They came from Montreal to buy cannabis from dispensaries run by the Mohawks above Rue Saint-Michel. They regularly come to Kanesatake to buy weed. “It’s nicer than the Quebec Cannabis Society. It’s less expensive. They give good advice, and after that you can come here to relax and look at the lake. It’s pretty,” explains one of them, particularly enthusiastic.
The beauty of the site. Could the whole complex story of Oka and the presence of the Mohawks begin with beauty? At least that’s what a very staunch Oka native tells us. When the Sulpicians arrived on the frozen lake with the Mohawks in 1721, they were struck by the beauty of the place and decided to settle there.
However, the history books offer a more prosaic version than that of this resident whom we shall call Michel. Michel’s real name isn’t Michel, but like the Mohawks, who denounced the climate of fear pervading their community of 1,800, he’s just as scared of the Gabriel brothers, even if he stays downstairs in Oka. You really shouldn’t be able to recognize me. I insist. Those are dangerous people up there. It’s a handful of individuals who are terrorizing the others, he says nervously.
In Oka, brothers Robert and Gary Gabriel are well-known figures. Especially Gary, who is described to us in the village as a voluptuous mirrored closet who we prefer not to cross when he comes to shop. I’m pretty scared when he’s around. “I’m very uncomfortable,” says Michel.
In 2004, Radio-Canada reported that Gary Gabriel was part of the group that kidnapped 67 Aboriginal police officers in Kanesatake that year. During the two days of rioting that followed, the home of Chief Chief James Gabriel was burned down. Gary Gabriel had been found guilty along with 13 other Mohawks of unlawful assembly, rioting and forcible incarceration. Twenty years later, the man is one of the owners of the illegal landfill where toxic, environmentally hazardous materials are found.
Our colleagues from Indigenous Spaces and La Presse recently told us how critical the situation at the landfill has been for years, but also how tired the people of Kanesatake are of being held hostage by organized crime, which operates with complete impunity , due to the reluctance of the Sûreté du Québec to intervene. Mohawks have also circulated a letter asking authorities for help.
Along a tree-lined road, several signs featuring a cannabis leaf warn motorists of “pot shacks.”
Photo: Radio Canada
Gary Gabriel is also one of the owners of the Green Room, a massive dispensary that sells cannabis-derived products. Suzanne* (fictitious name), who, like Michel, is from Oka, recalls with fear that day in June 2021 when an unsafe crowd arrived in the village. There were hundreds. They wanted to celebrate in the Green Room. I said to a policeman stationed at the bottom of the hill: There will be a murder. Well, a week later, a street gang leader was shot at point blank range while he was in the Green Room with Gary.
Like Michel, Suzanne went to school with the Mohawks. We wanted to play tag with them upstairs. I went to French school. “I had a lot of Mohawk friends and comrades,” says Michel. We cannot be indifferent to the suffering of our friends, our neighbors, and the people with whom we went to little school.
Suzanne often thinks of her friends too. “I’m worried about her,” she said. She attended English school. Our Mohawk friends disagree with what is happening. It’s hell up there, and our Mohawk neighbors down there don’t want to talk about it. “Then I blame them for not panting, they’re scared,” she explains.
Kanesatake is not a reserve!
The fact that Michel or Suzanne have neighbors and old Mohawk friends can be explained by the very special history of this territory, a unique situation in Canada. In Kanesatake, in a report on the origins of the Oka Crisis in 1990, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs recalled that the territorial situation in no way corresponds to the usual model for Indian reservations in Canada.
Kanesatake, that’s not a reserve! Michel starts. People think the top of the hill is the Mohawks, a reservation, and the bottom of the hill is the whites, but that’s not really the case. Kanesatake and Oka, it’s a chess board. A Mohawk house on federal government property sits next to a White House and so on, he explains.
In the legal documents, this checkerboard is called, as Michel says, the provisional territory of Kanesatake. Before the Oka Crisis, many whites lived on the hill. But the majority left back then, Suzanne recalls.
Myra Cree worked at Radio Canada from 1973 to 2002
Photo: Radio Canada / Guy Dubois
In the heart of the village of Oka, a stone’s throw from the wharf, the town library bears the name of a famous resident, Myra Cree, a Mohawk daughter and granddaughter of a great chief, one of the great animators of Radio Canada television and radio, who in 2005 died.
Kanesatake also means “down the coast,” Michel assures. This is also confirmed by the linguist André Cuoq in his Lexique de la langue algonquine. However, Mohawk friends told Suzanne that the translation of Kanesatake in French would be “sand dunes,” glowing in the distance like snow in the sun. Is it right? It doesn’t matter, it’s so beautiful to say while the darkness looms over these dunes.
The 1990 crisis, an echo of 1721?
Michel and Suzanne, like many others in Oka and present-day Kanesatake community, say that the Oka crisis has left the town in a lawless state. Sometimes I tell myself that the Sûreté du Québec isn’t going to intervene because they’re afraid of another Oka crisis, but I also get the impression that the police aren’t doing anything to the mafia that’s rampant in the Mohawks to fight for the Avenging Corporal’s death “Lemay,” Suzanne said thoughtfully.
In the summer of 1990, a crisis erupted in Oka over a housing project on disputed lands, including a Mohawk cemetery. Kahnawake, another nearby Mohawk territory, rose in turn to support Native American claims. Corporal Lemay of the SQ was killed there during an intervention on 11 July. The crisis, wanting, not wanting, is not easily forgotten. There was the army, the police, everything. “It was really something special!” Michel recalls.
A Mohawk warrior watches through binoculars as Canadian Army tanks approach.
Photo: The Canadian Press/Tom Hanson
And this crisis had been brewing for a long time. And since the beginning of the 18th century.
In 1721, the Sulpicians obtained authorization from the King of France to move their Aboriginal evangelization mission from Sault-au-Récollet on the banks of the Rivière des Prairies to a dominion which he granted them on the edge of the river. Current Lac des Deux Montagnes. In an article published in Histoire du Québec magazine in 2003, geographer Jean-Paul Ladouceur reports that the Aboriginal people then living in the mission were very frustrated at the move. The Indians were very reluctant to leave cleared land and start over, he says. The Sulpicians would then have promised them that the new place, today Oka, would be theirs.
But promised and due are two very different things. From the British conquest in 1763 to World War II in 1945, the archives show strained relations between the Sulpicians and the Indians, who never ceased to claim the right to own the land they farmed, as well as part of the territory liege lord of Oka .
It was not until 1945 that the federal government first attempted to settle the controversy by buying land from the Sulpicians and making it available to the Aborigines. These lands remain his property to this day. The federal government will subsequently purchase more lands in Oka to grant the Mohawks a beneficial interest.
Kanesatake’s territory, therefore, consists of a series of parcels separated by private lands on which white people live. Since Kanesatake’s Provisional Territory is in fact a fragmented mosaic of sorts, this prevented the formation of a reservation within the meaning of the Indian Act.
In 1990, in the wake of the Oka crisis, the federal government bought more land on the top of the hill where drug trafficking and landfill sites are now thriving.
Troubled, Suzanne wonders if this place of beauty will one day find peace. In the meantime, let’s not talk about it. “We live on a minefield and it’s very sad,” she sighs before leaving.
Young people are starving on the quay. Smoking cannabis increases appetite. So they decide to take the route back to Montreal. They are always in a good mood, light-hearted and unaware of the burden of history.
On the page for Parc national d’Oka, Quebec.
Photo: Radio Canada / Ivanoh Demers