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From armed standoff to peaceful standstill >> Eight years after the Oka crisis, tensions still lurk beneath the surface. Can Kanesatake natives and Oka villagers get along?
by PHILIP PREVILLE
The march was peaceful, but it was still an in-your-face type of commemoration: a gesture of defiance and distrust right outside people's doors, an attempt to stare people into shame. "Mayor Ouellet leaves town every July 11," said Mohawk Ellen Gabriel, the warriors' spokesperson during the 1990 crisis, when the march stopped at his empty house. "But for him to come back and be told his house has been targeted, that's good enough for me." Regardless of how the mayor may feel about all this, Oka residents don't appear to be particularly shamed. Many stood on their front porches, watching the march go by as if it were a parade. "I don't give it that much thought," said Rémi, a 22-year-old resident of Oka. "I was 14 at the time of the crisis, and it was a total trip--I had the time of my life," he says, referring to the guns and the tanks and the soldiers and all the other things 14-year-olds think are cool. Supporters of the native-solidarity movement are no doubt tempted to respond to Rémi's attitude with indignation. If so, they're not learning the lesson Rémi embodies: if someone living in Oka can actually live through the crisis and witness eight years' worth of commemorative marches and still not get the point, then maybe it's the Mohawks who aren't getting their message across properly. No more Peltier, no more SQ A lot has changed in the eight years since the standoff. Jerry Peltier was ousted last year as Grand Chief and replaced by James Gabriel (cousin to Ellen), who is more respected by the reserve's traditional and warrior groups. Gabriel was re-elected in May; Peltier tried to have the vote results disqualified, but Ottawa refused his appeal. More significantly, the SQ are now off the reserve. Since May 1997, they've been replaced by the Kanesatake Mohawk Police; officers were recruited from within the community and trained at the Nicolet academy. Mohawk Police Chief Barry Commando reports to a local five-member police commission. One year later, accounts differ on the force and its relations with the neighbouring SQ detachment. "There's been a marked difference within the community," says Chief Gabriel. "There was a lot of confrontation with the SQ. In that respect, things have calmed down." Prior to the local force, police relations had become so bad that SQ cruisers would speed through the reserve while making their rounds. They would only stop on the reserve in situations of dire emergency. "We have little interaction with the SQ," says Mohawk Police officer Robert Bonspiel. "There's no tension--they accept the fact that we're here." Public relations officials with the SQ, however, refused to speak about the matter; the Mirror was instructed to contact the Mohawk police for all comments. Land claims unresolved Perhaps most importantly, the Mohawks' land claims--the issue that led to the standoff in the first place--still haven't been resolved. It's partly because of the land-claims issue that reserve residents tossed former chief Peltier out on his ear. "We're not as far along on the land-claims issue as we should be," says new Chief James Gabriel. "A lot of time was wasted." Federal Indian Affairs spokesperson Hélène Philippe would only say that negotiations are "ongoing"--a word that seems to stick in Chief Gabriel's craw. "Since 1990, the clock has been ticking down. The further we get from the crisis, the less motivation there is to resolve our claims." Judging from the Oka residents' apathetic response to the march through town, Chief Gabriel has hit the nail on the head. The march is part of the Kanesatake annual Pow-Wow, attended by many Montrealers but comparatively few Oka villagers. Procession-watchers noticed that the demonstration includes less and less people from the reserve, and more and more from outside the community. Ellen Gabriel describes the Pow-Wow as "an invitation to share our culture," and defends the march as "taking something that was very negative and turning it into something positive. We haven't exactly seen any outstretched hands from the village since 1990." True. But you can hardly blame the residents of Oka for not joining a march against themselves.
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Last Saturday, July 11, just as they have done on July 11 of every year since 1991, residents of the Kanesatake reserve and their supporters marched through the streets of Oka. They marched to the golf course, whose proposed expansion had sparked the 1990 armed standoff now known as the Oka Crisis, and planted the Mohawk flag into the hole on the ninth green. The procession then made its way into town, stopping in front of the mayor's home, then on to city hall, before returning to the reserve.