BUSINESS
COVER:
Grassy Narrows Fights for
their Future
BIOGRAPHY
Eskasoni's Icon: Seymour
Doucette
Sophie Pierre, Lifetime Achiever Seeks a Better
Future for Children
BUSINESS
Tobacco Road
Revisited
Interior First Nations Awarded Forest
Licenses
BOOKS
Fatherhood, History, and
Art
CULTURE
A Mother's Prayer for Son's Safe
Return
EDUCATION
CHIP Hospitality "Future Tourism
Leaders" Scholarship
HUMOUR
Bee
in the Bonnet: Circle the Wagon
MODERN TREATIES
Top Court to Determine Scope of
Metis Rights
Tobacco Road
Revisited
By Dr. John Bacher
Polluted environment leads to Society
The various forms of
environmental disruption caused by the Seaway would sow the seeds of the
Warriors Society in complex ways. It both undermined the traditional
subsistence economy and faith in the integrity of the Canadian justice
system.
An image emerged of Iroquois people having to use violent methods to
escape their polluted environment, a belief that first emerged in
Kahnawake.
The Mohawk community of Kahnawake, surrounded by the suburbs of
Montreal, was also devastated by the Seaway. Here 1,260 acres were lost
through the construction of a new canal channel, although for an expense
of an additional $2 million, these lands guaranteed by sacred treaties
could have been avoided through constructing a canal away from the shore.
One of the Kahnawake leaders, who worked the hardest to defeat the
Seaway's assault on Kahnawake, was artist and writer Louis Hall. He worked
closely in courtroom battles with an able Jewish lawyer, Omar Z. Ghobashy,
a prominent Egyptian civil servant before the Nasserist
revolution.
Ghobashy persuaded Hall to adopt the fighting model of
Israel, where a relatively few well armed committed armed zealots could
form an army that successfully returned to the Jewish nation some of their
ancestral lands that had been seized in the past by Arabs (although they
were heavily outnumbered in the Middle East).
Hall dreamed of
creating a native Warrior Society. He hoped it would use armed might to
return some of their land stolen by whites who built such monstrous
projects as the Seaway, to earth respecting native Americans.
Hall
was like many in Kahnawake, disillusioned with the Canadian justice system
from its inability to protect their community from the destruction of the
Seaway. He mocked and ridiculed the peace orientated confederacy elders
who had been able to stop through nonviolent methods such assaults on
their lands as the Kinzua dam, which flooded away the Cold Spring
Longhouse.
At the same time Hall was planning the formation of the
Warriors Society, in nearby Montreal, the FLQ was demonstrating the
explosive impact of terrorism to get publicity for various injustices
faced by French Canadians.
On August 22, 1973 an FLQ bomb exploded
near Kahanwake on a nearby CPR railway bridge, closing Seaway traffic for
several hours. A huge FLQ proclamation was painted in red overlooking
Kahanwake. Hall would mimic the Quebec separatists in their fierce
determination of those who disagreed with his aims as
"traitors."
Hall's determination to build an armed Warrior Society,
which would wrest territory for a homeland for native Americans like the
exiled European Jews carved Israel out of predominately Arab Palestine,
was in keeping with fashionable justifications for armed conflict in the
1960s and 1970s among much of the political extreme left in North America
and Europe.
Since the Seaway encouraged many to believe in such an
armed struggle to obtain land in a clean environment away from polluting
industries, many native Americans from around the continent flocked to his
cause to join the Warrior Society after it was formed in 1971.
Natives flock to Society
One important figure in the early
Warrior Society was a Shawnee native from Oklahoma named Richard "Cartoon"
Alford, a veteran of the occupation of Wounded Knee, as well as the
co-founder of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Indian Movement. AIM
was founded in 1969 and was an expression of the struggle for social
justice manifested in the civil rights movement.
Cartoon was a
direct descendent of the famed Shawnee leader Tecumseh. When he was asked
to go to Kahnawake in the fall of 1973 to assist in the training of the
young men, he did so without hesitation. In time, he would be asked to
accept Mohawk citizenship while carrying the Turtle Clan name Tronnekwe.
While other armed struggle movements for social justice in North
America such as the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the FLQ made little
headway, for more than a decade Hall's Warriors were able to achieve some
of their goals.
A major victory took place on May 13, 1974, when
the Warrior Society seized at gunpoint a 612 acre site in Adirondack State
Park in New York at Moss Lake, at an old girl's scout camp on Moss Lake.
The camp was renamed as the Mohawk community of Ganiekeh or "place of the
people of the flint."
Cartoon successfully organized Ganiehkeh's
defense against New York state police. More than 300 natives from across
North America journeyed to the camp, some well equipped with weapons. Such
armed strength resulted in a 1977 agreement between the Warriors and New
York State (negotiated by Mario Cuomo, then New York's Secretary of State)
to move Gainekeh to the more northerly Altona corner of the Adirondacks, a
few miles south of the Canadian border.
Community relations were
smoothed by Christian ministers, who viewed the Mohawks, similarly to the
Jews, returning to their sacred ancestral lands. Under an agreement with
New York State, the community was given control over a 698-acre settlement
site, and the 5,000 acre Macomb Reforestation area was dedicated to their
use for subsistence use.
New community prospers
Under leaders such as Cartoon,
Ganiehkeh was able to prosper. It was able to come so close to Iroquoian
ideals of being a drug and alcohol free community that it became for
several years a cherished place for native Americans to undergo
rehabilitation for substance abuse. The community kept cattle and
chickens, raised and sold rabbits and operated a small sawmill.
In
1981 a craft store was opened. Under an agreement with the Miner Center of
New York State, a program of maple syrup production was developed.
Although such subsistence activities were commonly combined with ironwork
for employment, this pattern had been long been customary in Iroquois
communities.
Ganienkeh also provided an important point to many
young Iroquois; that the direct assertion of aboriginal land claims and
treaty rights could force New York to concede criminal, civil and
administrative victory over native people. This victory would have some
unexpected consequences.
Originally conceived for the high ideals of living in a clean
environment, it would unexpectedly open the door to commercial gambling,
cross border smuggling, and the rise of an "entrepreneurial" class among
the Iroquois that would in time, seek to undermine the authority of each
and every Native government.
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