All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  WE ARE DESCENDING ONTO Cornwall Island now. A couple hundred Mohawks await us there, also clad in ribbon shirts and waving Haudenosaunee flags. Some hand out bottles of water; others offer apples and oranges. Everyone mills about as the chiefs discuss the next move.

  When Mohawks refer to “the situation” today, they mean this spot right here, where Canada used to operate its border post. Until 2009, Mohawks had their own lane and simply had to flash their tribal cards before driving wherever they pleased, either to a destination on their island or continuing on to the next international bridge and nation. Granted, they were subject to periodic searches. Granted, they occasionally fielded questions they considered insulting, like “Where are you from?” Granted, a few Mohawks felt so mistreated by the CBSA, they filed complaints that launched human rights tribunals. But for the majority of Indians, border crossing was hassle-free until May 1, 2009, when Canada announced that its Border Service officers would be permitted to carry 9mm Beretta pistols there starting the first of June.

  Even among Akwesasne’s “touchy” subjects—gambling, the tobacco trade, drug and human trafficking—firearms are volatile. Guns first became an issue here in 1989, when a university shooting in Montreal left fifteen dead1 and prompted Parliament to pass sweeping gun control laws.2 A black market for weaponry soon flourished. The Ontario Provincial Police estimate that 60 percent of the guns used in local crimes are smuggled across the U.S. border, “often” through Akwesasne, with price markups of 2,000 percent or more.

  Most Mohawks I’ve met hold libertarian views about firearms and keep their homestead stocked with mini-arsenals, but hardly anyone wanted Canadian border agents wielding arms on their island. Not only was this considered an affront to Mohawk sovereignty, but residential neighborhoods were just a few hundred feet away from the checkpoint as well, along with a bus stop and recreational fields. Soon after the CBSA announcement, Mohawks descended upon the facility in protest. Some brought drums and started pounding. Others quoted treaties signed centuries before. Many camped out, and—in the morning—supporters brought them corn mush. Demonstrators built a wooden shelter across from the checkpoint for round-the-clock occupation and christened it the “People’s Fire.”

  Tension mounted as June 1 drew near. By the eve of May 31, several hundred Mohawks had gathered, some wearing bandannas around their faces, Zapatista-style. They lit six bonfires, one for each nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and waited for the midnight showdown. Ten minutes to twelve, however, the Canadian agents abandoned post. The demonstrators rejoiced. Strike one up for sovereignty! They raised purple Haudenosaunee flags where crimson maples once waved, and cheered.

  In the six weeks that followed, the bridges were mostly blocked—only by Cornwall City and New York State Police rather than by Mohawks. Considering those bridges average 2.3 million passenger transits a year, this was no small inconvenience, particularly for the islanders. Community leaders swung into action. One was Brian David, a subchief of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, whom I met for lunch one afternoon.

  “I started ferrying people across the river,” Chief David said, stroking his moustache at the memory. “I could carry five safely in my boat, and there were nurses to take across, doctors, people having emergencies. When my boat got too small, I got a larger one and turned into a ferry captain for six weeks. I transported 500 people a day: lacrosse teams, soccer teams, kids taking their final exams, people traveling to a funeral.”

  After forty-two days of negotiations, the CBSA finally reopened its checkpoint, albeit on the northern side of the bridge, in the city of Cornwall, Ontario. Mohawk triumph fizzled when they realized that, from that point forward, anyone wishing to visit the northern half of their nation from the south now must drive over both bridges, check in at the CBSA in Cornwall city, and then turn right around to recross the second bridge and return to the island—a journey that can take anywhere from twenty-five minutes to two hours, depending on traffic. Islanders, meanwhile, must check in with the CBSA every single time they leave home base.

  And that’s not all. Every vehicle’s license plate is photographed upon exiting the United States or Canada. If, upon entering the next country, the license plate shows up out of traffic sequence on an agent’s computer screen, it will serve as proof the driver made a pit stop, for something either as innocuous as a bathroom break or as scandalous as a contraband pickup. The law clearly states you must report “forthwith” to the CBSA. Failure to do so will cost you $1,000 for the first offense and $1,000 more per subsequent offense until the fourth, when your car will be impounded. If you can’t hand over a credit card then and there, you’ll also be charged $60 a day by the towing company until you do.3

  Canada has impounded at least 230 cars under this policy, according to Chief David. One is a 1994 Cadillac owned by Dana Leigh and Kanietakeron Thompson. Tribal government has a standing offer to cover the first offense of any member, but that doesn’t help the Thompsons, since they withdrew from the rolls long ago. The CBSA seized their Caddie three years ago, and they refuse to pay the fines out of principle.

  “The queen has it now,” Dana Leigh said when I asked her about it, ashing a cigarette and frowning.

  The federal bridge closure of 2009 didn’t sit well with the Thompsons, especially when a friend died on the island and they wanted to attend the funeral. A YouTube video shows Kanietakeron striding up to the police barricade at U.S. Customs, scattering ashes in the shape of a serpent, taking out a beaded wampum belt, and informing the officers that they are violating divine law. If they disrupt his passage, he warns, they will be disrespecting the clan mothers, and “natural law will befall you.” With a nod to his cameraman, he then turns around, sidesteps the barricade, and heads toward the bridge.

  A CRITICAL MASS HAS GATHERED NOW: 400 Mohawks and a smattering of camera crews. It is time to ascend the northern bridge into mainland Canada. Someone lights a fistful of sage. Musky sweetness spices the air.

  Architecture usually doesn’t intimidate me, but whenever I see this bridge, dread pools in my belly. Driving over it, you can only envision a nineteenth-century insane asylum at the end. The bridge is overly tall and curves so sharply, you cannot see the car in front of you until you’re about to smash right into it. Midway through, a chain-link fence rises above the railing, reinforcing the sense of imprisonment. The road, meanwhile, is riddled with potholes.

  “This bridge has destroyed every car I have ever owned,” Darren Bonaparte, the historian who wrote a book about Saint Kateri, says as I fall in step beside him. “But this is the fastest I’ve gotten over this bridge in a long time. By foot.”

  Mohawks have shut down this bridge a fair amount too, most famously in December 1968 when Canadian customs officials charged one $4.70 in duties on a truckload of groceries that he claimed he was bringing “for hungry Indians in Alberta.” As any Mohawk will tell you, such a fee clearly violates the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America (commonly known as the Jay Treaty), which grants Indians the right “freely to pass and repass, by land or inland navigation,” between the two countries and to “freely carry on trade and commerce with each other.”

  This particular Mohawk had a hidden agenda: his grocery mission was actually a ploy for a film he was narrating called You Are on Indian Land, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. So cameras were rolling when scores of Mohawks parked their station wagons across the slender strip of highway connecting the international bridges, obstructing traffic for five hours. Forty-seven were arrested that day, dragged away by officers through the snow.

  Ahead of me, a young father is pushing a stroller up the bridge’s steep incline. He proudly tells his friend that this is the second time his daughter has helped block this bridge. I quicken my pace to peek in the carriage. Bundled in blankets, she appears to be eight months old. That means her first takeover was the Idle No More flash-mob closure back in January. Temperat
ures dipped into the teens that day as protesters occupied the bridge for four hours. In Mohawk Country, little girls earn their activist creds early.

  WE ARE APPROACHING THE CBSA station now. All three lanes contain a windowed booth staffed by an agent wearing sunglasses. The drumbeats quicken as we ford into Canada without showing any ID.

  Up ahead, a lone man in uniform stands in the middle of a vacated avenue: Steve MacNaughton, the CBSA’s regional director. He grins with all of his teeth as the chiefs surround him, and the rest of us follow suit. One chief lights up a long wooden pipe and starts puffing. I keep thinking he’ll pass it over to MacNaughton, but no. He just stands there in his gloriously feathered and antlered kastowa, blowing smoke rings at the sky. Another chief begins to speak in a Haudenosaunee language, gesturing in a way that seems to incorporate the sun, the sky, the river, the trees, and the earth, along with every one of us. Minutes pass before a third chief begins to translate so softly that I catch only phrases:

  “We have come here to remind you that you are in our land.”

  “… the things we agreed to many years ago …”

  “… that line does not belong to us.”

  For a moment, it feels like witnessing a ritual steeped in history. Then somebody’s cell phone rings with the opening riffs of “Bad to the Bone,” and my focus disperses. No matter: the current function of the crowd seems to be that of a hype man in hip-hop, here to back up the chiefs with drumbeats.

  MacNaughton accepts a missive from the chiefs outlining their concerns about “the situation” and then gallantly steps to the side. One of the chiefs turns to face the crowd. In his late fifties with a graying moustache, he is wearing a purple ribbon shirt topped by a bear claw necklace. Ever so slightly, he cocks his head. With that, we march on toward the city.

  CORNWALL GETS A LOT OF GRIEF from its countrymen. MoneySense magazine recently ranked it the 167th best place to live in Canada—out of 190 options. Among its attractions is “Big Ben,” a toxic dump that becomes a ski hill each winter. But there’s also a winding riverfront with a bike trail, a teahouse that serves warm scones and clotted cream on vintage English saucers, and surprisingly good Thai food. I, for one, would visit more often if it weren’t such a pain to get here.

  Standing on a grassy knoll beneath a flagpole is the mayor of Cornwall, Bob Kilger. Conditioned, perhaps, by his previous stint as referee of the National Hockey League, he seems undaunted as 400 members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy surround him. Quite a lot of media have gathered by this point, too. I must elbow a few cameramen to get near the action. Again, the chiefs orate and translate.

  “We need you to know we are not going anywhere,” they say. “We need to be respected in the same manner as everyone else.”

  Kilger listens carefully before responding, adopting the chief’s use of first person plural:

  “We are glad you are here.”

  “We are friends and neighbors.”

  “We hope you feel at home in our home.”

  The chief in the bear claw necklace turns to the crowd. With a cinematic gaze, he takes in the young mothers cradling babies, the elders wearing clan symbols, the reporters tweeting on their Androids. Then he retreats toward the bridge.

  “Should we clap?” someone whispers.

  No one does. When the chiefs walk away, 400 follow.

  ON THE RETURN TRIP over the dreadful bridge, I remember how crossing into Mexico used to unnerve me, too, though for non-architectural reasons. As a child, I was distraught by the sight of barefoot kids my age hawking Chiclets along the bridge—especially after Tío Valentin told me about the time my great-grandmother lacked the funds to cross the bridge herself. Her husband had just been struck and killed by a runaway mining cart in Nuevo Leon, leaving her with five young sons. She packed them each a change of clothes and headed for the border, only to find the bridge toll too expensive. Late at night, she convinced a man with a canoe to paddle her family toward their new life in Texas at half the price. Certain that Chiclets would have been my fate, too, had she not been so persuasive, I would run from seller to seller, dispersing my allowance. Then I would steel myself for the radical differences between the world where the bridge deposited me and the one where I started, moments before.

  Like now. Downtown Cornwall feels long ago as I fall in step with a chief wearing a kastowa of especially handsome plumage. Sienna-skinned and oval-faced, he has combed his hair into braids that dangle past his ribs. His presence is so commanding, I am unsurprised to learn he is the Tadodaho of the Haudenosaunee, elected for life to run the meetings of the Confederacy. Slung over his left arm is a beaded replica of the Two Row Wampum, which represents an agreement between Dutch explorers and Haudenosaunee chiefs dating back to 1613.

  “This is the river of life,” the Tadodaho explains, pointing to the yellowing quahog shells that form the belt’s backdrop. Then he glides his forefinger along the two purple lines running parallel across it. “And this is your people traveling in a ship and our people traveling in a canoe. We travel together in peace and in friendship, but our paths do not cross.”

  Although some scholars are skeptical of this treaty, the Netherlands has fostered a special relationship with the Haudenosaunee because of it ever since. It is one of the few nations that accepts their confederacy passports rather than insisting upon U.S. or Canadian passports at the border. (In 2010, Great Britain rejected the sovereign passports of the Haudenosaunee lacrosse team, inciting the team to withdraw their participation in the world championship there, despite having invented the sport.)

  Up ahead is a chief of the Onondaga Nation, Jake Edwards. The Tadodaho introduces us. Nodding at my notebook, Chief Edwards mentions that, in July, the Haudenosaunee will commemorate four centuries of peaceful coexistence by canoeing down the Hudson River from Rensselaer, New York, to Pier 96 in Manhattan. The thirteen-day journey will culminate in a march to the United Nations.

  “The Two Row shows we live side by side, as long as the grass is green, as long as the waters flow downhill, as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The Europeans agreed with that. They wrote it down, but they lost it. We still have it here,” Chief Edwards says, pointing to the wampum on the Tadodaho’s wrist. “We will do this journey to remind them of their promise.”

  WE ARE BACK ON CORNWALL ISLAND NOW. Women have prepared a feast at the People’s Fire, across from the abandoned checkpoint. I join the line snaking out of the building and am promptly handed a plastic baggie containing a bologna sandwich, fruit cup, granola bar, and spork. Waiting inside are cauldrons of traditional dishes like meat pie, corn bread, corn mush, and—my favorite—corn soup (cured salt pork, turnips, kidney beans, and carrots, plus corn kernels cleaned with ashes and boiled until they burst into juicy white pearls). I serve myself a steaming bowl, then sit among the families gathered around the park benches.

  In January 2014, the Federal Bridge Corporation will replace the dreadful bridge with a $75 million low-level structure. Though it will significantly decrease crossing time, Mohawks will still be required to “check in” with Canada whenever visiting part of their own nation.4 Hundreds will sign a petition requesting the station move from Cornwall city to the New York side. Even if Canada ultimately agrees to do this, Chief David says it would take at least a decade to implement. Until then, “the situation” will likely remain the Situation.

  So often, the word “bridge” is deployed as a metaphor for connectivity. Politicians speak endlessly of “building bridges” between troubled communities—just as they promote “fences” as either neighborly gestures or terrorist-detractors. Why, then, in borderlands north and south, have lawmakers erected so much architecture that does the opposite?

  I think back to the story that Vera, the manager of Mo’ Money Pawnshop, told during our tour that day: “So many people have dreamt of that [dreadful] bridge collapsing, of the water tearing it down. Native seers came here this winter, and they said we are headed for a year of da
rkness because this area would be flooded. I take it with a grain of salt … but thoughts create reality. Maybe if enough people dream it, it will happen.”

  Of course it is morbid to imagine the bridge collapsing into the St. Lawrence River, hurtling cars and trucks and people into its icy current. Yet there is something deliciously anarchic about the vision as well. For if all the borderlands’ walls and bridges crumbled, wouldn’t the borders too?

  NOTES

  1. The twenty-five-year-old killer burst into a classroom full of engineering students at École Polytechnique de Montréal, ordered the men to leave, and shouted, “You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!” before killing as many women as he could (and ultimately himself). Canada has since marked December 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

  2. That’s right. It took only one mass shooting before the Canadian Parliament enacted gun control.

  3. Bridge crossing has become such a hassle at Akwesasne, many Mohawks with the means to do so have invested in a second car. They use one car for traveling from the island to New York and the other for running errands in Canada. The former is known as the “getaway car.”

  4. Of course, non-Indian drivers must also check in with the CBSA when visiting the island (plus pay a $6.50 round-trip bridge toll). It’s worth noting, however, that 70 percent of all Three Nations Crossing bridge users are from Akwesasne. At other points along the St. Lawrence River, such as the ritzy Thousand Islands region, boaters simply make a phone call to report their border-crossing activity or check in at one of the videophone stations at the docks.