Together, this group formed a Native association and was soon engaged in battle with the university itself. The engineering students ran a satirical newspaper that in one week published nothing but photographs taken of drunken Natives in downtown Winnipeg—and the association immediately demanded an apology. The young Natives got it, but fell short when they set out to impeach the university president for allowing it to happen. Still, they were a force to be reckoned with, and would remain so for years.
One winter in the late 1960s the group ran into a blizzard driving home from the University of Brandon, where they’d gone to organize a similar organization for its Aboriginal students. Cars and trucks were in ditches. The others wanted to quit, but Mercredi and Harper refused and took turns running out in front of the headlights so that the driver could stay on the pavement. The police and stranded truckers yelled at them to give up, but they believed that if they just kept plugging away eventually the storm would lift. They ran for thirty kilometres before it did lift, but they made it when no one else had managed.
The sheer stubbornness of that bond would pay off twenty-two years later when they hit another bad patch.
Three years before they gathered in Winnipeg, the Meech Lake Accord had been passed in secret by eleven first ministers who couldn’t spare a thought for Aboriginals and their standing in the Constitution. Native leaders—First Nations, Inuit, and Métis—had fought against this omission for three years without success. A parliamentary committee looking into the accord had recommended that it be opened for their inclusion. Various politicians, including all three Manitoba party leaders, had called for a change to accommodate Aboriginals, but nothing had been done.
The official contention of the Prime Minister’s Office and its legal minions was that the accord held no “egregious” errors and could not, and must not, be opened under any account. The door was slammed.
The same gang that had gone up against the University of Manitoba in the 1960s was now going up against the federal government. But they were no longer kids. Mercredi was a lawyer and deputy chief of the Assembly of First Nations. Moses Okimaw was a lawyer. Phil Fontaine was the head chief of the province of Manitoba. But only Elijah had the clout to actually do anything about it.
Elijah Harper had gone home without his degree. He had worked and then become chief of his band. He’d been one of the Canadian chiefs who had travelled to London to ask the Queen to ensure that Aboriginals be treated fairly if the Constitution was repatriated, as the Trudeau government intended to do. The Queen did nothing.
In 1981 Harper became the first treaty Indian to be elected to the provincial legislature. He was elected again in 1982 and served briefly in Howard Pawley’s cabinet. That same year he received a formal invitation to attend the Parliament Hill ceremony when the Queen came to Ottawa to sign the Constitution Act into law. He refused to go.
It was not an illustrious political career for Elijah Harper. He got in trouble instantly when, on election night, a man with no patience for Harper’s noisy victory party tried to put his fist through the new member’s nose. He got in financial trouble. He was arrested for failing to take a Breathalyzer test. His marriage faltered. His four children suffered. His party was tossed out of office, though he held his own seat.
But then, around the beginning of the Meech Lake discussions, Harper began to pull himself together. He quit drinking and started planning how he might somehow stymie this runaway train called Meech. Georges Erasmus, then also with the AFN, says that Harper had been talking about this very moment for the past two years, though no one thought it would ever prove as controversial and as dramatic.
The moment Harper saw the full details of the final Ottawa deal he called his old friend Gordon Mackintosh, now a lawyer but once clerk of the legislature. A procedural expert, Mackintosh helped refine Harper’s motion to block the deal. They discovered, much to their delight, that the Gary Filmon government had incorrectly introduced the Meech Lake motion, meaning they’d have to reintroduce it until the chamber unanimously agreed to consider it or until time ran out, whichever came first.
For all those days in June that Elijah Harper kept saying “No, Mr. Speaker,” he held an eagle feather in his right hand. It became the symbol of his defiance, a feather that could appear in the backdrop of an editorial cartoon and instantly remind readers that, somewhere out in Manitoba, one lone “Indian” just might have the power to derail the whole thing.
The feather had been found by Elijah’s older brother Saul, a trapper who quietly follows the traditional ways. Saul believed he was being told to walk out to a clearing not far from his home in Red Sucker Lake. When he got there the eagle feather was lying in the very centre of the clearing. He gave the feather to his younger brother Darryl, who took it down to Winnipeg, where he gave it to Elijah for strength to get through this difficult month.
In the middle of this pivotal final week, the Red Sucker Lake band went back to the clearing where Saul had found the feather. There they held hands and formed a circle while asking the Maker to give Elijah strength.
“Look,” Chief John Harper, a cousin, cried, pointing to the sky. High above, circling slowly in the drafts, was an eagle.
“The eagle is on Elijah’s side,” Chief John Harper told the gathering. “He’s going to win.”
While we were sitting in the hotel suite talking, Darryl Harper began flipping through the Bible that Elijah had been reading and opened it to the Book of Isaiah, chapter 40. He read the section quietly to himself, then aloud to everyone gathered there.
Though youths grow weary and tired,
And vigorous young men stumble badly,
Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary.
Later that long night, when Elijah Harper finally decided to try to get a little sleep before the day of decision, he took the eagle feather, placed it over these words, then closed the Bible.
The following day, at 12:24 p.m. Manitoba time, the feather was once again in his right hand as the motion was made and Elijah Harper killed the Meech Lake Accord with a single word.
“No.”
LESS THAN THREE WEEKS LATER, on June 11, 1990, more than a hundred Sûreté du Québec officers, armed with assault rifles, concussion grenades, and tear gas, took up positions around a Native blockade near Oka, Quebec, a village until then known for the excellent local cheeses sold by the Oblate brothers’ religious order.
The blockade—mostly downed trees and bulldozed dirt—had stood since March without incident. It had been set up by the Mohawks of Kanesatake, a reserve bordering the picturesque tourist village just to the west of the city of Montreal. The Mohawks were against the expansion of the local golf course, which they said was going to turn Native sacred burial ground into tees and greens and cart paths.
Among those Natives buried in the little cemetery was Kanawatiron, also known as Joseph Gabriel. In 1911 Kanawatiron had been part of a group of forty Iroquois daring to protest against a railway being built across their land. Armed with sticks, axes, and a few shotguns and revolvers, they blocked the railroad navvies from further construction. A peaceful settlement was reached.
The Mohawks of this part of the country had risen up against white oppression several times before. Joseph Swan, a Mohawk who was sent to France to study for the priesthood, returned to lead his people against white laws, which at one point in the nineteenth century included a ban on gathering firewood. White villagers insisted the wood be for their use only. There had often been skirmishes, but real violence was rare.
This time, however, there would be no peaceful outcome. The municipality had petitioned Quebec’s Superior Court and the court had ruled that the blockade over the golf course must come down. When the Mohawks refused, the mayor of Oka asked the Sûreté, the provincial police, to enforce the injunction.
The police
surrounded the nervous protesters near the top of the hills where the white pines stand tallest. Someone fired first—it has always been disputed just who—and almost instantly there was smoke and screaming and chaos and more shots ringing out. When it was all over, one officer, Corporal Marcel Lemay, was dead of a rifle wound. The police retreated, leaving behind cars that were burned and trashed and overturned by the furious Natives.
The blockade, the Mohawks defiantly declared, was not coming down.
The standoff continued on into summer. A second blockade went up on the Mercier Bridge over the St. Lawrence, erected by Natives on the nearby Kahnawake reserve out of sympathy for the Oka Natives. The obstruction infuriated commuters from the south shore trying to get into and out of Montreal and was marred by violence, mostly thrown bottles and stones. The tension mounted daily on Premier Robert Bourassa until mid-August, when he asked for military backup to put an end to the crisis.
It marked the first time Canadian soldiers had come up against civilians since the October Crisis of 1970. Tensions ran even higher once the soldiers arrived. The Mohawks gave no indication of backing down, no matter how much military might showed up.
Given that Native power had only weeks before brought down the Meech Lake Accord, there was a new swagger to Aboriginal activists. There was something about the new leadership, about angry, determined young Aboriginals, that seemed to catch the rest of the country off guard.
Two years earlier, Georges Erasmus, then Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, had delivered a warning about land claims and Native rights, telling the country: “We want to let you know that you are dealing with fire. We say, Canada, deal with us today because our militant leaders are already born. We cannot promise that you are going to like the kind of violent political action we can just about guarantee the next generation is going to bring to our reserves.”
Such talk had often been heard before, but this was the first time in memory that words were followed by action. “I never thought it would go so far,” said John Ciaccia, provincial minister of Native Affairs. “Nothing had prepared me for what would happen.”
The army moved in on August 14, the blockade grew larger, and a delicate standoff began that would run through the remainder of that hot summer. Along with other reporters, I was sent down from Ottawa by the Citizen. One reporter, Ian MacLeod, managed to get behind the barriers before the army moved in and would remain there, mostly sleeping in his car, for the full standoff. The rest of us lumbered down the 417 and Quebec route 40 in a forty-two-foot custom camper trailer and set up in an Oka-area campground. We’d spend our days poking around the blockade, attending army briefings, making calls to Natives inside the blockade, and then heading back to the campground to barbeque lamb chops and drink beer.
Somehow, given that the Canadian army had been called out over a golf course, it seemed to make sense.
Our camper wasn’t the only thing that seemed surreal. Television no longer just covered the news, it made the news. Oka came along just as all-news channels were coming into Canadian homes. CBC’s Newsworld was at Oka twenty-four hours a day, often broadcasting raw footage that both fascinated and shocked.
Oka became, in large part, a War by Scrum. The tough-talking camouflaged Natives—complete with facemasks, rifles and knives, and code names like “Lasagna”—severely rattled the country. The young, fresh-faced soldier, jaw jutting out defiantly, standing face to face with the fierce-looking, camouflaged “Warrior” became the image that defined that summer of 1990. Inspired by Harper’s victory, Natives across the country took up the Oka cause.
One day I ran into Frank and Rick Thomas, who had decided to walk down St-Michel, Oka’s main street, just to get a look at the famous barricade. Rick, having asked for a few days off from his job at a basket works in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, had jumped into his old 1977 Chrysler and driven three hundred kilometres out of his way to pick up his cousin Frank from the Shubenacadie Reserve in Nova Scotia. They’d driven through the night to reach Oka.
“It all begins with Elijah Harper,” Frank Thomas said in his “Custer Had It Coming” cap.
“Someone had to take a stand for us,” added Rick. “After what happened over Meech Lake every Indian in the country knew we could stand together and win. We knew it in our hearts.”
John Ciaccia later told the CBC that bringing in the army was precisely what the Oka Warriors wanted, “because then they could say they were fighting nation against nation.” If so, they seemed to belong to two different planets. One side said the battle was about rights and sovereignty; the other side said it was really about the Natives’ right to sell untaxed cigarettes. One side thought themselves warriors; the other side called them criminals.
To appreciate the enormous contradictions so often at work in this assemblage called Canada, consider that on one side of the roadblock, the white side, Joseph Brant would be seen as the greatest Native hero in Canadian history. He is the Mohawk chief to whom this country has erected statues, named towns after, and honoured in school textbooks as the wise chief who stood by the British during the American Revolution and eventually led his people to peace and prosperity on the Six Nations land in southwestern Ontario. On the other side of the Oka roadblock, the Native side, Joseph Brant would be known as Thayendanegea, the opportunist who sold out his people’s lands in New York state and then the Ohio Valley, who tricked his followers onto a reserve where he himself refused to live, and who later killed his own son who had attacked him as a traitor.
Two weeks after the army arrived, the barricade on the Mercier Bridge came down. But not until September 26, two and a half months after the gun battle on the hill, did the Warriors surrender. The leaders were arrested and chainsaws and front-end loaders moved in to take down the infamous barricade.
The blockade was down. But Oka was not yet over.
IF MEECH LAKE LED directly to the formation of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, then the Oka standoff can be credited with bringing about the Royal Commission on Aboriginals. The commission had been promised by the Mulroney government but then rescinded, and now it was again in the works. Georges Erasmus was to be one of its two chairs and the other would be Justice René Dussault. Aboriginal leaders were most encouraged.
The commission would meet across the country and take five years to complete its report. It would eventually cost $51.2 million—a figure that outraged the Canadian media—and be tabled in the late fall of 1996 under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. There were high hopes, as Chrétien had once been a sympathetic minister of Indian Affairs.
The final four-thousand-page report was all about change. Its 440 recommendations included the creation of an Aboriginal parliament, the formation of a completely independent tribunal to rule on land claims, and the establishment of an “adequate land base” for the most forgotten of the forgotten people, the Métis. Erasmus believed it would give Natives equal-nation status within Canada, providing full self-government to approximately sixty Aboriginal nations with jurisdiction over a wide range of powers.
Aboriginals, Erasmus said, would be citizens both of their own nation and of Canada. Federal government obligations would be directed to these nations, not individuals, and Ottawa would provide for each nation its own economic base within Confederation. The critics said it would be impossibly costly and would only increase most Aboriginals’ reliance on federal funds. Others said the Aboriginal parliament would never work and that if Natives were to be given “special status,” what about Quebec? What about what had been promised in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords?
In the end, the Royal Commission on Aboriginals report was placed side by side on the same shelf as Keith Spicer’s report on the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future.
EXACTLY NINE YEARS after the standoff began, I returned to Oka to see what, if anything, had changed. It was a dull July day, raining off and on. I went up the hill where the tall white pines still stand and wandered through the little grave
yard that had started the fight. For those who knew where to look, bullet marks remained in the trees and in the boards of the flaking lacrosse box.
The grave of Leroy Gabriel, Warrior, was in the very ground that was to have become a golf course, but instead of a ball washer there was an antler stuck into the grass. From the antler hung a small carved eagle, symbol of wisdom, of knowledge, of truth—and high above, hammered into a pair of magnificent white pines, two tattered warrior flags swung softly in the eerie still of a wet, muggy day.
Leroy Gabriel stood with “Lasagna” and “Spudwrench” and several dozen other Warriors who kept their faces behind bandanas and their weapons visible to all as they stared down the hill at the Canadian army for more than two months. It was as close to civil war as this peaceful country has come in modern times.
The Mohawk held the ground that was to be turned into a golf course as sacred. They said that for more than a hundred years their people had been buried there and that the deep wood behind the highway was theirs for future burial. Once the standoff was over, the government promised the Mohawks control over the territory.
Leroy Gabriel couldn’t wait. He’d never recovered from his weeks as a Warrior. He drank far too much, and eventually an accident with a hunting rifle ended his pain before he reached the age of thirty. His friends decided not to wait for any government permission and brought him here, wrapped him in buckskin, and gave poor Leroy a traditional Mohawk burial beneath the very pines he had fought for: victory his, forever and ever.
There were now ten graves in the disputed territory. Control of the land was handed over to the Mohawk Council of Kanesatake, but not the deed, much to the disappointment of many Natives in the area. The municipality of Oka received $230,000 for the property, even though Mohawks still claim that the land had never belonged to Oka in the first place and had no need to be purchased.
But now it was theirs, for keeps, deed or no deed. It had been cleared and was beautifully kept, carefully gardened and passionately guarded. Woe to the outsider who dares enter without first asking permission. And even then visitors are asked not to get too close to the gravesite of Leroy Gabriel, hero to many, troublemaker to many—for the winds of Oka had never really stopped blowing through this spectacular plot of land they call the Pines.
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