I tried to go to the barricades, or at least near them. Even in the middle of the crisis, it was clear that something big was happening and that we would hear of it for years to come. Just after aboriginal peoples had played a prominent role in the demise of the Meech Lake accord, Canadians watched the 1990 standoff at Oka and knew that a new political challenge was arising. I wanted to see for myself what it might look like, this clash over a golf course and real estate development on land claimed by the Mohawk of Kanesatake. The heavy police presence at the site was not surprising, but what I was not prepared for was an exclusion zone that must have been a hundred square kilometres. The whole region was roadblocked like that small U.S. town that has been hit by some super-lethal virus in a Stephen King novel: if the disease is allowed to spread, say goodbye to the whole great country. Keeping the thing contained was a matter of survival.
Twenty years later, the...
Claude Denis is a professor at the School of Political Studies and the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity (Broadview Press, 1997), and of many articles on the relationship between indigenous peoples and Canada.
Advertisement
Advertisement