OKA: 10 years later

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It's been 10 years since the world watched as Canadian soldiers rolled their tanks into a small town in Quebec, called into action to end a dispute between Mohawks and a town council that wanted to build a golf course on a Native burial site.

The Oka Crisis, or as Native leaders prefer to call the 78-day standoff in 1990, the confrontation at Oka, shook the entire country as activists took to the barricades and took up arms to defend their land rights.

To mark the 10-year anniversary, a panel of speakers gathered in a small cafeteria to discuss the legacy of the confrontation. The panel of five included Kenneth Deer, publisher of Kahnawake's Eastern Door, and Ellen Gabriel, whose face became the Canada-wide symbol of the Mohawk people in Oka, the person who explained the Mohawk position to the press during those tense and uncertain days.

The panelists were asked if the federal and provincial governments have changed their ways in the years since the confrontation.

"If you look at 10 years before the Oka crisis and the conditions and relationship that we had with government in 1980 and you compare it to the conditions and relationships in the year 2000, there's a definite difference," Deer said. "I think that 1990 was a wake-up call to Quebec, the Canadian government and to people in general about how non-Natives perceive Native people. Of course, how we perceive government hasn't changed. Our perception of government hasn't changed in the last 10 years, 20 years or 100 years."

Mohawk people still look to the Two-Row Wampum treaty which states that the relationship with the Crown is a nation-to-nation relationship and that Mohawk people have a right to be sovereign on their traditional territory, he said.

"That'll never change," Deer added. "It's always our stand. Governments, before 1990, had a difficult time with the concept of self-determination for Native people."

The newspaper publisher believes the ugliness of Oka, the racial tensions that reached fever pitch between Native and non-Native, exposed attitudes in Canada that had previously gone unexamined and unchallenged.

"The Canadian and Quebec governments looked at us as subordinate, as dependent, as, perhaps, a lesser society. They were racist without realizing how racist they were. In 1990, what it did was bring out the racism within the general public. The racism that was always beneath the surface came to the surface and we all saw what it was like," he said.

A book about hate groups in Canada discovered that Ku Klux Klan organizers were responsible for creating and encouraging the hate and anger that led to rock throwing and other demonstrations directed against Mohawk people in Kahnawake, where a vital commuter link - the Mercier Bridge - was blocked in support of the Mohawk community of Kanesatake (Oka), an hour's drive to the north.

Deer believes the intensity of the hatred and anger scared government officials enough to back away from the hard line approach that saw Canadian military personnel ordered into action outside the picturesque town of Oka on the shores of Lac des Deux Montagnes (Lake of Two Mountains).

After the shooting death of Quebec provincial police officer Marcel Lemay and daily confrontations between Mohawk warriors and Canadian soldiers, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney made a series of promises that brought the impasse to a peaceful conclusion.

"Brian Mulroney referred to his four solutions to the quote unquote Indian problem," Deer said. "One was that he would strike a Royal Commission. The second was that he would speed up the rate of land claims because at the rate they were going it would have taken more than 100 years to settle them. The third was that he would improve conditions on reserves and the fourth was he would include Native people in the constitutional process, which was the Charlottetown Accord."

He noted that the Charlottetown Accord was a complete failure, voted down in a nationa referendum in 1992.

There has been some progress on the promise to improve conditions on reserves, Deer noted.

"The Canadian government has increased and continues to brag around the world about how much money it spends on Native people. Canada does pay more per capita than any other country that has Indigenous people. But how much of that money is benefiting the Indigenous people? In general, we are still on the low end of the economic ladder; we still have the highest suicide rate in the country and we still are victims of a certain amount of racism," he said.

Deer agrees with Native leaders who say the Royal Commission has not lived up to its original promise.

"Basically, the Royal Commission's been ignored. It's not been activated by the government. Their solution was to pay us $350 million as a healing fund. That was Canada's response to the Royal Commission, which is ludicrous. Canada spent $500 million to cancel a helicopter contract."

He noted there has been some progress on speeding up the land claim process, although less than a week after the panel met, that process may have suffered a critical blow. Sechelt First Nation pulled out of the treaty process in British Columbia and threatened to force a total redesign of Canada's plan to solve land disputes, including government's insistence of extinguishment of Native rights in exchange for settlements.

"There has been some progress. A land claims commission was set up that was semi-independent but not truly independent," he said. "A treaty process was set up in British Columbia that was questionable to many people. It was a treaty process that wasn't really a treaty process. A treaty process recognizes the two signatories as equals. The B.C. process does not. Canada is still superior and the Indigenous people are still not equal. However, they still try to disguise these things as treaties."

He noted that it was a provincial Liberal government in power in Quebec at the time of Oka and the arti Quebecois has made agreements with Native leaders in the province in order to pursue its separatist agenda. But Deer pointed out the agreements have yet to be implemented and probably won't be until after the next provincial election.

Talk of raising cigarette taxes has been heard in Quebec in recent months and, Deer said, that could encourage a renewal of the cross-border traffic in cigarettes that played a role in the Oka confrontation where Mohawk businessmen (called smugglers by Canadian authorities) used the Mohawk sovereignty issue to prevent authorities from stopping their lucrative trade.

Many traditional observers have said, during the last 10 years, that many of the armed warriors at Oka hijacked the sovereignty agenda for their own purposes and didn't represent the Mohawk leaders or people. Deer said there could be another confrontation if cigarette taxes go up.

"It's yet to be seen. Ten years is just a blink of an eye for us. We've been here for centuries and we expect to be here for a few more centuries. I'm not convinced that Canada has learned, that Quebec has learned, the lesson of 1990," he said. "Government memories are short. They say one week in politics is a long time; 10 years is a longer time. There will be a time when, because these agreements do not recognize us as equals, do not recognize us as sovereign peoples, that sooner or later it will come to confrontation."

Ellen Gabriel still lives and works on the Kanesatake territory. She said nothing important has changed since Oka.

"In the community of Kanesatake, I think, in many ways, we're still feeling like we're under siege. The physical barricades came down and the army left. However, we're still oppressed. The issue of the land that we were protecting is still in question. The government keeps saying, 'We have negotiations underway.' They have the band council that they're negotiating with. And the traditional people, the longhouse people whose government predates Europen arrival on this continent, is still not recognized and is still outlawed," she said.

Children of traditional people who refuse to recognize the band council's authority are issued temporary band numbers until they reach the age of 18 when they lose their status, she said.

"Where I come from, it's considered Crown land. It's not a reserve, which means the Queen, in Canadian law, owns the community where I come from. They're only letting us live there out of their gracious generosity," she said. "We do not own our land. Yet a person who comes from anywhere else in the world and buys land has more rights than we do. So what has changed in 10 years? Very little and yet a lot."

Gabriel asked the audience if they were familiar with the details of the beginning of the confrontation in her community in 1990.

"Ten years ago, a group of us decided to block a secondary road - a road which was not used at all except by the local people - because they were going to expand a golf course," she said.

She said the historic attitudes of the French colonists towards Mohawk people was unfriendly and antagonistic from the start.

"They didn't look at the Mohawk people living in Kanesatake as human beings. We were expendable and if we died, who cared? The attitude is still the same today."

She said the residential school system is a clear example of that attitude.

"The whole point of the residential school system was to take away the identity of our people. They were practising genocide against Aboriginal people and today we are left with that legacy and we are trying to stop that cycle of abuse that exists in our community," she said.

As in most Mohawk communities and, indeed, to some extent in all Indigenous communities, Gabriel's home is divided between traditional people who refuse to recognize the Indian Act system and those who do recognize it. That division is the fault of the colonizers, she believes, but non-Native people use the division as another