Montreal, 1990. What had started as a peaceful blockade in the community of Kanesatake, erected by the Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) Nation to block the expansion of a golf course onto their land, became a bloody confrontation with the arrival of the Quebec Police, RCMP, and Canadian Armed Forces. 78 days later, negotiations brought the blockade to an end, and the golf course expansion was cancelled. But the larger fight, for the recognition of Kanien’kehà:kan sovereignty over their land, was not won.
Settler media has dubbed the event the Oka Crisis. Those involved or in support of the blockade prefer a different name: the Mohawk Resistance. 35 years later, we examine the history and legacy of the resistance, as a microcosm of the struggle which continues to define our nation.
The Kanien’kehà:ka struggle for sovereignty against colonial powers stretches as far back as 1761, when they petitioned British authorities for the return of land which had been stolen in 1717 by New France. These requests were repeatedly denied, and a part of Kanesatake was renamed the town of Oka by settlers. In the 1880s, the Kanien’kehà:ka of Kanesatake planted around 100,000 pine trees outside the town of Oka, which would come to be known as The Pines. In 1961, a golf course was built bordering the Pines and, subsequently, near a Kanien’kehà:ka burial site.
When an expansion of the golf course was proposed in 1989, the Kanien’kehà:ka were not consulted at all. Under the settler legal system, they still had not been granted any claim to the land after having seen their claims rejected three years prior. The expansion would not only encroach on the burial site, but also clear out the remainder of the Pines.
To prevent construction vehicles from breaking ground on the expansion, a group from Kanesatake erected a blockade in March of 1990. Despite an injunction allowing the municipality of Oka to dismantle the blockade, the resistance gained strength with support of Kanien’kehà:ka from Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne, as well as an activist group called the Mohawk Warrior Society. After another injunction which failed to dismantle the blockade, Quebec’s provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), arrived slinging tear gas and concussion grenades. In the ensuing violence, an SQ corporal was killed and the SQ retreated.
The Mohawk Resistance continued to grow, drawing support and solidarity from Indigenous communities across the country through communications networks between locals. The movement had grown bigger than the golf course, bigger than Kanesatake — it came to represent the fight for stolen land which is shared by Indigenous peoples across so-called Canada. Kanien’kehà:ka from Kahnawá:ke blocked the Honoré Mercier bridge. The RCMP and Canadian Armed Forces were soon called in to help the SQ, and forcefully dismantled the blockade. Then 14-year-old Kanien’kehá:ka girl (and future Canadian Olympian) Waneek Horn-Miller was stabbed in the chest by a soldier’s bayonet. In response to the Mercier Bridge blockade, local Quebecers engaged in racist protests, including the burning of a Kanien’kehà:ka effigy.
The resistance ended 78 days later, with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney conceding to some of the Kanien’kehá:ka demands, such as cancelling the expansion of the golf course and the purchasing of the Pines by the federal government. The government promised that no further development would proceed.
Ellen Gabriel is a Kanien’kehà:ka filmmaker, artist, and activist, who became a spokesperson for her community during the Mohawk Resistance. She recently published a book, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, detailing the complicated history and legacy of the Resistance. In an interview with The Philanthropist Journal, Gabriel gives a retrospective account of the crisis.
“It wasn’t a crisis for Oka,” she says, explaining why the moniker “Oka Crisis” is misleading. “Oka caused the crisis. We [the Kanien’kehà:ka of Kanesatake] were the ones occupied.”
Indeed, the media has framed the “crisis” as an unfortunate breakdown of Indigenous and settler relations. State-sanctioned violence against Indigenous people is portrayed as the regrettable, but inevitable consequence of resistance which is deemed too radical. As Gabriel says, the media largely portrayed Kanien’kehà:ka protesters as terrorists, “focus[ing] on the men in camo gear and ski masks holding guns.”
Pauline Wakeham’s 2012 analysis of the Mohawk Resistance draws a parallel between the resistance and Operation Desert Storm (an offensive campaign by Western powers during the Persian Gulf War), which occurred within a year of each other. To illustrate the continued anti-terrorism panic sparked by the Mohawk Resistance and violence in the Middle East, Wakeham cites a collection of letters from 2006 titled “Home-grown Terror in Caledonia, Ontario,” which compares the Haudenosaunee Grand River land dispute to the violence of the Iraq War. Bizarrely, the equating of Indigenous land-rights activism to the wars in the Middle East was not limited to posthumous media exaggeration: a staggering four thousand soldiers were sent to Kahnawà:ke and Kanesatake, a more aggressive reaction than was deployed to the concurrent Persian Gulf War. This conflation of Indigenous land-rights activism with terrorism does immense damage to the movement, and is a lasting legacy of settler institutions’ mismanagement of the Resistance.
35 years after the Mohawk Resistance, regrettably little has changed. As Ellen Gabriel puts it, “the government just learned different ways to be sneakier about extinguishing our rights to our land.” Although the 1990 golf course expansion at Kanesatake was cancelled, ownership of the land was never transferred to the Kanien’kehá:ka—it is considered an “interim land base” for the Kanien’kehà:ka to use, meaning that they have some jurisdiction over the land but no title to it. And today, 308 years after Kanesatake was first stolen, the government continues ignoring petitions to return it. The battle against the development of the Pines was won, but the larger struggle for Indigenous sovereignty over their land continues. It seems Canada had yet to learn the lesson which the Mohawk Resistance should have taught us decades ago: if we keep refusing to listen, Indigenous land defenders will make themselves heard.