, but also because of the two governments’ intentional disregard of Natives’ legitimate protests and demands. There are more people just like me, and more on the way. In James Bay, in British Columbia, all over this country the frustration is reaching explosive proportions. The Lubicon people wouldn’t cooperate with the governments’ demands. The governments’ response was to create another band, enticing the more malleable people with money, creating a band that would sell out.
The new constitutional proposal being pushed by the Mulroney government speaks of the fundamental “duality” of Canada. This is a slap in the face of Aboriginal people. Almost as bitter a joke as Québec’s assertion that it is a “distinct society”.