BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010)

by S. da Silva

In 1990, Canada was taken to the brink of civil war for what on the surface appeared to be about a golf course and some sacred trees.  What was actually at stake, beyond the surface of things, was the fate of a nation, one that had suffered two and a half centuries of the colonial theft of their land, and was no longer going to take it.

This summer marks 20 years since the armed standoff between  Mohawk Warriors and the Canadian Armed Forces near Oka, Quebec, a small Quebec town whose mayor at the time, Jean Ouellette, was trying to push through plans for the expansion of a golf course and the construction of condominiums.  The land in question, however, had for decades, if not centuries, been the subject of a land claim upheld by the Mohawk nation of Kanehsatake, whose ancestral graves and grove of pine trees held to be sacred were situated on the land. Read more…

BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010)

by J.D. Benjamin

The 23-member Iroquois Nationals team was forced to miss out on playing the Lacrosse World Championships in Manchester last month after British, American, and Canadian officials refused to recognize the sovereign right of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to issue their own passports.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations or Iroquois, includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations and has territory on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.

The Haudenosaunee first issued their own passport in the 1920s for one of their members to attend a League of Nations conference in Geneva. In 1977, the Confederacy reached an agreement with the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries to accept the passports as valid travel documents. Since then, delegations and individual members of the Haudenosaunee have traveled to various countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia using the passports. Read more…

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Kitiganik, Rapid Lake, Algonquin Territory / – On August 12, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake will protest and boycott a nomination poll for Indian Act band elections that the Department of Indian Affairs is unilaterally forcing on their community.

The Quebec Police, the Sûreté du Québec, will be guarding the polling stations in the community’s territory and have threatened to arrest anyone who tries to interfere or set up blockades. Read more…