THE DRAMA BEGAN IN JUNE 1990 IN WIN-
nipeg, the capital city of the province of Manitoba.
A fluke of history put Elijah Harper, an Ojibway politician
who is one of Canada’s few Indian parliamentarians, in a
position to kill an elaborate constitutional deal known as
the Meech Lake Accord. The accord was meant to secure
the Quebec government’s acceptance of the 1982 Cana-
dian constitution, a document which severed Great
Britain’s last formal legal hold on the country. In return,
Quebec would be recognized as a “distinct society.”
Indigenous people were completely excluded from the
negotiations leading up to the deal, as well as from the
constitutional definition of Canada drafted by the accord’s
authors. As in virtually all countries dominated by non-
indigenous settlers, aboriginal people in Canada have
been marginalized in most facets of the country’s eco-
nomic and political life. (The term “aboriginal” is used in
Canada to describe its original peoples, including Indian,
Inuit and Metis.) At the same time, they are vastly
overrepresented in the jails, the unemployment lines, the
detoxification centers and the morgues.
By standing so firmly against the accord, Harper
became an instant hero among the million or so indig-
enous people in Canada. Thousands of them gathered at
the legislative grounds in Winnipeg to witness and cel-
ebrate the countdown to the accord’s demise.
Harper also became a hero for many English-speaking
Canadians who wanted to register a protest against the
perceived abuse of power by Prime Minister Brian Mul-
roney and his closest political allies in the Quebec provin-
cial government. The circumstances surrounding the death
of the Meech Lake Accord enormously raised the profile
of aboriginal people. At the same time, however, their
issues were thrust into the midst of a growing schism
between the politically cohesive French-speaking com-
munity in Quebec and the eclectic mix of Canadians who
communicate primarily in English.
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Tony Hall teaches Native American Studies at the
University of Lethbridge in the province of Alberta.
34Less than three weeks after the death of the Meech
Lake Accord, the focus of the controversy shifted to the
town of Oka, Quebec, where the town council was intent
on expanding a golf course into a stand of pines that
surrounds a sacred Mohawk cemetery.’ On July 11 the
Quebec provincial police attacked a small barricade the
Kanesatake Mohawks had built to symbolize their resis-
tance. A gun battle ensued. When the tear gas cleared, a
police officer lay dead, a bullet in his chest.
Within hours the neighboring Mohawks of Kahnawake
blocked the Mercier Bridge, a major thoroughfare in
greater Montreal, which runs through Kahnawake. Over
the next few weeks, inconvenienced commuters mounted
angry demonstrations where Indians were burned in ef-
figy. Leading the Mohawk resistance at Oka and
Kahnawake were members of the Mohawk Warrior Soci-
ety, a paramilitary association financed in partby Mohawk
gambling establishments in New York state.
Considerable suspicion still exists that the ferocity of
the original police attack on the Mohawk barricade was
linked to the role native people played in killing the
Meech Lake Accord. It was as if Quebec authorities were
sending a signal that the quest for aboriginal self-determi-
nation would not be allowed to impede the parallel quest
for self-determination by the French-speaking Qu6becois.
While the site of a proposed golf course stood at the
forefront of this clash of interests, in the background stood
a growing controversy over the right of the Quebec
government to expand a huge hydroelectric project into
the hunting ground of the Cree and Inuit people who
predominate in the northeastern part of the province.
These native people oppose this centerpiece of Premier
Robert Bourassa’s vision of Quebec’s economic future as
a major exporter of electricity, citing the ecological dev-
astation that would result. For the Qu6becois, dam build-
ing has become a veritable symbol of their efforts to carve
out a more independent role for themselves as a strong,
economically self-sufficient society.
P ASSIONS AROUSED AT OKA AND KAHNA-
wake spread like wildfire across the country. Al-
though there was considerable criticism of the tactics of
the Mohawk Warriors even among native people, many
readily identified with the struggle to protect dwindling
Indian lands from outside developers. Indian groups block-
aded several key transportation routes in British Colum-
bia, a province where Indian land title has never been
addressed through treaty negotiations. In a part of north-
ern Ontario where Indian land title remains similarly
unaddressed, Ojibway bands at Mobert and Long Lake
Reserve 58 set up protest camps blocking both transcon-
tinental rail lines. In southern Ontario hydro lines were
felled. In southern Alberta members of the Peigan
Lonefighters Society registered their protest against a
massive dam on the Oldman River being rushed to comple-
tion without the required federal environmental assess-
ment. The Lonefighters proceeded to dig a mile-long
ditch on their reserve around an irrigation weir, rendering
useless the irrigation dam upstream from their commu-
nity.
The barricade syndrome continued to spread. Images
of dozens of brief road blockades, including in downtown
Calgary and Vancouver, flashed across the nation’s TV
screens. Unprecedented numbers of non-natives got in-
volved in support of aboriginal rights. Peace camps were
established at the legislatures of several provincial capi-
tals, including Toronto and Winnipeg. Prayer vigils were
held as native and non-native people used all the power at
their command to avoid a tragic outcome for the em-
battled Mohawks at Oka and Kahnawake.
The trepidation was well founded. The immediate
response of the Quebec provincial police to the crisis was
to block off food and medical supplies to the Mohawks. In
the early stages of the standoff, police also tried to control
the movement of journalists and seize their exposed film.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan distributed literature at the
anti-Indian protests near the Mercier Bridge.
Meanwhile, an eerie silence descended on government
leaders in Ottawa and Quebec City. The prime minister
went into virtual hiding at his summer retreat in the
Gatineau Hills. Public pronouncements from federal offi-
cials focused almost exclusively on the criminal records
of some of the Mohawk leaders, hardly a surprising
revelation in a country where a young Indian has a far
greater chance of going to jail than to college. 2
Without calling parliament into emergency session, in
August the prime minister invoked key sections of the
National Defense Act to place units of the Canadian army
under the command of the Quebec government. As 20
years earlier, when revolutionary Quebec separatists kid-
napped several officials, Canadian army tanks began
rolling in the vicinity of Montreal. The eventual result was
that the Mohawks of Kahnawake voluntarily removed
their blockade on the Mercier Bridge, but not before a
cavalcade of escaping Indian elders, women and children
was savagely stoned by a large vigilante mob as Quebec
provincial police looked on. A month laterthe lastMohawk
holdouts at Oka voluntarily destroyed their weapons and
left their stronghold to be arrested
HE ROAD TO OKA AND TO ELIJAH HARP-
er’s stand has many branches. Canada inherited
from the British government a relatively firm constitu-
tional basis for the recognition of aboriginal rights. Alli-
ances with Indian groups, sometimes codified in treaties,
had been an important geopolitical necessity in asserting
the Crown’s jurisdiction against the competing claims of
the United States. To this day the Inuit are among the most
important upholders of the flag of Canadian sovereignty
in the high arctic. Canada’s moves toward independence
over the past twenty years, however, have imperiled the
old constitutional structures that recognized aboriginal
rights. Whenever non-indigenous colonials take over
increased powers of self-government, they almost invari-
ably use their new-found liberty to undermine the legal
status of indigenous societies.?
British parliamentarians foresaw the problems ahead
when they debated in 1981 the act for Canada’s constitu-
tional independence. Fully 27 of 30 hours of debate in the
British House of Commons on the Canada Act were
devoted to indigenous issues. The dire prophesies came
true between 1983 and 1987 when Canada’s prime min-
ister and ten provincial premiers failed at four constitu-
tional conferences to agree on any basic principles of
aboriginal self-government. The fifth constitutional con-
ference took place at Meech Lake. Virtually overnight
Canada’s first ministers agreed to extend to the people of
Quebec precisely the kind of powers that aboriginal
people had been seeking in order to preserve and promote
the identities of their own distinct societies. A double
standard of gross proportions was revealed.
The failure to make progress on the constitutional front
was matched by the failure of the political process to
resolve aboriginal land claims. A pivotal Supreme Court
decision in 1973 led to the creation of an administrative
mechanism for negotiating land disputes between federal,
provincial and indigenous authorities. After almost two
decades, however, that process remained caught in iner-
tia, stymied by provincial governments’ jealous defense
of their claims over natural resources. There was little
incentive for federal authorities to counter such provin-
cial prerogatives on behalf of aboriginal peoples. This
became especially evident during the early years of Brian
Mulroney’s administration when his main preoccupation
was to provide U.S. corporations with unfettered access to
Canadian natural resources in order to clinch a free-trade
treaty with the United States.
The native leadership grew increasingly frustrated as
the majority of their people struggled with abysmal hard-
ship. “Canada, we have a warning for you,” George
Erasmus, then national chief of the Assembly of First
Nations (AFN), told a broad gathering of his constituents
in the summer of 1988. “We want to let you know that
you’re playing with fire. We may be the last generation of
leaders who is prepared to sit down and peacefully nego-
tiate our concerns with you. Canada, if you do not deal
with this generation of leaders, then we cannot promise
you are going to like the kind of violent political action
that we can just about guarantee the next generation is
going to bring.”
The AFN, created in 1980 by Indian leaders to deal
with the Canadian government’s push to patriate the
constitution, represents one of the central paradoxes of
Indian life. While the organization works for self-deter-
36 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
1
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
i
36mination, it is composed of registered Indians, whose
governance is structured by Canada’s Indian Act. The
Indian Act was set in place during the Victorian era to
replace traditional forms of Indian decision-making with
a hierarchical edifice of authority flowing from the fed-
eral Ministry of Indian Affairs.
One element of indigenous frustration vented during
the Indian summer of 1990 was directed at those native
people who were perceived to be supporters of the insti-
tutional complex created by the Indian Act. The Mohawk
Warriors led the way with their claim to represent an
authority not rooted in the federal government, but rather
in the ancient constitution of their own Iroquois Confed-
eracy. The Warriors’ flirtation with the operation of
gambling casinos was justified as a way of building native
institutions outside the framework of federal control.
Those who renounce the legitimacy of the Indian Act
and all it represents tend to look to new sources of
leadership. Many look to an emerging cadre of Indian
strategists who learned to fight the white man’s system in
the toughest school of all, the Canadian prison system.
Canada is thus beginning to reap the bitter harvest of a
situation where a native person is about ten times more
likely to be incarcerated than the rest of the population. 5
The tensions between those working for change from
within the Indian Act structures and those who deny the
very legitimacy of those structures remained an undercur-
rent in the 1990 protests. But shared animosity towards
the governments of Canada and its provinces was strong
enough to generate a fair degree of solidarity. It remains
to be seen whether the new AFN national chief, Ovide
Mercredi, will be able to maintain that somewhat tenuous
unity.
M ERCREDI IS A SOFT-SPOKEN BUT DETER-
mined Cree lawyer in his mid-forties who came to
prominence as a close adviser to Elijah Harper in his
successful blockage of the Meech Lake Accord. Today he
stands on a more solid political base than any other native
leader in Canada since the early nineteenth century, when
Tecumseh led a powerful Indian confederacy intent on
fighting off the Americans to found a secure Indian state
west of the Ohio River.” One view holds that the Canadian
government needs Mercredi’s cooperation to build a new
constitutional consensus. Mercredi has met with the prime
minister and will probably play a role comparable to that
of a provincial premier in the round of constitutional
negotiations that lies ahead.
Another victor to emerge from the Indian summer of
1990 was social democrat Bob Rae of the New Demo-
cratic Party (NDP), who was elected premier of Ontario in
September in the wake of the protests. One of his early
acts in office was to recognize aboriginal self-government
as an inherent right. This position acknowledges that the
First Nations draw their authority for self-determination
from sources which pre-exist the legal structures of Canada.
NDP governments were elected in Saskatchewan and
VOLUME XXV. NUMBFIR 3 (DI)ECEMIR 1991)
British Columbia in October of this year and may soon
follow Ontario’s lead.
Though unprecedented, the election of three NDP
provincial governments does not necessary mark a new
era of tolerance and pluralism in Canada. Reactionary
elements rallying behind the Bloc Qu6becois seem to
have taken hold of the movement for an independent
Quebec. 7 Polls indicate they may do well in the next
federal election. Similarly, the populist Reform Party
whose roots lie in Alberta has given a political home for
anti-French, anti-Indian, anti-ethnic bigotry.” Mulroney’ s
Progressive Conservative Party is working hard to pre-
empt this challenge from the Right. In the white reaction
to native assertiveness during the summer of 1990, the
face of Canadian fascism showed itself briefly but clearly.
Who knows if the genie can be put back in the bottle?
A referendum on Quebec’s independence looms some-
time in 1992. To lure the country away from partition, the
federal government has designed a new constitutional
proposal, one which Ovide Mercredi has already rejected
as inadequate. Bob Rae will almost certainly be one of
Mercredi’s prime allies in the quest to have aboriginal
self-government recognized in the Canadian constitution
as an inherent right. The ability of Canadians to meet this
challenge will be one of the major tests of whether our
country will be renewed or broken in 1992.
Indian Summer, Canadian Winter
1. For a detailed account, see G. York and L. Pindera,People ofthe Pines:
The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka (Toronto: Little, Brown Canada, 1991).
2. A.C. Hamilton and C.M. Sinclair, The Justice System and Aboriginal
People: Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba (Winnipeg:
Queen’s Printer of the Government of Manitoba, 1991).
3. Ironically, the Canadian army proved to be a moderating influence. The
hawks in the Quebec and federal cabinets kept demanding military action to
remove the heavily guarded blockades on the Mercier Bridge and seize huge
arsenals allegedly hidden at Kahnawake. The generals simply refused to
comply with these commands, aware that a bloodbath would have resulted. The
army even went to the point of creating the illusion of an airlift out of
Kahnawake to convince the hawks that a major cache of Mohawk weaponry
had been removed. See York and Pindera, People a1the Pines, pp. 333-334.
4. See Menno Boldt and J. Anthony Long (eds.), The Quest for Justice:
Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1985); Tony Hall, “What Are We? Chopped Liver? Aboriginal Affairs
in the Constitutional Politics ofCanada in the 1980’s” in Michael Behiels (ed.),
The Meech Lake Primer: Conflicting Views ofthe 1987 ConstitutionalAccord
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1989).
5. Hamilton and Sinclair, The Justice System.
6. Tecumseh died in combat at Moraviantown in 1813, in the War of I 8 12,
fighting aginst the Long Knives (K’chimokman)–the Americans.
7. The Bloc Qu6becois represents the movementforQuebec independence
at the federal level. The Parti Qudbecois runs candidates for the provincial
legislature (assemblee nationale).
8. TheReformParly isgaining adherents inevery province and is expected
to run candidates throughout Canada, except Quebec.
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