Article first published Monday, July 12, 2010
Tom Molloy remembers flying south from the Arctic in April 1990. As one of Canada’s chief treaty negotiators, he had just helped craft the historic pact to settle a vast Inuit land claim and create the new territory of Nunavut.
On the airplane, Molloy learned that, while the Inuit were celebrating their new deal, another group of native people far to the south were building barricades around a disputed piece of woodland near the town of Oka, Que., and warning that they would "die to protect Mohawk land."
Molloy, a Saskatchewan lawyer, says he was struck by the extraordinary contrast: "In one case we had negotiated an important settlement with one [aboriginal] group. In another case an agreement hadn’t been possible, tensions were rising and people were angry and setting up blockades."
Three months later tensions at Oka exploded into the most infamous confrontation between natives and non-natives in modern Canadian history. It led to the killing of a Quebec policeman, weeks of dramatic standoffs between the army and Mohawk warriors, and episodes of ugly racial intolerance.
Today, 20 years after that long, hot summer of discontent, feelings are deeply divided about the legacy of Oka — about whether Canada and its first nations have learned the lessons of the crisis, and made peace and progress on a long list of aboriginal grievances.
"I think progress has been made," says Molloy, who also helped bring self-government to the Nisga’a in B.C.
"There have been new treaties negotiated in Quebec, the Northwest Territories and B.C. over the past 20 years. New treaty processes have also been started in Nova Scotia and the Gaspe. Nunavut has been created, there’s the residential schools [reconciliation] process. And in some communities, businesses are also negotiating with first nations to conduct resource activities on their land.
"In my view there’s much more discussion, much more trying to find solutions, than in the past."
Others look back over two decades of little more than talk. Ellen Gabriel, a Mohawk native rights activist in Kanesatake, Que., says that despite new settlements, the needs and rights of the majority of Canada’s 600,000 status Indians are still being ignored, marginalized and treated with contempt by governments across the land.
Gabriel, who was the public spokeswoman for the protesters during the Oka crisis, points to the nearly 600 outstanding federal land claims, and the many violent confrontations over disputed land and resources that came after Oka — Gustafsen Lake in B.C., the Ipperwash crisis in Ontario that took the life of native protester Dudley George, the Burnt Church crisis in New Brunswick, the dispute in Caledonia, Ont. — as proof that over the past two decades, little has changed.
"It’s a really sad reflection on Canadian democracy that the only time the government wants to come to the table and takes notice of our issues is if communities put barricades up," says Gabriel. "That should be a signal to Canadians that something is wrong with the system, that it’s broken and needs to be fixed.
"We should have a better relationship, in 2010, with the Canadian state that what we do right now."
Twenty years after her fearful summer behind the barricades, Gabriel says she is still "thankful to be alive." She remembers vividly the police raid on July 11, 1990, when a tactical team from the Quebec Police Force tried to storm the Oka blockade. "My memories of the young policemen who had weapons pointed at us, shaking and looking very scared, those kinds of things you never forget."
The raid was a failure and a tragedy, sparking a gun battle that cost the police a number of vehicles, as well as the life of 31-year-old Cpl. Marcel Lemay, who was killed, according to a coroner’s report, by a bullet fired from the Mohawk encampment.
The Mohawks were defending a small piece of pine woodland which they claimed as tribal property, but to which the neighbouring municipality of Oka had legal title, and was planning to use for the expansion of a private golf course. What had been merely a minor local dispute was transformed, after the police raid, into an international cause celebre for native rights activists.
Mohawks at nearby Kahnawake, Que., blockaded an important commuter bridge in solidarity with Kanesatake, cutting off access to Montreal for residents of its south shore suburbs. That in turn prompted episodes of racial hatred — and even rock throwing — by angry white residents against their Mohawk neighbours.
In August, at the request of the Quebec government, Ottawa sent in the army, dispatching a company of soldiers to the edge of the barricades to seal off the protesters and pressure the warriors to surrender. For weeks, Canadians watched in disbelief as images flashed across their televisions of armed and masked warriors standing nose-to-nose with Canadian soldiers, taunting the troops.
In late September, 78 days after the siege began, hundreds of warriors and protesters put down their weapons and walked out of the woods. Dozens were arrested, but none were ever identified or prosecuted for the shooting of Lemay.
The crisis briefly shattered the complacency with which Canadians regarded aboriginal complaints and grievances. It also ignited a sense of solidarity among native people across the country.
Daniel Paul, a Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq, author and historian, says he was "very gung-ho and optimistic" about the future when the government of Brian Mulroney convened a multimillion-dollar Royal Commission, co-chaired by Assembly of First Nations chief Georges Erasmus, to study Canada’s relationship with first nations and recommend a way forward.
Such hopes were short lived. By the time the commission’s report was introduced five years later — along with its main recommendation for an expanded aboriginal land base and a new order of aboriginal government — Oka was just an unhappy memory. Canadians had moved on to other matters, and the commission’s report was ignored by the government of Jean Chretien.
Gabriel says Oka wasn’t a complete loss for first nations people. If nothing else, it prompted the growth of native-run civil society organizations, and raised public awareness about the plight of aboriginal people, who for the most part still live on Canada’s social and economic margins.
But Gabriel says the root of the Oka crisis — a land ownership dispute — remains unresolved to this day. She says that makes the Kanesatake Mohawks no different than the dozens of other first nations across Canada with festering, unsolved land rights issues.
Tom Molloy agrees such land issues are a daunting problem. But he also says Oka did contribute to advances for native people: the inclusion of aboriginal leaders at first ministers’ conferences, for example, and the faster processing of federal land claims. "My view is that aboriginal lives have been improving in the years since Oka, but it’s very, very slow."
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