Residents of Kahnawake facing eviction can breathe easy – for now.
The Kahnawake band council is putting expulsions on hold pending public consultations on who has the right to live on the Mohawk reserve.
"There’s no further action being contemplated at this time," said Joe Delaronde, a spokesperson for the band council.
The move follows an announcement Monday by Chief Carl Horn that he is giving up the membership portfolio. Horn, who spearheaded a move to evict 35 non-native residents, said he will remain on the 12-member band council to devote himself to other issues such as drug abuse.
"It’s up to the community to have their say now," Horn said.
"I want to go into these hearings as a regular member, not as a chief."
In February, the band council sent letters to 26 residents informing them that as non-Mohawks, they had no right to live in Kahnawake. The council dispatched another batch of "letters of non-entitlement" in April.
Only seven or eight recipients responded, of whom one or two have moved away from Kahnawake, Delaronde said.
Alvin Delisle, who received two eviction notices, welcomed the reprieve.
"We don’t have kids, so I don’t know what the beef is. It’s just discrimination," said Delisle, 67, whose common-law wife, Pauline, 61, is a nonnative.
Delaronde said the decision to hold off on enforcing the evictions was spurred, not by Horn’s decision to step away from the membership issue, but for legal reasons.
Under current laws, if a resident appealed an eviction notice, the case would be decided by a non-native court, he said.
"You have to appeal to an outside court, which is unacceptable to us," Delaronde said.
"We realized as time went on that if it was going to work, we needed the justice system to change," he said.
For the past year, Kahnawake has been holding sessions called the Community Decision-Making Process (CDMP) to devise a justice system that would handle many non-criminal cases within the community. The new system would hearken back to the consensus-based decision-making process that reigned in Mohawk communities in centuries past, Delaronde said.
Kahnawake already has a court, but it is restricted to minor violations like traffic tickets.
The new justice system would be better suited to rule on membership than the patchwork of laws that now cover first-nations communities, Delaronde said.
The CDMP will hold public hearings on the membership issue in the next two months. Last month, Kahnawake held twice-a-week information sessions.
According to Kahnawake’s membership law, only people with at least four Mohawk great-grandparents are entitled to live or own land on the reserve.
The membership issue has divided the community, with the Eastern Door newspaper championing the cause of residents who feel they have been unfairly targeted.
In May, many residents attended an emotional community meeting to air concerns about the evictions.
But Horn, who personally delivered many of the eviction letters, said he didn’t give up the membership portfolio because of flak from citizens.
"It was not the easiest thing to handle, but I handled it to the best of my abilities," he said.
"I didn’t take on the membership file to be popular," he added. "I took it on to protect our future generations."
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