ABSTRACT
JULY 11, 1990, WAS NOT AN ORDINARY DAY IN MONTREAL, QUEBEC. Rather than reports about the recently failed constitutional discussions and disputes about Sunday shopping, Canadians saw images that rocked the ‘peaceable kingdom.’ Native protesters, primarily from the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, wearing camouflage clothing, holding guns, faces masked by kerchiefs, stood atop barricades artfully composed of an overturned Quebec provincial police car and earth-moving equipment, facing down police officers. Such photos became the emblem of Canada’s ‘Oka crisis.’ A conflict between Native protesters and the town of Oka (just north of Montreal) over land had erupted into violence. The morning of July 11, the provincial police launched an early morning raid to remove Native protesters from a forested area that they were seeking to protect from Oka’s development plans. During the raid a provincial police officer was fatally shot. Native people at Kanesatake, near Oka, hurriedly constructed barricades in protest and to prevent further police raids. Allies in Kahnawake, a Mohawk reserve on the south shore across from the island of Montreal, placed their own barricades up in support, blocking a major bridge that links the south shore to Montreal. The police responded with their own barricades. The ensuing summer was filled with barbed wire, guns, appeals to nationhood and sovereignty, and national angst. “How,” Canadians asked themselves over the course of what became a summer-long, three-month standoff, “could this be happening in a nation known for its general principles of justice, peacefulness, tolerance and respect, and for its historic ‘good’ treatment of ‘its’ Natives?” With barricades dividing Indian from settler it seemed that a modernized version of the American frontier had crossed the border and landed in Canada.
