Volume 1 No. 1
January 31, 1992
KAHNAWAKE MOHAWK TERRITORY
Volume 1 No. 1
January 31, 1992
KAHNAWAKE MOHAWK TERRITORY
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Watkwanonhwera:ton. Iakwahska:neks Akwe:kon Takwanonhwera:ton.
The Eastern Door would like to send greetings to all the people of Kahnawake
This issue marks the beginning of an effort to bring a comprehensive newspaper to Kahnawake. A community like ours always seems to be on the cutting edge of native issues whether it be in education, social programs, health, language, culture, economics or politics. It needs a communication tool to inform all residents of ongoing activities in its own area and in other native communities across Indian country.
The Eastern Door is a community based newspaper serving the Mohawks of Kahnawake regardless of their birth, sex, age, language, politics or religion. Our community has a diverse mix of activities both social and political. This newspaper will serve as a common medium of information for everyone to contribute to and to read at their own leisure. Articles submitted for publication will be given every opportunity to be printed as long as they are informative and constructive, and not slanderous or libelous.
The paper strives to be a source of factual, authoritative information on our community and other communities in the Mohawk Nation, the Six Nation Iroquois, and other Indian Nations. A variety of articles will cover the events in the international field as well.
This paper feels that it has a responsibility to reinforce our culture, language, and values. The memories of our elders, the nurtuting of our young, the protection of our environment and the elimination of abuse.
The editorials of the paper will comment on a wide range of issues and will strive to be constructive in its recommendations and conclusions.
The Eastern Door is a private enterprise seeking to maintain itself on sales, advertising and the support of the community
Among the member nations of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy or Houdenosaunee, the Mohawk are referred to as Kanien'kehaka Na:kon:ke Rontehnhohanonhnha, the Keepers of the Eastern Door. There are seven Mohawk Communities and Kahnawake is the eastern-most of them all. Therefore, we feel it is appropriate to name our paper The Eastern Door.
The owner/publisher of the Eastern Door is Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer. His varied background includes sixteen years in the field of education, three years at the Mohawk Nation Office, two years in private enterprise and experience ranging from recreation to international affairs. Kenneth Deer is also Editor in Chief.
A. Brian Deer is the assistant editor. Brian has been involved in community affairs, education, and cultural activities in Kahnawake for the past twenty years or so.
Also assisting in the development of the paper is Kanatakta, currently the museum program manager at the Cultural Center.
The paper has a number of contributing writers such as Harley Delaronde, who will do sports as well as other issues. Johnny Beauvais, our twentieth century historian, and lawyers Christine Deom and Martha Montour on self government and government publications.
Artists Conway Jocks and Peter Montour have contributed our masthead, artwork and cartoons.
Peter Williams, former editor of the Akwesasne Notes, the Indian Time, and our last paper Kariwarorks, handles our layouts and is lending his invaluable experience.
A number of other volunteers have helped to put this paper on its way from stuffing envelopes to delivering papers.
All staff are contributing their time, materials and enerty on a voluntary basis until such a time as the paper can afford to buy its own computers and equipment, pay salaries and honorariums.
The Eastern Door is looking for interested individuals who might want to join our list of contributors. We need writers, reporters, communists, humorists, satirists, artists and cartoonists as well as completed work such as short stories, poems, and artwork. We know there is talent in this community. The Eastern Door presents an opportunity to develop and support these talents.
We also need you, the reader, to write letters to the Editor to express your point of view.
This is the first edition of the Eastern Door and we realize we have a ways to go to refine our product. We will make mistakes along the way and that is natural, so please bear with us. Any constructive criticism will be welcome.
The events over the last weeks have left the community in a state of wonder over what will happen next.
To capsulize, a number of residents of Kahnawake gathered at the home of Josie Horn on Saturday the 21st of December to discuss the recent activities of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. They were called there by a group of women who had grave concerns about recent events which they felt could jeopardize our community and asked that different factions put aside their differences and sit together to discuss what could be done.
The meetings over the next two days focused on the recent signing of agreements to negotiate by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake on policing and MCK/Canada relations. People present felt that the Council had over-stepped their authority by not gaining the consent of the majority of the community before signing these agreements. Several people also pointed out the Kahnawake Court System as not reflecting our own Traditional methods and as an avenue for outside incursions into our society.
A general consensus was reached that the 'Band Council' should be replaced by a Traditional Government as mandated by the people of the community in 1979. People at the meeting organized a demonstration on Monday mornings, December 23rd to prevent the Council members from entering the council Office until they met with the people of the community to explain their actions. A similar demonstration was held in front of the Court House.
At a public meeting held at the Knights of Columbus Hall that evening, certain members of the community declared the 'Band Council' dissolved. The Mohawk Council stated that only the electorate can remove them from office and they left the meeting. Several people were angry by their sudden withdrawal but by the end of the meeting it was agreed that a peaceful demonstration the next day to demand more public meetings would avoid confrontation over the issue.
The next morning a group of people met the Council before they entered their offices to demand more public meetings. The Council, anticipating violence, had a busload of Peacekeepers and other auxiliary present in force should they be needed to gain entry to their offices. This proved to be unnecessary and cause for some resentment.
A public meeting was held that afternoon at the Kateri Hall resulting in a statement from the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake that if the people are ready to take that final step towards Traditional Government then the Council cannot stand in the way. A series of meetings were arranged to explain Traditional Government and the Great Law of Peace. These meetings were scarcely attended by the community. As it stands now at the time of this writing the ball seems to be in the hands of the Traditionalists in our community.
The community awaits the next move.
At the initiative of the Native Women's Association of Canada, a HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH COMMITTEE was set up in early 1991 to begin working on establishing relations based on developing mutual understanding and respect between peoples of Quebec and Kahnawake.
The Committee is composed of persons representing the Native Women's Association of Canada, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, The Mohawk Nation Office, the Assembly of First Nations, the Native Council of Canada, the National Association of Friendship Centres, the Oecumenical Committee for Aboriginal Rights, the United Church Synode Montreal - Ottawa, Development and Peace, the National Action Committee on the Stutus of Women, the Montreal Labour Council affiliated to the CNTU and the Coalition Solidarite populaire - Quebec. Their time is given on a volunteer basis and they meet every two weeks.
The Committee has set up a team of 40 volunteers (it hopes to have between 60 and 100 eventually) who monitor and observe the interaction between the various Police forces and the people of Kahnawake and outlying communities (along routes #132, 138, and 207).
Individuals can bring complaints of alleged Police harassment or abuse to the Human Rights Watch Office. The Committee can help these individuals make formal complaints to various independent Police bodies and accompany people in following up on complaints.
Although some alleged incidents may appear "minor" or not worth the trouble, such as tickets based on falsehoods, officers refusing to identify themselves, etc., the accumulation of the records of such abuses can provide weight in the elaboration of a report that could be submitted to various national or international Human Rights institutions as well as helping to put an end to this situation
The Eastern Door posed the following questions:
Q: There has been some criticism that the defense of Ronald Cross, Gordon Lazore and Roger Lazore was based soley on Canadian criminal law and that it ignored issues of Mohawk Sovereignty. Was a sovereignty deferse raised?
Lawyers throw around different terms: "colour of right" and "mistake of fact" are often heard. However a defence truly based upon Mohawk sovereignty is neither of these. Still, although many people have a strong sense of what constitutes Mohawk sovereignty, a very basic problem is that there is no real and common understanding of how it is to be translated into the courtroom - exactly what is meant by a "sovereignty" defence.
At a superficial level, the Oka crisis sprang out of a battle over land. At a deeper level, the crisis was merely the point at which a longstanding dispute exploded into physical confrontation. The cause of that underlying dispute is sometimes described as jurisdiction, sometimes sovereignty, sometimes self-determination.
Whatever the name, it boils down to the same question: who is to direct the lives, affairs and destinies of the Mohawk people? This question applies equally to day to day community administration and to long term political, economic, social and even philosophical direction. Although the issues of the Oka crisis occasionally got mired in attempts to address day to day administrative concerns, the real fire and energy behind the Mohawk stance came from a determination to assert control over the deeper matters of heart and soul that looked to the Mohawk past and future.
Canada and Quebec consistently stand by the position that both types of issues day to day and long term - are to be resolved within Canada's political and legal systems. It is the bloody-mindedness with which they maintain this attitude that has put Mohawks who were active at Oka and elsewhere on trial in Canadian courts facing sometimes huge and senseless indictments.
Owen Young, Photo by This Land is our Land, Optimum Publishing
The Mohawks, on the other hand, are often seen as waffling from position to position. Sometimes sovereignty is viewed by Mohawks as a political position - to be asserted by insisting on nation to nation negotiations and by a complete refusal to recognize the authority of Canadian courts and Canadian legal processes. Other time sovereignty is asserted by Mohawks as a legal position - lawfully binding the Canadian and provincial governments and to be recognized and deferred to by Canadian courts.
To an outsider this apparent contradiction is one to which Mohawks seem to adapt easily. However, it is difficult for those trained in legal analysis and thinking to drift so effortlessly from one model to the other. That difficulty is a reality that must be accounted for when one goes to court.
Nonetheless, when being critical of the defences raised by a person charged with what are said to be crimes, one has to bear in mind that people rarely volunteer to be subjected to the criminal process. They are in the criminal courts because of the power of the state to put them there physically. Further, once one is in the criminal process, it is natural to want to escape the clutches of the system - sometimes at almost any cost. In such circumstances the nice luxuries of logic and consistency often fly out the window.
All of this is a long and roundabout way of saying that:
-Sovereignty has both political and legal aspects.
-When one is dragged into a criminal court in Canada the nature of the criminal process itself pretty much requires one to choose between fighting on a purely legal front and on a purely political one. (Political action in the courtroom includes refusing to recognize the courts as valid, refusing to participate in the trial process, raising defences that are based upon the truths of law and history as Mohawks understand them without attempting to adapt them to the rigors of Canadian legal structures).
-Once one opts for a legalistic approach, the framework within which he or she must work is that of Canadian law. Another way of putting this is that when one chooses to raise legal aspects of sovereignty in a criminal trial, one is stuck with the reality that the state has made the rules and framed the issues - as criminal.
Ronald Lasagna Cross being arrested by Canadian Force MPs,Photo by This Land is our Land, Optimum publishing
In the case of Ronald Cross, Gordon Lazore and Roger Lazore, the three men and their lawyers opted for a legalistic approach to a sovereignty defence. In doing so they consciously limited not the scope of the issues, but the manner in which they would be analyzed and decided by the court. That choice still did not prevent the case from resulting in some very important legal decisions and precedents. They are admittedly, decisions of Canadian law and procedure:
-guaranteeing the three men a trial conducted in English
-expanding the use of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect persons subject to federal criminal law from the effect of proceedings taken in provincial tribunals (here, the inquest into the death of SQ Corporal Marcel Lemay on July 11, 1990)
-expanding the obligation of the prosecution to disclose to an accused and his lawyers the evidence it has found in the course of its investigation
-expanding the process by which prospective jurors may be challenged and questioned about their possible biases.
-establishing the right of witnesses to bind themselves to tell the truth by way of traditional ceremonies
-determining that although the Geneva convention could not be applied to this particular case, it was not a closed question for the future.
But even the plan to explore sovereignty as a legal issue began to fade after the trial got underway. It faded not because of any desire on the part of the defence to avoid the issue, but because the case for the Crown began to disintegrate
Some prosecution witnesses were simply unbelievable. Others gave evidence the Crown obviously did not expect to hear and that even helped the defence. Some witnesses refused or simply failed to come to court. Evidence that the prosecution had not told the defence about slowly began to come to light. Largely because of defence challenges, the judge decided to step in and to stay some of the charges and to tell the jury that it had no choice but to return verdicts of "not guilty" on others.
By the end of the case for the prosecution the number of counts or charges in the indictment has been reduced. Even the "political" charges of rioting and obstruction had fallen. In addition, the evidence was simply not adequate to show that it was the three men on trial who had vandalized homes and caused all of the damage and injury the Crown accused them of. It was at that point the defence began to consider changing its plans - to do no more than require the prosecution to abide by its own laws: to prove the three men guily beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision was clinched when the trial judge decided not to permit the defence to be divided between charges involving confrontations with soldiers and those involving property damage and injury suffered by civilians. With such a split, the defence would have to cover everything lumped into the indictment and could not focus its attention only on activity involving the army which was more political in nature.
Eventually the plan that was followed was to let the case go to the jury without any evidence being introduced by the three men. As a result, what had started out as a plan to present a broad but legalistic "sovereignty" defence gave way to a routine "criminal" defence. It was a case of adapting to changing circumstances.
Did Ronald Cross, Gordon Lazore and Roger Lazore Have A Fair Trial?
There is an old saying that has come to Canada from the English law: "Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done."
The trial started out with almost everybody involved trying to see that the three men benefitted from as fair a trial as the Canadian criminal legal system can provide. Where even at its best the system could offer a Mohawk charged after Oka a "fair" trial is a very good question. It is not one I can debate in this short time or space.
What is more immediate is that as the trial would its way into November and December,the oversight of the prosecution in failing to provide necessary evidence to the defence began to tarnish the appearance of fairness that the court had set out to see maintained.
For one thing, there were so much "oversights" that it could not help but create the impressions that the defence had only scratched the surface and that even more helpful evidence lay buried away in Surete Du Quebec and Canadian Armed Forces filing cabinets. For another, the judge did not make it abundantly clear that he disapproved of the Crown's conduct. In some cases he even excused it.
That left many courtroom observers with the bitter impression that he was one-sided. While I hasten to add that I am not being critical of whatever was in the judge's mind, I cannot excape the fact that it is the appearance - not the reality - of fairness that natives and non-natives have seen and will remember about this trial. In this sense, I do not believe that history will treat this trial kindly.
Taking a look at the dictionary's definition:
Tradition: 1. The passing down of elements of a culture from generation to generation especially by oral tradition. 2.a. A mode of thought or behaviour followed by a people continuously from generation to generation: custom or usage. b. A set of such customs and usage's viewed as a coherent body of precedents influencing the present.
The meaning is pretty clear in most peoples' minds. So when Joe Clark says, at a recent meeting with Chiefs from across Canada (Nov. 27), that the use of force is "not within the context of Canadian tradition", his statements ranks right alongside Ronald Reagan's comment that "in America, there are no poor". Both are examples of double speak in the New World Order.
The derision with which Mr. Clark's statement was greeted by the chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations was from their first hand knowledge of Canadian Tradition. Many remember all too well...Batoche and the Riel "Rebellion", the forced imposition of the Indian Act in the 1880's and the killing of one of the chiefs at Akwesasne, the imprisonment of the chiefs at Oshweken (Six Nations) in the 1920s; including the confiscation of wampum belts and other spiritual and political articles, the outlawing of our ceremonies, the occupation of Akwesasne. We all especially remember the use of the military at Kanehsatake (Oka) and Kahnawake in 1990. Canada's tradition has been to use force when it comes to dealing with the aboriginal people of this land. The violence against us is not confined to the police or the military but includes the psychological undermining of our independence (residential schools, Indian acts, judiciary, media ignorance and bias, etc.). Canada is hard pressed to maintain its image as champion of the oppressed in the rest of the world when it continues to gloss over the realities of oppressions within the borders of Canada.
I Think Mr. Clark was saying that Canada would never come to the defense of First Nations if it means the use of force against another "founding nation".
When Claude Ryan was asked to comment on (heaven forbid, and I do mean Heaven) the movement in Kahnawake towards traditional government, he stated that he was concerned that the community would adopt a "less democratic" form of government than the Indian Act elective system. This attitude epitomizes the whole history of settler/aboriginal relationship that has existed since first contact. It is for the non-Indian to decide what is good for the Indian without the benefit of analysis of what traditional government is or how it works. His knee-jerk reaction comes from a tradition of missionary mentality. There is no other way but the way that they approve. This attitude was prevalent among the Spanish Franciscans who maimed and killed in order to convert the natives in Central and South America. The missions in New France used more subtle ways, such as intrigue and subversion.
Mr. Ryan's comments have another purpose. Plant the seeds of suspicion that traditional government is undemocratic. IF he were able to take the time to study traditional government he would find that the decision making process is based on the ability of the people to be heavily involved. He would find that the people also have a duty and responsiblity to be involved. The people do not give up their powers to a selected few who are not answerable for their actions. Indeed, it is the parliamentary system which is less than democratic. The only time the people have any say in the government is every four or five years when they can cast a ballot. What they "elect" is a kind of dictatorship by a ruling political party that can and does govern without the further consent of the people. Surely there are possibilities of abuse in both the parliamentary and traditional forms of government. The difference is that people under the traditional government have the ability to monitor and change direction at any time without waiting two or five years for an election
A special thank-you to all of the following names who made this first issue possible. Niawenkoh:wa! Nancy Deer, Bonnie Horn, Olive Stacey, Martin Loft, Cindy Terrance, Synesis, Inc. Harold & James, Dave Kramer, Frosty Deere, Philip Deering, Glen French, Randy Peterson, Arnold Goodleaf, Kahnata Industries, a special thank you to the Kanien'kehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center and to all our advertisers.
When people think of winter sports in this part of the world, hockey and skiing generally come to mind first. In the last couple of years though, a group of young men at the Kahnawake Survival School have been hard at work forcing local sports fans to sit up and just maybe take note of a third sport - wrestling.
This year, head coaches Dave Canadian and Danny Stacey have their charges primed and ready to take a serious run at their third straight GMAA wrestlilng championship.
Loaded with veterans such as tri-captains, Ben Pinsonneault, Joel Montour, and Neil Cross, along with past champions Cory McComber, Rick Diabo, and defending two time champion Carl Horn, the team so far has been victorious in their past powerhouse Massey Vanier, tough Royal West Academy, and Howard S. Billings.
In talking to the coaching staff, one gets a feeling of quiet confidence tempered with a realization that the toughest part of their schedule lies ahead of them.
Coach Canadian feels that "If we come into the championship healthy, the other schools, although tough, still h ave to go through us in order to grab the title."
"We've had some injuries with Ben and Chucky McComber missing a good part of the early season workouts and meets, but we've managed to overcome them with quality depth throughout our line up."
Coaches Dave and Danny give much of the credit for the team's success to their graduate assistant coaches Peter Montour, Ryan Rice, Otsitsa Deer, and Mike Canoe. Having them certainly eases some of the workload and allows for more specific coaching to be done.
The next few weeks will be very busy with meets scheduled in domino fashion, consequently excitement and anticipation are building rapidly at the school
General consensus seems to be that the highlight of the regular season will be the dual meet with last year's co-champion and perennial contender, Pierrefonds Comprehensive, but it would be a serious oversight to forget a school such as Selwyn House.
Depth being a strong suit for this year's team, there should be numerous opportunities for friends and family to cheer on our local talent at the championship. Anyone who has attended past championships knows the excitement that can build throughout the grueling day of matches, highlighted by the final set of man to man struggles tht determine the individual and team croawn for the year
See you then!
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