July 11, 1990. The SQ arrives at the Pines and demands that the Mohawk Indian natives who have put up barricades around their burial ground and occupied a large tract of land leave immediately. After hours of verbal confrontation, the Sûreté du Québec lobs volleys of canisters of tear gas and concussion grenades into the Pines and moves in. The Mohawks resist. The ensuing exchange of gunfire is inevitable. The first victim of what is later to be known as the "Oka crisis" is thirty-one-year-old Quebec policeman Corporal Marcel Lemay.

It is not clear who fired first. There has been some debate about how he was actually shot. Some say that he fell off a tree and accidentally shot himself. Others say he was shot by the Mohawk warriors, and others still say he was hit by a stray bullet, perhaps from friendly fire. If the two sides had decided to shoot to kill, Corporal Lemay would not have been the only victim of the exchange.

The other victims of the Crisis were an elderly Mohawk woman and an elderly man. The woman died of heart failure in early September; a few days before she was attacked, together with other Native elderly people and children fleeing from Kahnawake, by a stone-throwing mob. The man was poisoned by the tear gas that wafted down from the Pines on July 11. He never fully recovered and died several months later.

The Canadian summer of 1990 was indeed a hot, vulnerable summer. The Oka crisis was sparked off by the decision taken by the Municipality of Oka and Le Club de golf d’Oka Inc. to extend a nine hole golf course originally built in 1959 on land that the Mohawks claim is, and has always been, theirs. The 39 hectares of land in question include a Native cemetery and parts of a pine forest known as "the Pines". Various investigations, like those made by archaeologists in 1970 and National Geographic in 1974, confirm the validity of the Mohawk claims. However, as it had already done in 1959, the Municipality of Oka ignored the peaceful protests of the First Nations (as Native Indians are known in Canada) and went on with the proposed project. This lead the Mohawks, on March 10, 1990, to occupy parts of the wooded area to protect their burial ground and trees. The pines had been planted by the Mohawks and Algonquins in the nineteenth century, under the guidance of the Sulpician fathers.

The Mohawks' occupation of parts of their land lasted more than six months. After the initial shoot out, the police backed down and four days later were replaced by the Canadian Armed Forces. By August 14, there were more than 2500 soldiers positioned outside Kahnawake and the town of Oka. Inside the besieged area that had been vastly narrowed down by the army, there were about a hundred people, including warriors, women and children. In his book Native Peoples in Canada, published with Lilianne Ersnestine Krosenbrink-Gelissen in 1993, James S. Frideres writes about how "the armed forces began to engage in extensive psychological warfare such as sending jets at low altitude over the reserve, stationing tanks around the area and displaying a range of heavy weapons; e.g., howitzers, tanks, bulldozers." The Mohawks were armed with small weapons; some of them had AK-47s.

The Mohawks' decision to use weapons to defend their land caused a great deal of internal strife. Some of the Natives saw an armed occupation of the disputed land as the only way to protect themselves. Others in the community felt that it was not right or even wise to resort to weapons. However, according to Frideres, after the experience of the police raid of July 11, "the Native community was suddenly galvanized into a state of unity by the traumatizing effect of an outside threat. For the duration of the armed stand-off, the community appeared to be united on central issues of land rights, sovereignity and relations with non-Native society. The continued negative experience with the police and the armed forces seemed only to reinforce the reaction. Allegations of human rights violations against the police and the army have been widespread and persistent." The armed stand-off at Oka sparked Native blockades on railways, highways and bridges primarily in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

The Mohawks claim that they are a sovereign people and that their land does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Canadian government. In their book, The Warriors and Legacy of Oka, journalists York and Pindera who spend weeks with the besieged Mohawks, state that "by international standards, the Mohawks can make a strong argument for sovereignity: they were never conquered by military force; they have never agreed to give up their sovereignity; they signed treaties with European countries on a nation-to-nation basis; and they served as equal partners with Britain in military alliances."

Besides the aggression they have to put up with from the outside, the Mohawks have their own brand of internal problems. In One Nation Under the Gun: Inside the Mohawk Civil War, Rick Hornung writes about the many conflicts that have plagued them, both before and after the Oka crisis. His book sheds light on the difficulties that the Natives faced at the time in trying to present a united front. Hornung seems to dispute the validity of at least part of Frideres's claim that the Crisis united the Mohawks, for it certainly highlighted the major differences within the nation. Hornung claims that the two main factions, the pro-gambling and anti-gambling groups, have been fighting a fierce war that has done the Mohawks a great deal of harm. The conflict has cut right through the community because it is related to central issues like Mohawk identity, sovereignity and self-government. On August 8, 1989, the Mohawks voted nine to one in favour of casino gambling, but as the summer of 1990 and subsequent events show, the vote did not settle the issue within the community conclusively.

In the Oka crisis, the authorities throve on these internal differences and used them to discourage and discredit the militant Mohawks and their representatives and ultimately force them "peacefully" out of the Pines. The authorities' strategy of "divide and rule", the great psychological pressure they subjected the besieged Natives to, and the inability of the Mohawk community to stick together from start to finish, lead to what York and Pindera have called the "dénouement" (final resolution), or what Hornung has described as the "dismal end to the stand-off": on Wednesday, September 26, Mohawk Warriors, women and children left the Treatment Centre, ending the 78-day stand-off.

At the height of the Oka crisis, the federal government, through its Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, went back on its initial decision not to interfere in Quebec's internal affairs: it purchased the disputed land for $5.2 million and drew up plans to turn it over to the Mohawks. Ottawa also compensated the municipality of Oka financially for loss of income from the purchased land. In this sense, the government has "attempted", at least in part, "to address one of the root causes of the Mohawk land dispute."

Despite the relatively peaceful resolution to the crisis and the five years that have since elapsed, many important issues have still to be addressed, foremost of all the rights, role and standing of the First Nations in Canada today. Moreover, a number of questions about the government's tactics during the stand-off itself still remain unanswered. Canada's credibility as a free and democratic nation was seriously undermined by the way it treated one of its founding nations.

During the crisis, the Canadian authorities confronting the Mohawks broke promises and clamped down heavily on the press. Frideres notes that "a number of well-respected international agencies launched their own inquiries into the Oka affair ... In the autumn of 1990, a lawyer from Amnesty International came to Quebec to interview Mohawks who said they had been tortured with burning cigarettes by the Quebec police after they were arrested."

On September 9, 1990 three or perhaps four soldiers attacked one of the besieged Natives, forty year old Randy "Spudwrench" Horne, and beat him up so badly that they almost killed him. The Mohawks requested permission to have him taken to hospital. Despite the promises of Major Alain Tremblay that Spudwrench would be allowed to rejoin his companions once he recovered, "he was not permitted to return to the Treatment Centre. On the morning of September 12, he was arrested by the provincial police on five charges, including possession of a dangerous weapon and rioting."

Relations between the authorities and the press were particularly bad. On Thursday August 2, the police seized all footage of the July 11th confrontation from television stations. Further restrictions on the media, especially those imposed on journalists encamped with the besieged warriors (who were prohibited from sending film back to their newsrooms and receiving personal supplies from their employers), compelled human rights groups in the United States and Britain to send letters of protest to the Canadian authorities. The Canadian Association of Journalists later described the military censorship as "one of the worst attacks ever on the Canadian public’s right to know."

Despite the army's restrictions, the news of human rights violations was still getting out, and this prompted the European Parliament to pass a series of resolutions condemning Canada and Quebec for violating an agreement signed on August 12 by the warring parties concerning international observers and human rights. The vice-president of the Parliament, Wilfried Telkamper, wrote a letter to Brian Mulroney on September 14 to protest the violations of human rights. 'The cut-off of the telephone lines is an unjustified attempt to turn away international attendance and to resolve this conflict without any witnesses,' he wrote.

In their book York and Pindera write about how the police beat up some of the Mohawks after they walked out of the Pines, how "three journalists who had witnessed the walkout were handcuffed and questioned for hours by the police that same night", and how one of them was kicked and punched. They also describe how lawyers for the Mohawks were denied the right to assist their clients during interrogations.

Five warm summers, each with its fair share of protests and stand-offs between the First Nations and the authorities, have passed, and yet the serious issues that provoked the Oka crisis have not been resolved. "The psychological victory achieved by the federal government ... has prevented Native people from further expressing their concern and frustration over land claims." The federal authorities claim that "Canadians are recognizing that Native people must assume more responsibilities for their own affairs, setting their own priorities and determining their own programs." And yet, the hot summer of 1990, wedged between the long and bitterly cold Canadian winters, gives what Frideres calls "ample proof" that Canada is "not yet ready to act" in favour of its founding nations.

Ó Adrian Grima (11 September, 1995)

(unpublished)