Retyped for your information is a recent newspaper article on the present situation at Oka as well as an article giving some insights into the history of relationship between colonial powers and the Iroquois Confederacy. ************************************************************************ MOHAWKS FEAR ARMY IN OFFING Calgary Herald, August 7, 1990 MONTREAL (CP) - A lawyer acting as an adviser to Mohawks manning barricades in Oka and Kahnawake says the Canadian and Quebec governments are setting the stage for military intervention to end the land-claims deadlock. On Sunday night, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa gave Mohawk negotiators until Wednesday to return to the bargaining table or face unspecified "appropriate steps." "If Bourassa and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney are running true to form, they are planning to declare a state of emergency in Oka and send in the army," native rights lawyer James O'Reilly said Monday. He said military intervention would fall under the Emergencies Act, which would give the government the right to call in the army if the safety of individuals or the security of the state is in danger. "The Quebec and Canadian governments have been preparing the public to believe that such a situation exists in Oka so they can use the full force of the Emergencies Act against the Mohawks." Asked why Quebec and Ottawa would take such a drastic step, O'Reilly said that hardline elements in the cabinets of both Bourassa and Mulroney have taken over the negotiating process with the Mohawks. "Many of these people have become paranoid about Indians and they are fooling around with this situation to suit their own ends." O'Reilly wouldn't single out any cabinet ministers by name. The Mohawks - who have been blocking Highway 344 outside Oka, just 30 kilometres west of Montreal, since July 11 - said they will ignore Bourassa's 48 hour ultimatum to resume negotiations. "We will not be bullied by the power and arrogance of Quebec. We never have and we never will," said Ellen Gabriel on Monday morning, reading from a prepared statement. In addition, the Mohawks have also sent a letter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney asking him to get personally involved in the negotiations. Their conditions for resuming talks are free passage of food, clothing and medical supplies to Kahnesatake and Kahnawake; unrestricted access for spiritual leaders and advisers to the two territories; and the presence of an international team of observers. Helen Fisher, spokeswoman for the Department of Indian Affairs, said Prime Minister Brian Mulroney will likely make a statement in the next few days. "We will not negotiate with the Mohawks until arms are laid down and the barricades are removed," Fisher said. Asked what Ottawa would do if Quebec City requested military intervention, Fisher said: "It's not something we can speculate about. It's not the Canadian way to resolve disputes." The dispute centres on a proposed extension to a golf course, on land which the Mohawks claim is theirs. The standoff began on July 11 when Quebec provincial police stormed a barricade the Mohawks had put up four months earlier. A police officer was killed in the raid. ************************************************************************ The Globe and Mail, FACTS AND ARGUMENTS Friday, August 3, 1990 The Mohawks were once part of a mighty confederation that won from the British a respect that must be renewed today if events at Oka are not to recur A MEETING OF NATIONS by Michael Jackson It is more than an accident of history that the Mohawk Nation, one of the five founding nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, has focused national and international attention on issues of aboriginal rights through its actions at Oka, Quebec. In the eighteenth century, the Iroquois Confederacy, through a brilliant combination of diplomatic, trade and military alliances, exercised enormous power and influence not only among other Indian nations but with European colonial empires. As the major military power situated between the rival British and French colonies, the Confederacy played a critical role in shaping the colonial history of North America. The Mohawks, in their original homeland, were the most eastern nation of the Confederacy, and as "the Keepers of the Eastern Door" had special responsibilities for relations with both the coastal Algonquin tribes and the eastern colonial colonies. The first Mohawk trade and peace treaties were made with the Dutch in the early seventeenth century in the short-lived colony of New Netherland. After the British conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the Mohawks entered into their first treaty with the British colonial authorities. Significantly, in light of the events in Oka, the treaty dealt primarily with punishing of trans-national crimes and recognized the mutual independence and juridical equality of the contracting parties. Over the course of the next century, the Iroquois Confederacy made treaties with both the French and the old British colonial governments, particularly New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. Legal and political relationships between the Confederacy and the British centred on "the Covenant Chain," which symbolically linked the Confederacy and the British in an alliance between equals. By the mid-eighteenth century the Confederacy was viewed as the lynch pin in the security of the respective colonial empires. Iroquois support, to either the French or the British, threatened the stability if not the existence of the other colonial empire. Agreements between the Iroquois and the British and French respecting war and peace, military alliances, neutrality, trade and land rights were matters of special attention and were carefully recorded. The records provided the basis upon which Britain and France formulated their Indian policies and their competing claims to territorial sovereignty in North America. Several very important features emerge from Covenant Chain treaties. The protocol of treaty-making was largely based on Iroquois diplomatic conventions. Treaty councils at Albany and Philadelphia often went on for many weeks, it being an Iroquois convention that any proposals made by the British would not be responded to until the next day. These treaty councils were usually held in the great colonial meeting halls and were attended by the political and social Who's Who of colonial society. During some of these treaty councils Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of American confederation, first observed the complex and sophisticated Iroquois governmental and diplomatic processes at work. The Iroquois system of participatory democracy, with its elaborate checks and balances to prevent abuse of power, was an important model for men like Franklin and George Washington in founding the American constitution. The Covenant Chain was dependent upon the British recognizing Indian lands and institutions. In 1753, failure by British colonial authorities to heed repeated Iroquois grievances about the disregard of Iroquois land rights by colonial land speculators - aided by colonial authorities - led the Mohawk chief, Hendrick, to tell the British that the Iroquois regarded the Covenant Chain as having been broken. This dramatic announcement, coming as the final countdown between Britain and France drew near in the form of the Seven Years War, galvanized the authorities in London into action. They adopted a policy aimed at recognizing Indian land and political rights. With the defeat of France by the British - a defeat that depended at critical junctures upon Iroquois military support - this policy led to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This has been called the Magna Carta of Indian rights. It expressly pledged the British Crown to protect Indian lands that had not been ceded to the Crown and reaffirmed the treaty process as the only way for colonial authorities to acquire Indian land. The Royal Proclamation and the Covenant Chain treaty process have continuing significance today for Canadian confederation. The Mohawks and aboriginal peoples across Canada have issued a clarion call that has both history and justice on its side. They want renewal of nation-to- nation negotiation, recognition of aboriginal rights to self-government and covenants of confederation that guarantee them the rights and resources upon which their societies and communities can reverse the terrible legacy of colonization. As long as that clarion call is unanswered, and regardless of what happens following the failure of Meech Lake, Canadian Confederation involving all of its founding nations will continue to be a vision unfulfilled, and whatever happens at Oka, the barricades to true nationhood will remain in place. (Michael Jackson is a professor of law at the University of British Columbia Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Natives in Canada, a special report of the Canadian Bar Association.) ************************************************************************ For more information contact web:car by e-mail or in writing Aboriginal Rights Support Group Committee Against Racism P.O. Box 3085, Station B Calgary, Alberta T2M 4L6