Stories of Oka

Land, Film, and Literature

Isabelle St. Amand, S.E. Stewart

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780887555510
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the summer of 1990, the Oka Crisis—or the Kanehsatake Resistance—exposed a rupture in the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada.

In the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the conflict made visible a contemporary Indigenous presence that Canadian society had imagined was on the verge of disappearance. The 78-day standoff also reactivated a long history of Indigenous people's resistance to colonial policies aimed at assimilation and land appropriation.

The land dispute at the core of this conflict raises obvious political and judicial issues, but it is also part of a wider context that incites us to fully consider the ways in which histories are performed, called upon, staged, told, imagined, and interpreted.

Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature examines the standoff in relation to film and literary narratives, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This new English edition of St-Amand's interdisciplinary, intercultural, and multi-perspective work offers a framework for thinking through the relationships that both unite and oppose settler societies and Indigenous peoples in Canada.

CHAPTER 1

The Event and the Impossibility of Neutrality

Public sentiment was deeply perturbed by the events that took place in the Oka region during the summer and fall of 1990: a 78-day stand-off with armed Natives posted behind the barricades, closure of the Mercier Bridge for some 55 days, intervention of the Canadian Armed Forces at the request of the Quebec government, an extremely traumatizing situation for the local populace, and above all, the death in the line of duty of a Sûreté du Québec officer.

—Coroner’s Office, Rapport d’enquête du coroner Guy Gilbert sur les causes et circonstances du décès de monsieur Lemay [Report on the Inquest by Coroner Guy Gilbert into the causes and circumstances of Mr. Lemay’s death]

Overt conflicts over territory and its resources are complex and emotionally charged, going to the very foundation of the settler states. They are at the root of serious confrontations among the police, Indigenous protestors, and non-Indigenous populations in recent history across Turtle Island. In the United States, this was made tangible in 2017 by the state repression directed at the Sioux water protectors and their supporters who had gathered at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, North Dakota, to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a crude oil pipeline endangering sacred sites and crucial water sources. In Canada, Idle No More, “one of the largest Indigenous mass movements in Canadian history,” has been praised since 2012 for its ability to conduct a grassroots, relatively non-confrontational social and political resistance through multiple teaching-ins, rallies, and protests for Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection.1 It is nonetheless a fact that Indigenous resistance has repeatedly been faced with state repression across the country. Some examples of the violent clashes sparked by forceful police intervention in Indigenous communities that reclaimed, defended, and asserted their land or fishing rights were seen in Listuguj (Restigouche), Quebec, in 1981; Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, in 1995; Ipperwash, Ontario, also in 1995; Caledonia, Ontario, in 2006; and Elsipogtog, New Brunswick, in 2013.

The Oka Crisis, which exploded in 1990, without a doubt remains the territorial conflict in recent history that most deeply affected Indigenous and settler relations in this country. Following immediately on the failure of the Meech Lake Accord negotiations, the seventy-eight-day armed standoff drew much media attention and rendered visible an Indigenous presence that the Quebec and Canadian society believed had faded away. The event challenged the status quo and exposed a colonialist violence that underlies relations among the peoples making up Canada. It raised glaring political and legal questions, and was part of an expanded cultural context that encourages us to consider the many different ways in which history and stories are performed, utilized, staged, and recited. While it caused feelings of belonging to become fiercely polarized, Oka offered a common field of action on which this conflict could be played out.

Through its form and structure, this book attempts to reveal progressively what, in this political crisis, moved the Quebec and Canadian settler societies to realize that the status quo is not self-evident, but is based on a colonial power relation that normalizes the settler state order as it eliminates for specific purposes the political legitimacies of the peoples indigenous to the land. The book replicates the process of reflection I undertook when I ran up against fundamentally divergent interpretations in the many documentary sources and reference materials that deal with this territorial conflict.

State of the Issue

The Oka Crisis stimulated a substantial amount of discursive and audiovisual production, which has become an integral part of the event and its aftermath. Throughout the summer of 1990, the disturbing, dramatic armed conflict generated intense media coverage in a steady stream of television reports, information updates, and articles in daily and weekly newspapers, news magazines, radio broadcasts, and public forums, along with press releases and media conferences, letters, petitions, and posters that circulated in different places and networks. Day after day, the entire country avidly followed the reporting of an event that had captured the attention of the broader public as well as local residents. During the siege and in the months following its denouement, backgrounders on the land dispute, testimonies, and numerous other accounts were published. They represented many different voices attempting to report on the event, to communicate and symbolize what was happening in the moment and what had come before.

I argue that the Oka Crisis can be understood as an event. In that perspective, I agree with Onondaga scholar David Newhouse, who concluded from the various terms in use, “It is hard to know what to call the events at Oka. It has been variously described as crisis, incident, uprising, rebellion, and insurgency in the journalistic and academic literatures. I use the more neutral term ‘events’ to reflect this multiple perspective.”2 The notion of event can also point to specific impacts produced. According to historian Pierre Grégoire, the event is subjected to explanatory procedures that require us to locate it at least schematically in the context of its emergence, define how it proceeded, and specify a number of its effects.3 Most of the media reports and publications dealing with the 1990 crisis make an attempt in this direction. The reports written by independent observers called to the site in summer 1990, such as representatives of Quebec’s human rights commission, the Commission des droits de la personne du Québec, and the International Federation for Human Rights, followed such explanatory procedures—they located the conflict in its broader context and then assessed the situation and the actions of the various players according to the terms of the specific mandate their organization had been given regarding the crisis. The police intervention on 11 July, which is what triggered the overt armed conflict, clearly called for elucidation—the shots fired in the grove called the Pines and the death of Corporal Marcel Lemay have since generated an aura of violence and mystery around the political event.

Significantly, all parties directly affected by the police intervention (namely, the Sûreté du Québec’s chief executive officer, the Quebec association of provincial police officers, the municipalities of the village and parish of Oka, as well as the Mohawk communities of Kanehsatake and Kahnawake) demanded a public inquiry into “the events” of 11 July 1990.4 The following year, the Quebec government launched a public inquiry with a social and preventive mandate to shed light on the causes and circumstances of Corporal Lemay’s death. As distinct from a police inquiry or a civil or criminal case, the procedure was “neither accusatory nor adversarial, but inquisitorial” (Quebec 1995, 3). It meant that the mandate received by the government-appointed coroner was not to identify a guilty party by name or to assign blame, but to understand what had happened, with the specific aim of preventing such a sequence of events from happening again.

Moreover, since the event in question was an armed conflict causing a death, the explanatory procedures to which it was subject tended to report, locate, and assess it from the perspective of adjudication and the law. There would be no accusation levelled or individual identified as responsible for taking the fatal shot, with the result that Corporal Lemay’s death will never be resolved. At the same time as the coroner’s inquest was proceeding, a criminal trial was being held at Montreal’s courthouse. Various charges were brought against some thirty-five Indigenous activists who had been behind the barricades at Kanehsatake in September 1990.5 The Crown cited counts of taking part in a riot, obstructing peace officers in the performance of their duty, and possessing firearms for a purpose dangerous to the public peace. The defence recast the trial in a political light. In addition to insisting that the accused had committed none of these crimes, defence lawyers maintained that their actions were justified by the need to protect land belonging to their people and to ensure their safety against violations of human rights committed by the authorities.6 At the end of the lengthy trial, the jury rendered a verdict of not guilty on all counts. In a press release issued in response to their acquittal and addressed to the media, the Mohawk activists and their allies described the decision as “the jury’s recognition that issues of territory and jurisdiction should not be decided in a criminal court, but by nation-to-nation negotiation between the Canadian government and the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy” (translation).7 The deliberations and judgement associated with this criminal trial raise critical political questions that lie at the root of the territorial conflict of summer 1990.

In addition to prompting a public inquiry and a trial, the event generated numerous political interrogations within the framework of the state itself. The Quebec government’s request to the Canadian Armed Forces under Aid to the Civil Power—in other words, the government’s calling out of armed forces as support for the provincial police—raised many questions. The responsibility of the Government of Canada for the degeneration of a land dispute into an armed confrontation also remained a principal subject for interrogation. Why, for example, did the federal government wait until the conflict degenerated to that point before intervening? Why didn’t it redeem the disputed land from the town of Oka before the crisis erupted, as suggested in March 1990 by John Ciaccia, Quebec Native Affairs minister at the time?8 It is in response to questions like these that in 1991, the federal government held hearings of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs to understand the crisis that had recently rocked the country. Like the coroner’s inquest, these hearings were intended to clarify “the complex issues underlying this conflict and the confusion and bitterness felt in its aftermath”9 in order to avoid further violence and promote healing.

The troubled period following the rejection of the Meech Lake Accord and the confrontations at Oka also saw the creation of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Its mandate was to “investigate the evolution of the relationship among aboriginal peoples (Indian, Inuit and Métis), the Canadian government, and Canadian society as a whole”10 with the goal of suggesting concrete solutions to the challenging problems that had hindered these relationships. The commission engaged in consultations to explore “the basis of an equitable, honourable relationship between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Canada,” and underlined the importance of understanding the origins of the conflicts between the different peoples in order to work towards a resolution. “But the barricades will not fall until we understand how they were built,” reads the report, in which the commission clearly noted a common interest in settling disputes: “Every Canadian will gain if we escape the impasse that breeds confrontation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people across barricades, real or symbolic.”11 The event calls for understanding, introspection, and analysis, at all levels.

In the years following the crisis, various social and political actors continued to talk about and explore the event in a variety of publications: learned articles, essays, memoirs, and theses. These publications recount their author’s unique relationship to the event. Many years after the crisis, provincial and federal government ministers, in particular John Ciaccia and Harry Swain, who had taken part in negotiations with various Mohawk political actors published accounts of the conflict based on their personal experience. What were the issues associated with this territorial conflict, from the governments’ perspective? How did the political climate of the time influence their representatives’ decisions? What actions might have been taken to avoid the conflict or hasten a resolution? Their accounts described the constraints implicitly placed on the political actors who, at the time of the crisis, proceeded in accordance with state machinery. Similarly, research in the field of military studies emphasized the strategic and logistical considerations governing the denouement of the armed conflict. In Oka: A Convergence of Cultures and the Canadian Forces, historian Timothy C. Winegard looked at the legal framework and political significance of deploying Canadian troops under Aid to the Civil Power during the crisis.12 Like other works in this field, it explicitly situates the military’s role in the structure of Canadian law and statehood, revealing the blueprint of the government framework that was exposed by the siege in the summer of 1990.

While they pursued a similar process aimed at understanding the event, the publications produced by Mohawk scholars, political activists, and community members who had experienced the siege close up addressed other concerns and frames of reference. In At the Woods’ Edge: An Anthology of the History of the People of Kanehsatà:ke, Mohawk authors Brenda Katlatont Gabriel-Doxtater and Arlette Kawanatatie Van den Hende established the presence of the Kanehsata’kehró:non on the land since time immemorial. They cited the 1990 resistance as a sequel to the historical struggles against a pernicious, insistent colonization process, and presented eyewitness accounts of the siege by community members. From Kahnawake, Donna Goodleaf published the non-fiction account Entering the War Zone: A Mohawk Perspective on Resisting Invasions, in which she looked back at the summer of 1990 to locate the activities of Mohawk political actors—especially the women in charge of communications—in the framework of Mohawk and Haudenosaunee political and spiritual structures. Goodleaf honoured her community’s resistance to colonial government policies as well as its courage when faced with police and military repression.

Many other forms of inquiry have appeared in Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarly works that treat the crisis as a continuation of colonial history, discuss images and media representations of the conflict, examine the geography of the siege, study the historical struggles of the Indigenous peoples, and highlight how the Mohawk people’s political and social structures were affirmed. Nonetheless, this handful of examples from a vast number of settler and Indigenous accounts reveals certain divergences, which point to fundamental issues that were central to the conflict that blew up in 1990.

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Oka speaks to the colonial and therefore deeply conflicted nature of the settler-Indigenous coexistence on the levels of historiography, territoriality, politics, and culture. In a magnifying mirror, it reflects a continental context in which the First Peoples and settlers are, to borrow the phrasing of Chippewa media studies scholar Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, “shackled to one another in cultural conflict and political struggle.” Regarding this difficult cohabitation, Valaskakis continued: “Today, Natives and newcomers are engaged in conflicts over land and treaties, stories and stereotypes, resources and policies, all interrelated issues that arise in collapsed time and continuing discord. The threads of this discord are formed from dissimilar memories, images and meanings, each string entangled in struggles over territory, history, and ideology.”13 The crisis that exploded in summer 1990 provides a single point of focus for the multiple threads of discord that inescapably bind and separate peoples positioned on either side of a long process of colonization that is still active.

The issue of territory is of primary importance in the resistance at Kanehsatake. It implies a political dimension concerning how the very narratives that give the land’s occupation meaning and legitimacy can come into conflict. In his book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, literary scholar J. Edward Chamberlin stressed how essential it is to understand “how stories give meaning and value to the places we call home; how they bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into a world of words; how they hold us together and at the same time keep us apart.”14 The element of conflicting stories mentioned by Chamberlin has been an integral part of the history of the Americas since colonization began. From the first contact, the imperial European powers have relied on the Doctrine of Discovery and on the principle of terra nullius to carve up among themselves the territory they set foot on, dismissing the existence of the peoples who were indigenous to those lands. Institutionalization of this international jurisdictional construct reinforced and legalized the dehumanization of the Indigenous peoples and the concomitant persisting appropriation of their lands.15 The structural effects of what anthropologist and ethnographer Patrick Wolfe has termed “the settler-colonial logic of elimination”16 continue to be felt today. This is notably indicated by the loss of territory, gulfs between generations, and deep-seated injustices, along with the harsh socio-economic conditions and multifaceted violence that result from ongoing settler colonization. Contrary to the rational dimension generally associated with the law, this principle includes an undeniable element of fiction, as underscored by Chamberlin when he states that “the settlers quickly invented a myth of entitlement—a constitution, a creation story—to match their myth of discovery.”17 Canada, like other settler countries, is based on a constitution that was developed in the absence of Indigenous peoples. The constitution is shored up by a judicial and legal structure that reduces the First Peoples to inferior status and seeks their assimilation. The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, requested by the federal government following the Oka Crisis, clearly states as much.

The siege in action exposed a land dispute that had persisted at Oka-Ka...