‘Colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions’
The Narwhal: Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force.
“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”
In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations.
In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.”
In a conversation with The Narwhal, Gabriel discussed the intentions behind the book, what’s changed (and what hasn’t) since 1990, and her vision for the future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In the book, you discuss the biased and incomplete media coverage during the 1990 crisis in Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke. How can media do a better job of covering acts of Indigenous resistance and Indigenous land rights?
Learn about Canada’s real genocidal history. That’s one of the frustrations that I had, and that many of my community members had about the media, is that sometimes they had no clue. You know, there was the assumption that we didn’t exist anymore, that everything was taken care of, everything was settled, right? Media just took that at face value. But armed resistance is not new to Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island. It was the way of the land when the colonizers came.
So the approach by journalists was very naive and racist and ignorant, especially the French media. Overall [the media] is just a propaganda machine, as far as I’m concerned, for Canada and the provinces and the corporations. And we’re deemed to be the radical, ridiculous ones for defending our rights. So they didn’t see our rights as human beings, they didn’t see our rights to self-determination.
All the commissions and reports that had gone out — from the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples — there are recommendations for everyone at every level to learn the truth about how Canada was formed. But we see today that this is still not the case. They’re still teaching history the way I learned it in the ’70s: that we’re savages, and all these stupid stereotypes. So I think the media has a responsibility to search for the truth, and to dig deeper.
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