IV: SEPARATING SEPARATION
In the summer of 1990, Quebec lived through another big traumatic uprising of a character that nationalists have neglected to take into account in the whole period of glory of their Quebecois nationalism. When a golf course in the village of Oka, a suburb of Montreal, planned an extension into the neighboring pine forest of Kanehsatake, in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, the Mohawks reacted strongly by blocking the main road linking their reserve to the French-Canadian village of Oka. In solidarity, the community of Kahnawà:ke, another Mohawk reserve in the area, blocked a bridge that led to the Island of Montreal and that passed through their territory. In the shootout that ensued, a police officer was found dead. The police retreated in panic, and their vehicles were set on fire and piled on the barricades.
Thus the Canadian Army took the place of the police, as is often the case in conflicts with Indigenous populations in America (Wounded Knee in 1973, Gustafsen Lake in 1995, etc). Faced with Natives, no half-measures: the foreign and impenetrable character of their resistance forces the colonial society to treat them as a foreign nation, which could not be overcome by a simple police operation. In this case, the Oka Crisis saw the Canadian Army encircle the Mohawk barricades with tanks, mortars, machine guns, and helicopters, until their adversary, at the end of their food supplies, was exhausted.
Now, in the surrounding Quebecois society, this crisis of almost three months would be the scene of a strong reaction of suburbanites, who responded to the blockade of the Mercier Bridge by staging racist riots, burning the effigies of Native people, and assaulting Mohawk families who took flight during the conflict with stones. These demonstrations of racial hatred, encouraged by certain “patriotic” media outlets, revealed to what point Quebecois society is keen on well-functioning infrastructure. Under the slogans “Masters of our own home!” (which had first served the nationalization of electricity) and “Quebec for the Quebecois,” Quebecois nationalism in this way turned into anti-Indigenous reaction, assuming—as far as possible from separatism—the point of view of a majority society bent on suppressing all dispute.
If the course of the history of revolutionary independentism ruptured in October 1970, it was in 1990, during the Oka Crisis, that the parentheses definitively closed. Confronted with an internal separatism, the Quebecois people reacted with a violent tension, accompanied by outpourings of racist rage and cheers for the police and the army. The Quebecois minority, finding a constant in the history of anticolonial nationalisms, inept in its language and profoundly lulled by feelings of victimization, transformed all the more easily into a mass of hatred and resentment when faced with another difference that challenged its hard-won national unity.
On the anarchivistic level, the study of the Oka Crisis has brought us to explore the existence, within the province of Quebec, of territories that already have a de facto autonomous existence, separate from the majoritarian society. Vast and numerous territories, extending far beyond densely populated zones, drawing a completely different geography made up of reserves, hunting grounds, and contested zones, whose consistency—unlike national territory—is fiercely heterogeneous.
Not only are there a good dozen Indigenous “nations” that cut across “Quebecois” territory, but these nations break down into more than fifty communities, each having its own dialect and habits and customs. Moreover, these communities often find themselves separated into a number of different factions, at least in part because of the effect of colonial blackmail. The coexistence of traditional structures of governance and state-imposed band councils as its unique agent and interlocutor form the matrix of this Indigenous factionalism, further complicated by the historical stratification of multiple forms of cultural and religious reconciliation. In the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawà:ke, for instance, one counts no less than four longhouses (traditional community centers) for a population of less than ten thousand inhabitants, some following the Iroquois Kaianerekowa (The Great Law of Peace), others the code of Handsome Lake marked by Quaker influence—and this doesn’t even include the Christian churches and the official Band Council. Decidedly, separatist multiplicity—a double-edged sword—is inseparable from Indigenous culture.
This, at least, tells us the history of the American continent, which one can reread as a single push to impose a homogenous conception of territory and government on Indigenous populations that are resolutely fragmented and, subsequently, ungovernable. Few historians today dare to affirm the validity of any of the treaties formerly passed between the heavily armed colonial forces and a handful of so-called “chiefs” who were handpicked and awarded the title on the spot.
There could be no central government on the territory of most of the northern pre-Colombian Indigenous peoples for the simple reason that the territory was conceived of as anything but a kingdom, on account of an impossibility that was as much logistical as symbolic (the two going together). From one end of the continent to another—on Turtle Island—one phrase continues to ring true: “the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth.” Some add: “as we belong to our mother,” the feminine principle having, in the territory of a matrilineal people, an intrinsic connection with the earth, such that the exclusive right to make decisions that concern terrestrial life are reserved for women, men playing the protective role of the sun.
First of all, among the Iroquois, matrilineality means that the man, once married, must move to the family of his spouse and all their children belong to this maternal home through the clan system—which constitutes just another level of separation. Based on the maternal house, the clan indicates family belonging through animal spirits: turtle, bear, and wolf being the three main clan families in several northern nations. These animal figures carry not only a symbolic line of descent, but a veritable ethos, implemented by the traditional systems of government as a specific responsibility vis-à-vis their communities. Accordingly, the bears have the tendency to be in charge of provisions, where the wolves have a penchant for politics. But the most interesting is without doubt the fashion in which the clans, beyond their filiation and exogamous function, intersect not only the communities themselves, but also linguistic families. Thus an Anishinaabe beaver is bound by a spiritual affinity with an Iroquois of the same sub-clan, bypassing their national, cultural, and genetic belonging: ethical affinity supplants ethnicity.
As we see it, far from a modern conception associating territoriality with community confinement, the essentially fragmentary character of the Indigenous conception of “a people” is associated with a large capacity for mobility. Just as the gendered polarization is not necessarily associated with sex, territorial belonging is not limited to lineage. Very much to the contrary, the way in which Indigenous peoples name themselves overcomes the genetic divide, moving it to the level of their traditional mode of living, which embraces the specific uses of a given territory, in all its shapes and forms. To the generic name of “veritable human beings” (Onkwehonwe in Mohawk, Anishinaabe in Algonquin, etc.) follows a definition linking them to the soil: the Mohawks are “those of the land of flint,” as the Senecas are “those of the big hill,” the Oneidas “those of the standing stone.” Thus the people does not just designate the territorial fraction of a generic species, of which indeed only the white men—these souls without bodies—are excluded. At this point, and from this perspective, it can no longer be a question of “Nation,” a concept that emerges from birth. The blood-right is invalidated by the earth (mother), to which human beings belong.
It is necessary to take the full measure of what differentiates this nomadic conception of territory, defined by usage without claims to property, from modern nationalism,