Entering the War Zone: A Mohawk Perspective on Resisting Invasions

J.R. Miller is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of
Indian–White Relations in Canada, and co-editor of The Canadian
Historical Review.

Donna Goodleaf, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, provides a participant-observer
account of the standoff at Oka (or Kanesatake) in the summer of 1990.
She has supplemented the observations she made, as she worked on one of
the many committees the Mohawk formed to defend themselves, with
selective reading in published materials to provide an insider’s
account of the confrontation between the Mohawk and both the Quebec
provincial police and the Canadian armed forces.

The result is powerful as a statement of the outrage felt by an Native
group that has long experienced mistreatment, but weak as either
historical account or analytical commentary on the present situation.
Goodleaf is most moving and effective when she is recounting what life
was like on the Mohawk side of the barricades during the crisis,
although her first-hand experience and the resulting portrait are much
fuller and more persuasive for events at Kahnawake than for those at
Kanesatake. For example, her fifth chapter, “Life Behind the
Barricades,” is moving and evocative, portraying especially well the
important contributions of Mohawk and other Native women during the
crisis in both locations. Similarly, the chapter outlining the response
of federal and provincial governments does a respectable job of
dissecting the moral cowardice and prevarication demonstrated by both
Ottawa and Quebec City.

Where the book falls down, however, is in failing to provide a
well-founded and persuasive analysis of why these events occurred and
what they signified. The early background chapters display a shaky grasp
of Canadian history, even those aspects that bear directly on the
experience of the Mohawk north of the United States. Another defect is
the refusal in the background chapters to outline the internal divisions
of the Mohawk communities—Longhouse religious traditionalists vs.
Christians, pro-gambling and anti-gambling elements, and supporters of
elective vs. hereditary government—even though some of these
differences helped to bring on the crisis, and even though the author
herself refers to aspects of them later.

The strength of its first-hand observations and the weakness of its
analysis mean that Entering the War Zone should be treated as a primary
source on the Oka crisis rather than an authoritative reflection on its
roots and significance.