The Inconvenient Indian (28 page)

The tribe immediately filed a number of injunctions to stop the project, and, at the same time, in a rather savvy move, hired two well-known engineers, Arthur Morgan, who had been chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Barton Jones, who had been responsible for the building of the Norris Dam within the TVA complex. Morgan and Jones were to look at the proposed dam to see if there was an alternative site that would serve the project without the breaking the treaty and forcing the Seneca to move. Morgan found such a site, but the Army Corps of Engineers was not keen on changing their plans, and instead of looking at the new site in any detail, they forged ahead, pushing the dam project through Congress and condemning the Seneca reservation by right of eminent domain.

In 1961, the Seneca went as far as to write President John F. Kennedy, requesting that he terminate the project. I’m guessing that the Seneca supposed that Kennedy might be a sympathetic ear. After all, he had made all sorts of encouraging noises about civil rights and had lectured the Russians and other countries on the need to honour treaties.

Just not Indian treaties.

Alvin Josephy, in his book
Now That the Buffalo’s Gone
, argues that the Seneca had a large number of supporters in Congress who tried to get the dam site moved so the Seneca could stay where they were, but that the forces massed against the Seneca, led by the Army Corp of Engineers, were simply too great to overcome.

I don’t doubt that Josephy is correct. But I also know enough about money and politics to say that much of the public support for the Seneca and a good deal of the hand-wringing on the part of politicians was probably just for show. Treaty or no, I can’t imagine that many folks in Washington really gave a damn whether or not Seneca land wound up on the bottom of a lake.

I know that’s a rather cynical attitude, but, if you look at the history of dam building in North America, you might be surprised to discover how many excellent dam sites just happen to have been found on Indian land.

Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.

Three.

The year is 1717. Voltaire is sent to the Bastille because his rather edgy writing makes powerful people uncomfortable, a massive earthquake strikes Antigua, Guatemala, and France gives a portion of land along the Ottawa River to the Sulpician
Missionary Society. France doesn’t own the land, but for the French Crown, such matters are neither here nor there.

The gift did not sit well with the Mohawk, since the land in the French grant was their land, and for the next 151 years, this piece of real estate would be a thorn in the side of Mohawk and Sulpician relations.

In 1868, a year after Confederation had overtaken Canada, Joseph Onasakenrat, a chief of the Mohawk, wrote a letter to the Sulpicians demanding the return of the land within eight days. The Sulpicians ignored the warning, and Onasakenrat led a march on the Sulpician seminary, weapons in hand. After a short and rather unpleasant confrontation, local authorities arrived and forced the Mohawk to retreat. Then, in 1936, the Sulpicians sold the property and left the area. The Mohawk protested the sale, and again, the protest fell on deaf ears.

Twenty-three years later, in 1959, a nine-hole golf course, Club de golf d’Oka, was built on the land, right next to the band’s cemetery. This time the Mohawk launched a legal protest, hoping that the courts would provide them with some relief from White encroachment. The authorities and the courts dillied back and dallied forth, and in the meantime, the developers went ahead with the construction of the course, and happy golfers began roaming up and down the fairways in their little carts.

Finally, in 1977, the Mohawk filed an official land claim with the federal Office of Native Claims in an attempt to recapture the land. Nine years later, the claim was rejected because it failed to meet certain legal criteria. Which was a fancy way of saying that the Mohawk couldn’t prove that they owned the land, at least not in the way that Whites recognized ownership.

For the next eleven years, relations between the town of Oka and the Mohawk were spotty. Then, in 1989, the mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, announced the exciting news that the old golf course was going to be expanded into an eighteen-hole course, and that sixty luxury condominiums would also be built. In order to manage this expansion, the town prepared to move on the Mohawk, taking more of their land, levelling a forest known among the Mohawk as “the Pines,” and building new fairways and condominiums on top of the band cemetery.

That did it. After 270-odd years of dealing with European arrogance and indifference, after trying every legal avenue available, the Mohawk had had enough. On March 10, 1990, Natives began occupying the Pines, protecting their trees and their graveyard. Their land.

Five months later, in the heat of July, the confrontation became a shooting war. Neither the provincial government nor the federal government wanted to deal with the situation. Jean Ouellette had no intention of talking with the Mohawk and said so on television. Instead, he insisted that the province send in the Sûreté du Quebec, and in they came, storming the barricades that the Mohawk had erected with tear gas and flash-bang grenades. Shots were fired. No one knows who fired first. Not that it would have made much difference. And when the smoke cleared, Corporal Marcel Lemay had been mortally wounded and a Mohawk elder, Joe Armstrong, had suffered what would be a fatal heart attack trying to escape an angry mob.

So began the Oka Crisis.

Very quickly the Sûreté was reinforced by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the RCMP was joined by
around 2,500 members of the Canadian military. Jets arrived, along with tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The Mohawk were joined by other Natives, and for seventy-eight days the two sides remained locked in a standoff.

To say that Oka could have been avoided is an understatement. John Ciaccia, Quebec’s Minister of Indian Affairs at the time, had realized the potential for disaster months before matters got out of hand. Ciaccia had urged the federal government to buy the disputed land from Oka and give it to the Kanesatake Mohawk. Of course, the Kanesatake Mohawk already had Aboriginal title to the land, had had title to the land long before France gave it to the Sulpicians, but Ciaccia’s idea was, given the circumstances, a reasonable compromise.

But rather than do something creative or at least intelligent, local, provincial, and federal politicians stood around and pointed fingers at each other. And did nothing.

The confrontation at Oka cost well over $200 million. In 1997, some seven years after the fact, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development quietly purchased the disputed land for $5.2 million and “gave” it to the Mohawk for their use. At the discretion of the federal government, of course.

Anyone with a calculator can figure out that it would have been $195 million cheaper to have bought the land earlier, as the confrontation began to take shape. Of course, if the Mohawk land claim had been settled in 1977, the costs would have been minimal. Hardly more than a good dinner and a movie. But from Ottawa’s point of view, Oka was never about the money. Or justice, for that matter.

Of the confrontation at Oka, Georges Erasmus, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations at the time, said, “This is not
going to be the last battle. This is not the last stand. This could be the first stand.”

Four.

The Northwest coast is one of my favourite places in the world. I’ve spent a good deal of time along the northern California coast, the Oregon and Washington coasts, and, in particular, the coast of British Columbia. I like the fog and the gloomy, cool weather, and I have a long-lived love affair with the ocean that makes me prone to multi-syllable adjectives. But if I were required to find a single noun to describe this part of the planet, it would be “fish.”

Salmon. In fact, many of the tribes in the Northwest refer to themselves as the “Salmon People.”

The salmon have been coming up the rivers along the Northwest coast for millennia. They are one of the staple foods and figure heavily in the language and the cultural life of the Native people along these waterways.

By 1854 Europeans had settled in numbers in the Puget Sound area of Washington Territory. In that year, the territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, was able to impose a treaty—the Treaty of Medicine Creek—on the Nisqually, the Puyallup, the Steilacoom, the Squawshik, the Squaxin Island, and other western tribes, a treaty that forced the tribes to give up most of their good farming land in exchange for $32,500 and the promise that they could continue to fish. One of the Nisqually chiefs, a man named Leschi, objected to the treaty and the loss of land. Skirmishes broke out between Indians and Whites, and the conflict turned into what history likes to call the Puget Sound War.

Puget Sound War sounds more dramatic that it was. Few people died on either side, but Stevens, outraged that the Nisqually
would resist his land grab and angered over the deaths of two of his militiamen, sent troops to capture Leschi. No one knew for sure if Leschi had anything to do with the deaths of the two men, but it didn’t matter. Leschi’s real crime was his resistance to White desires, and, on February 19, 1858, he was hanged.

Whites were quick to take over the land that the Treaty of Medicine Creek had given them and slow to honour their promises, particularly the promise about fishing rights, and for the next hundred years, the matter of fishing rights would be a continuing irritant to Indian-White relations.

Any question about fishing rights should have been settled by the Medicine Creek Treaty, and, if not by that treaty, then by two U.S. Supreme Court cases,
United States v. Winans
(1905) and
Suefert Brothers Co. v. United States
(1919). In both these cases, the central question was whether Indians had access to the rivers of the Northwest and whether they could fish as they had been accustomed to fishing. And in each of the cases, the court ruled that Native people indeed had those rights.

Yet in 1945, a fourteen-year-old Nisqually named Billy Frank, Jr., was arrested for fishing on the Nisqually River. Frank had the right to fish, guaranteed by treaty. That right had been upheld in at least two Supreme Court cases, but for the next twenty-nine years that right would be ignored by Washington State officials.

Maybe they were fans of Andrew Jackson.

Just in case anyone has forgotten, Georgia, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, was hell-bent on removing the Cherokee from the state. Then, in 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court under John Marshall, in
Worcester v. Georgia
, ruled that states had no power or authority to pass laws that affected “domestic, dependent” Indian Nations.
That decision should have put Georgia’s plans on hold, but Andrew Jackson, who was president at the time and sympathetic to Georgia, pushed ahead with the forced removal of the Cherokee anyway. “Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson is credited with saying, “now let him enforce it.”

But perhaps Washington State officials weren’t thinking of Jackson. Perhaps they just decided, like Jackson, that when it came to a matter of land and natural resources, a bunch of Indians, treaty or no, Supreme Court decisions or no, weren’t going to set the rules of engagement.

In 1954, a Puyallup named Bob Satiacum was arrested for illegally fishing along the Puyallup River. He was convicted, but, in 1957, on appeal, the Washington State Supreme Court overturned the conviction. However, the matter of who could fish and who controlled the fishing was far from settled, and in no time at all, the rivers of the Northwest became the site of “fish-ins,” as tribes pushed to have their fishing rights recognized and reaffirmed.

During these “fish-ins,” Indians went fishing with a vengeance. Game wardens arrested them, destroyed their equipment, and confiscated their boats. While the Indians were fishing and the wardens were arresting, courts of various jurisdictions were busy turning out a flurry of rulings. In 1960, the Pierce County Superior Court ruled that the Puyallup tribe didn’t exist. Another ruling denied the existence of the Puyallup reservation. In 1963, in
Washington v. McCoy
, the court upheld the right of the state to subject Indians to reasonable and necessary regulations.

The fishing wars escalated quickly. Hollywood celebrities such as Marlon Brando, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Dick Gregory came to the Northwest to help call attention to Indian fishing rights.
The National Indian Youth Council showed up. Many of the fishing protests were led by the Survival of American Indians Association (SAIA), an organization formed out of the dispute itself.

Neither side was willing to back down. Native people wanted their fishing rights as guaranteed by treaty. But neither the Department of Fish and Game nor the state’s sports fishery associations were willing to allow the power to regulate any part of the fishery slip through their fingers. One of the fears voiced in newspaper articles and on radio talk shows was that Native fishers would ruin the fishery by overfishing. Little was said about the destruction to the fishery by foreign offshore trawlers with their factory ships, or the army of sports fishers who waited in ambush at the mouth of the river each year for the salmon to return.

The idea was that Indians had no business competing with the commercial and sports fishery. This was never said out loud. It was just in the air. Certainly, this was the attitude of the Department of Fish and Game. And as Indians pushed to secure their treaty rights to the salmon, a strange dance began. Indians would push off in their boats and set their nets in the river, all of which, under the terms of the Medicine Creek Treaty, was legal. Game wardens would arrest, fine, and jail the fishers and confiscate their boats and nets. The Indians would go to court, and the court would throw the government’s case out. The Indians would claim their boats and nets and go back on the river.

But the arrests and fines and court costs took their toll. Boats and nets were never returned in a timely manner, and, many times, they would somehow sustain damage during their impoundment. As soon as the Indians got back on the river, the game wardens
would arrest them once more, and the great legal mandala would begin to turn again.