[LINK] "'If you marry out, you move out'"

[rfmcdonald]

Besides being terribly discriminatory the news of the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve in Québec to expel non-residents of insufficiently pure blood quantum is terribly ironic, since the previous trend has been for the Canadian government to strip deny members of First Nations as Status Indians because, whatever their culture, they're partially non-First Nations heritage. Preserving the community's all well and good, but successive purges of the population--including, as one woman says, of people who contribute to the community's life--isn't a good way of keeping it dynamic, to say nothing of the human rights issues involved.

As the Mohawk band council in Kahnawake prepares to post names of non-aboriginals issued eviction notices last week, local reaction yesterday revealed mixed feelings about the evictions - even though some felt they may have been necessary.

The only thing there seemed to be any agreement on is that the interracial couples now being forced to separate or move out of the community together "should have known better."

"Nobody in this town can say they didn't know that this would happen if they married a non-native," said a Mohawk woman in her 60s sitting at a card table at the community's Golden Age Club.

"We were all taught from when we were children: If you marry out, you move out," the woman said as four of her friends, all Mohawk women of about the same age, nodded their heads in agreement.

[. . .]

Over the years, there have been at least five such separate actions, in 1880, 1939, 1971, 1973 and 1981. Delisle said this current eviction undertaking was predictable.

Although a widow now, one Mohawk woman at the Golden Age Club yesterday who had married a white man said she was "lucky" she did so before 1981, when a moratorium on mixed marriages prohibited non-aboriginals who married Mohawks from residing in Kahnawake. As a result, she was not forced to leave.

But even without the 1981 moratorium, she, like the others, said they had always known the potential cost of marrying outside. Their parents had witnessed the upheaval caused by eviction notices in the 1930s and, they themselves remembered the emotional turmoil of similar eviction notices issued in 1971 and 1973.

One woman recalled how she had refused to let her son, who was 15 at the time, into the house when he came home with a white girl from Châteauguay. "He thanks me for it now," she said.