Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) by Glen Sean Coulthard

Author:Glen Sean Coulthard [Coulthard, Glen Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
ISBN: 9781452942438
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Managing the Crisis: Reconciliation and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

The federal government was forced to establish RCAP in the wake of two national crises that erupted in the tumultuous “Indian summer” of 1990. The first involved the legislative stonewalling of the Meech Lake Accord by Cree Manitoba Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Elijah Harper. The Meech Lake Accord was a failed constitutional amendment package negotiated in 1987 by the then prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, and the ten provincial premiers. The process was the federal government’s attempt to bring Quebec “back in” to the constitutional fold in the wake of the province’s refusal to accept the constitutional repatriation deal of 1981, which formed the basis of the the Constitution Act, 1982. Indigenous opposition to Meech Lake was staunch and vocal, in large part due to the fact that the process failed to recognize the political concerns and aspirations of First Nations.52 In a disruptive act of legislative protest, Elijah Harper was able to prevent the province from endorsing the package within the three-year ratification deadline stipulated in the Constitution Act. The agreement subsequently tanked because it failed to gain the required ratification of all ten provinces, which is required of all proposed constitutional amendments.53

The second crisis involved a seventy-eight-day armed “standoff” beginning on July 11, 1990, between the Mohawk nation of Kanesatake, the Quebec provincial police (Sûreté du Québec, or SQ), and the Canadian armed forces near the town of Oka, Quebec. On June 30, 1990, the municipality of Oka was granted a court injunction to dismantle a peaceful barricade erected by the people of Kanesatake in an effort to defend their sacred lands from further encroachment by non-Native developers. The territory in question was slotted for development by a local golf course, which planned on extending nine holes onto land the Mohawks had been fighting to have recognized as their own for almost three hundred years.54 Eleven days later, on July 11, one hundred heavily armed members of the SQ stormed the community. The police invasion culminated in a twenty-four-second exchange of gunfire that killed SQ Corporal Marcel Lemay.55 In a display of solidarity, the neighboring Mohawk nation of Kahnawake set up their own barricades, including one that blocked the Mercier Bridge leading into the greater Montreal area. Galvanized by the Mohawk resistance, Indigenous peoples from across the continent followed suit, engaging in a diverse array of solidarity actions that ranged from information leafleting to the establishment of peace encampments to the erection of blockades on several major Canadian transport corridors, both road and rail. Although polls conducted during the standoff showed some support by non-Native Canadians outside of Quebec for the Mohawk cause,56 most received their information about the so-called “Oka Crisis” through the corporate media, which overwhelmingly represented the event as a “law and order” issue fundamentally undermined by Indigenous peoples’ uncontrollable anger and resentment.57

For many Indigenous people and their supporters, however, these two national crises were seen as the inevitable culmination of a

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