[URBAN NOTE] On the post-Oka Crisis decline of Kanesatake

[rfmcdonald]

Peter Kuitenbrouwer in the National Post last Friday had a depressing article about the continuing disarray of the Mohawk reserve of Kanesatake outside Montréal.

Twenty-five years later, I expected to find a feel-good story of progress and success in Kanesatake. Instead I found a community struggling with poverty, lawlessness and bitterness. These Mohawks may have won the battle at Oka, but they lost the war.

Where the conflict began now stands a lacrosse box, a playing field enclosed by plywood walls, on top of which flutters a Mohawk Warrior flag. Every July 11, a holiday here, locals play the game invented by natives.

But beyond that show of pride, this is now a vulgar strip, like a mini Las Vegas in the woods of Quebec: about two dozen garish shops sell cut-rate cigarettes and tobacco. Although Ottawa confirmed the status of this land as Mohawk with what’s called the Kanesatake Interim Land Base Governance Act there has been no organized handover. Instead, the community was left with a no-mans-land – neither native reserve nor municipal park.

Into the vacuum have stepped native entrepreneurs, who have built one-storey wood shacks where they sell tobacco products smuggled across the border from factories on a Mohawk reserve in upstate New York.

[. . .]

Business with non-native customers seems to be brisk, and locals tell me they employ some Mohawks. Even so, I am told that unemployment is a problem and many young people leave the community.