From Kanehsatà:ke to Palestine

A review of Ellen Gabriel and Sean Carleton’s When the Pine Needles Fall

At 5:15 am on July 11, 1990, the Sûreté de Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, along with the RCMP and other paramilitary units, marched on a blockade on a dirt road in Kanehsatà:ke, about 50 kilometres west of Montréal. As Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel tells it in her new memoir, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, written in conversation with Sean Carleton (a former Canadian Dimension editorial board member), there were just five women at the blockade that day, including Gabriel, when the police arrived. After a three-hour standoff, the SQ began shooting at the land defenders. Gabriel and the other women took refuge in an area known as “The Pines,” the forest that the Kanien’kehá:ka have been actively protecting since Sulpician missionaries first arrived in the region that is now southwestern Québec in 1717.

This raid, during which a police officer, Marcel Lemay, was killed, initiated a 78-day standoff that would come to be known as the “Oka Crisis,” or as Carleton clarifies in the book, “more correctly, the siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke.” According to Gabriel, throughout the standoff, there was a concerted effort to depict Mohawk land defenders as dangerous criminals, thus legitimating the overwhelming force that the SQ, the RCMP, and eventually, the Canadian military brought to bear. Even today, the famous photograph of an armed Mohawk warrior in fatigues staring down a Canadian solider dominates our collective memory of the conflict. But Gabriel argues that the narrative popularized by the media distracted from the land struggle at the heart of the dispute and activated “existing fears and racist attitudes to justify [Canada’s] use of force.”

Gabriel was the spokesperson for the Kanien’kehà:ka defending “The Pines” from a proposed nine-hole golf course expansion in 1990. Nearly 35 years later, When the Pine Needles Fall offers a counter-history that retells the story of the conflict in two important ways. First, Gabriel humanizes and feminizes the Mohawk resistance, making it clear that while there were armed male warriors (there had to be, the state came in guns ablaze) “the women were really the leaders of the movement,” backed by elders and the wider community. Second, Gabriel historicizes the crisis, complicating it as not simply a conflict between radical land defenders and the municipality of Oka. That superficial narrative is the colonizer’s version of the story: recalcitrant Indians refuse to accept Canada’s civilizing offer of progress and development. Gabriel’s version situates the crisis as the latest entry in a centuries-long history of violent occupation and land theft that began in 1717.  (more...)

From Kanehsatà:ke to Palestine