Canadians (33 page)

Among those Natives buried in the little cemetery was Kanawatiron, also known as Joseph Gabriel. In 1911 Kanawatiron had been part of a group of forty Iroquois daring to protest against a railway being built across their land. Armed with sticks, axes, and a few shotguns and
revolvers, they blocked the railroad navvies from further construction. A peaceful settlement was reached.

The Mohawks of this part of the country had risen up against white oppression several times before. Joseph Swan, a Mohawk who was sent to France to study for the priesthood, returned to lead his people against white laws, which at one point in the nineteenth century included a ban on gathering firewood. White villagers insisted the wood be for their use only. There had often been skirmishes, but real violence was rare.

This time, however, there would be no peaceful outcome. The municipality had petitioned Quebec's Superior Court and the court had ruled that the blockade over the golf course must come down. When the Mohawks refused, the mayor of Oka asked the Sûreté, the provincial police, to enforce the injunction.

The police surrounded the nervous protesters near the top of the hills where the white pines stand tallest. Someone fired first—it has always been disputed just who—and almost instantly there was smoke and screaming and chaos and more shots ringing out. When it was all over, one officer, Corporal Marcel Lemay, was dead of a rifle wound. The police retreated, leaving behind cars that were burned and trashed and overturned by the furious Natives.

The blockade, the Mohawks defiantly declared, was not coming down.

The standoff continued on into summer. A second blockade went up on the Mercier Bridge over the St. Lawrence, erected by Natives on the nearby Kahnawake reserve out of sympathy for the Oka Natives. The obstruction infuriated commuters from the south shore trying to get into and out of Montreal and was marred by violence, mostly thrown bottles and stones. The tension mounted daily on Premier Robert Bourassa until mid-August, when he asked for military backup to put an end to the crisis.

It marked the first time Canadian soldiers had come up against civilians since the October Crisis of 1970. Tensions ran even higher once the soldiers arrived. The Mohawks gave no indication of backing down, no matter how much military might showed up.

Given that Native power had only weeks before brought down the Meech Lake Accord, there was a new swagger to Aboriginal activists.
There was something about the new leadership, about angry, determined young Aboriginals, that seemed to catch the rest of the country off guard.

Two years earlier, Georges Erasmus, then Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, had delivered a warning about land claims and Native rights, telling the country: “We want to let you know that you are dealing with fire. We say, Canada, deal with us today because our militant leaders are already born. We cannot promise that you are going to like the kind of violent political action we can just about guarantee the next generation is going to bring to our reserves.”

Such talk had often been heard before, but this was the first time in memory that words were followed by action. “I never thought it would go so far,” said John Ciaccia, provincial minister of Native Affairs. “Nothing had prepared me for what would happen.”

The army moved in on August 14, the blockade grew larger, and a delicate standoff began that would run through the remainder of that hot summer. Along with other reporters, I was sent down from Ottawa by the
Citizen
. One reporter, Ian MacLeod, managed to get behind the barriers before the army moved in and would remain there, mostly sleeping in his car, for the full standoff. The rest of us lumbered down the 417 and Quebec route 40 in a forty-two-foot custom camper trailer and set up in an Oka-area campground. We'd spend our days poking around the blockade, attending army briefings, making calls to Natives inside the blockade, and then heading back to the campground to barbeque lamb chops and drink beer.

Somehow, given that the Canadian army had been called out over a golf course, it seemed to make sense.

Our camper wasn't the only thing that seemed surreal. Television no longer just covered the news, it made the news. Oka came along just as all-news channels were coming into Canadian homes. CBC's Newsworld was at Oka twenty-four hours a day, often broadcasting raw footage that both fascinated and shocked.

Oka became, in large part, a War by Scrum. The tough-talking camouflaged Natives—complete with facemasks, rifles and knives, and code names like “Lasagna”—severely rattled the country. The young,
fresh-faced soldier, jaw jutting out defiantly, standing face to face with the fierce-looking, camouflaged “Warrior” became the image that defined that summer of 1990. Inspired by Harper's victory, Natives across the country took up the Oka cause.

One day I ran into Frank and Rick Thomas, who had decided to walk down St-Michel, Oka's main street, just to get a look at the famous barricade. Rick, having asked for a few days off from his job at a basket works in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, had jumped into his old 1977 Chrysler and driven three hundred kilometres out of his way to pick up his cousin Frank from the Shubenacadie Reserve in Nova Scotia. They'd driven through the night to reach Oka.

“It all begins with Elijah Harper,” Frank Thomas said in his “Custer Had It Coming” cap.

“Someone had to take a stand for us,” added Rick. “After what happened over Meech Lake every Indian in the country knew we could stand together and win. We knew it in our hearts.”

John Ciaccia later told the CBC that bringing in the army was precisely what the Oka Warriors wanted, “because then they could say they were fighting nation against nation.” If so, they seemed to belong to two different planets. One side said the battle was about rights and sovereignty; the other side said it was really about the Natives' right to sell untaxed cigarettes. One side thought themselves warriors; the other side called them criminals.

To appreciate the enormous contradictions so often at work in this assemblage called Canada, consider that on one side of the roadblock, the white side, Joseph Brant would be seen as the greatest Native hero in Canadian history. He is the Mohawk chief to whom this country has erected statues, named towns after, and honoured in school textbooks as the wise chief who stood by the British during the American Revolution and eventually led his people to peace and prosperity on the Six Nations land in southwestern Ontario. On the other side of the Oka roadblock, the Native side, Joseph Brant would be known as Thayendanegea, the opportunist who sold out his people's lands in New York state and then the Ohio Valley, who tricked his followers onto a reserve where he himself
refused to live, and who later killed his own son who had attacked him as a traitor.

Two weeks after the army arrived, the barricade on the Mercier Bridge came down. But not until September 26, two and a half months after the gun battle on the hill, did the Warriors surrender. The leaders were arrested and chainsaws and front-end loaders moved in to take down the infamous barricade.

The blockade was down. But Oka was not yet over.

IF MEECH LAKE LED directly to the formation of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future, then the Oka standoff can be credited with bringing about the Royal Commission on Aboriginals. The commission had been promised by the Mulroney government but then rescinded, and now it was again in the works. Georges Erasmus was to be one of its two chairs and the other would be Justice René Dussault. Aboriginal leaders were most encouraged.

The commission would meet across the country and take five years to complete its report. It would eventually cost $51.2 million—a figure that outraged the Canadian media—and be tabled in the late fall of 1996 under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. There were high hopes, as Chrétien had once been a sympathetic minister of Indian Affairs.

The final four-thousand-page report was all about change. Its 440 recommendations included the creation of an Aboriginal parliament, the formation of a completely independent tribunal to rule on land claims, and the establishment of an “adequate land base” for the most forgotten of the forgotten people, the Métis. Erasmus believed it would give Natives equal-nation status within Canada, providing full self-government to approximately sixty Aboriginal nations with jurisdiction over a wide range of powers.

Aboriginals, Erasmus said, would be citizens both of their own nation and of Canada. Federal government obligations would be directed to these nations, not individuals, and Ottawa would provide for each nation its own economic base within Confederation. The critics said it would be impossibly costly and would only increase most Aboriginals' reliance on
federal funds. Others said the Aboriginal parliament would never work and that if Natives were to be given “special status,” what about Quebec? What about what had been promised in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords?

In the end, the Royal Commission on Aboriginals report was placed side by side on the same shelf as Keith Spicer's report on the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future.

EXACTLY NINE YEARS after the standoff began, I returned to Oka to see what, if anything, had changed. It was a dull July day, raining off and on. I went up the hill where the tall white pines still stand and wandered through the little graveyard that had started the fight. For those who knew where to look, bullet marks remained in the trees and in the boards of the flaking lacrosse box.

The grave of Leroy Gabriel, Warrior, was in the very ground that was to have become a golf course, but instead of a ball washer there was an antler stuck into the grass. From the antler hung a small carved eagle, symbol of wisdom, of knowledge, of truth—and high above, hammered into a pair of magnificent white pines, two tattered warrior flags swung softly in the eerie still of a wet, muggy day.

Leroy Gabriel stood with “Lasagna” and “Spudwrench” and several dozen other Warriors who kept their faces behind bandanas and their weapons visible to all as they stared down the hill at the Canadian army for more than two months. It was as close to civil war as this peaceful country has come in modern times.

The Mohawk held the ground that was to be turned into a golf course as sacred. They said that for more than a hundred years their people had been buried there and that the deep wood behind the highway was theirs for future burial. Once the standoff was over, the government promised the Mohawks control over the territory.

Leroy Gabriel couldn't wait. He'd never recovered from his weeks as a Warrior. He drank far too much, and eventually an accident with a hunting rifle ended his pain before he reached the age of thirty. His friends decided not to wait for any government permission and brought
him here, wrapped him in buckskin, and gave poor Leroy a traditional Mohawk burial beneath the very pines he had fought for: victory his, forever and ever.

There were now ten graves in the disputed territory. Control of the land was handed over to the Mohawk Council of Kanesatake, but not the deed, much to the disappointment of many Natives in the area. The municipality of Oka received $230,000 for the property, even though Mohawks still claim that the land had never belonged to Oka in the first place and had no need to be purchased.

But now it was theirs, for keeps, deed or no deed. It had been cleared and was beautifully kept, carefully gardened and passionately guarded. Woe to the outsider who dares enter without first asking permission. And even then visitors are asked not to get too close to the gravesite of Leroy Gabriel, hero to many, troublemaker to many—for the winds of Oka had never really stopped blowing through this spectacular plot of land they call the Pines.

“There are still growing pains,” Barry Bonspille told me. The local historian worked for the Kanesatake Mohawk Roundtable and lived only a few houses from where the battle took place. His home had been virtually destroyed by vandals during the standoff but had since been rebuilt and refurbished. Even so, nine years later, hardly a day went by that the events of the summer of 1990 were not recalled by someone.

“We get along fairly well with the town now,” said Bonspille. “But there's still a feeling that efforts were made to appease the town.”

The town got money for the land. Town businesses received some compensation. A new ferry was put into service, the waterfront improved, and the exquisite local park improved.

Native businesses received nothing for their losses. Barry Bonspille paid out of his own pocket to repair his home.

The surface changes in Kanesatake had been vast: council was now elected, policing was now all Native, and municipal employment had mushroomed since the Mohawks began delivering their own programs. The issues that Oka raised, however, are always simmering in the background.

The Mohawk community at this point in 1999 counted some eighteen hundred members, yet only five to six hundred lived in Kanesatake; the remainder were off-reserve, with full voting privileges. Political issues had become centred on such matters as taxation, even though the minority actually living there continued to demand that land claim settlement take precedence. The fight over the cemetery lands had been but a small portion of a larger claim to lands from Mirabel airport to Montreal itself.

“It's kind of ironic,” Bonspille said, “but the thing we fought for in 1990 is last on the list of priorities.”

THIRTEEN YEARS to the day after Elijah Harper held his eagle feather and said no to Meech Lake, we met again in Ottawa.

He was still recognized wherever he went and often treated as a hero. He had received tens of thousands of letters. When he checked into hotels he'd be given the presidential suite. When he visited schools, children would walk up and touch him just to make sure he was real. On one flight half filled with German tourists they lined up in the aisles to ask for the autograph of Canada's “most famous Indian.”

“My life changed,” he told me, “but I stayed the same.”