People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka

J.R. Miller is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada.

During the 11-week standoff at Oka-Kanesatake in the summer of 1990,
journalists York and Pindera spent a lot of time behind Mohawk lines.
They have supplemented their first-hand experience by interviewing 200
people who were involved in the clash and by reading selectively in the
scholarly literature on Iroquois history to produce People of the Pines,
a fast-paced and readable account of the confrontation.

Although the authors do not overtly take sides, there is little doubt
from their account that bungling by non-Natives, especially by leaders
at all three levels of government, was chiefly responsible for the death
of a Quebec policeman and the ensuing strife and damage. Local and
provincial politicians who forced a confrontation with the Mohawk of
Kanesatake over “the pines,” a forested area that the Mohawk claimed
and the Town of Oka owned on paper, showed little appreciation of the
tenacity with which the Indians of the area had pushed for recognition
of their rights to territory for well over a century.

Politicians and bureaucrats from the two senior levels of government
manifested a similar obtuseness. Ottawa and Quebec seemed oblivious to
the restiveness that prevailed in Quebec’s Mohawk reserves of
Kahnawake and Akwesasne, and they showed an astonishing lack of
awareness of the ability of the militant Mohawk Warrior Society to
organize resistance both in “the pines” and at the Mercier Bridge
that links south-shore Kahnawake and Montreal. York and Pindera depict
unflinchingly the purblindness of non-Native politicians and the
determination of Mohawk defenders of disputed territory—an explosive
combination whose consequences Canadians are still attempting to
understand and accommodate.

People of the Pines is quite simply the best of the half-dozen studies
of Canada’s “Indian summer” that are now available. York and
Pindera provide the most accessible and comprehensible account of that
11 weeks of agony to be had.