Mohawks Speculate That Violence Could Damage Their Cause : Canada: Golf course standoff may end without more bloodshed. But Indians wonder who will lead them to their goals of land and self-government.

When Doreen Cross, a 34-year-old Mohawk, was growing up in this once-quiet Quebec village, she used to hear again and again that the white man had stolen vast tracts of land from the Indians.

“They’ve taken all kinds of rights away from us,” she asserted.

Today, armed Indians in Oka have taken a stand against the whites to reclaim a small part of that land, but Cross finds herself with mixed feelings about that.

On Wednesday morning, she woke up to the sound of gunfire outside her house; on Thursday, when she went out with her 10-year-old son to buy some meat and milk, she had to run a gauntlet of five police roadblocks and was finally told that she couldn’t bring the groceries home. Cross wasn’t so sure she wanted to go home anyway.

“It’s scary,” she said, looking down the road toward where her house stood, beyond a phalanx of policemen in bulletproof vests and a blockade of camouflaged Mohawks, toting semi-automatic rifles.

“They say they’re traditionalists,” added her fellow Mohawk, Diane Gaspe, 30, eyeing the Mohawks ahead. “But with all these guns? That’s not part of the traditions at all.”

Cross and Gaspe’s ambivalence reflects a generalized mood of introspection among Canadian Indians today. After more than 100 years of life under the Indian Act, a federal code written by whites, Indians in Canada see reason to hope that a new social order is coming their way. But what order? Indians say they know white officials don’t represent their values; what they don’t agree on is who does.

In Quebec, in particular, Indian political thinking these days is influenced by the surrounding French Canadian quest for a new arrangement with English Canada. Earlier this summer, natives here watched intently as French Quebecers fought for a constitutional amendment giving special powers to the province. The amendment failed--due, in large part, to opposition by the Cree Indians of Manitoba--but it made Quebec’s Mohawks wonder: If the Francophones could claim a special status, why couldn’t we?

This climate of political ferment provided a backdrop to the violence and tension that hit this week in placid Oka, a village where several hundred French-speaking whites and Mohawk-speaking Indians normally coexist in a state of unusual harmony.

A gun battle broke out here Wednesday when police in full SWAT gear rushed a barricade where Indians were trying to keep developers from felling a lofty stand of pines and expanding a golf course. The Indians say the forest land is theirs. One policeman was killed in the fusillade, reinforcements were rushed in on both sides, and the police and Indians have been in a standoff in Oka ever since.

Meanwhile, Mohawk sympathizers have barricaded a bridge leading over the St. Lawrence River into Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, about 25 miles from Oka. Traffic has been cut off since then, and the militants are threatening to blow up the bridge if the police rush the Mohawks of Oka again.

The standoff may end without further bloodshed. Quebec’s Indian Affairs Minister John Cuccia has been called in to negotiate a settlement, and he expressed optimism Friday about the talks, without describing their content.

But Mohawks are already wondering whether the militancy in Oka will deal a blow to the very cause that it was meant to further: the cherished goals of large-scale land transfers to, and self-government for, native Canadians.

“It’s very, very difficult for us to imagine any sort of land negotiations (with federal officials), with these stupid people ruining it for us,” says Lori Jacobs, a Mohawk journalist from Kahnawake, an Indian reservation south of Montreal whose militant residents are helping the Oka Mohawks.

By “stupid people,” Jacobs was referring not to the peaceable Oka Mohawks who first barricaded the golf course project back in March, but to the well-armed members of the Warrior Society, a group that has moved in to help them. The Warrior Society appeared on the Kahnawake reservation in the mid-1980s and has since spread to other reservations and a few other tribes. It is now at the heart of various controversies involving Indians both in Canada and in the northeastern United States.

The Warrior Society calls itself a “traditionalist” group, supporting sovereignty for native North Americans. The message is a popular one, since the existing system of native government in Canada--councilors elected in white-style votes--was devised by whites and lacks widespread legitimacy among Indians. Mohawks in Quebec had already been formally seeking some new form of government since 1979.

The search has been slow, and throughout these years of uncertainty, various factions, including the Warrior Society, have emerged, arguing different views.

Along with the political ferment has come an economic boom, based on glaringly non-traditional enterprises: casinos on the reserves, duty-free cigarette smuggling, gun-running and liquor bootlegging.

(Liquor and cigarettes are heavily taxed in Canada, and Indians, deemed borderless citizens of North America, can make a handsome living bringing them into Canada and selling them to whites at tax-free American prices.)

Warriors argue that such enterprises line native pockets and help redress the centuries-old injustices that Indians have suffered at the hand of whites. But Warrior critics say catering to vice has corrupted life on the reservations. Indeed, on the St. Regis-Akwesasne Reservation, which straddles the international border between Quebec, Ontario and New York, a gambling-related dispute led to a gun battle earlier this year, and two Mohawks were killed.

In Kahnawake, where Warriors handily outnumber the Indian police force, the vigilantes have used their muscle and firepower to thwart the execution of local court rulings.

Warriors have also called for the ouster of all “white-backed” elected band officials, a rallying cry that evokes frightening images of vigilante rule in the minds of those who oppose the Warriors’ tactics.

“These Warrior people are lawless people,” says Jacobs. “They have no morals, no values. They are between 13 and 19 years old. They don’t even graduate from school. They say, ‘Why should I?’ Because (the Warriors) give you a car. They give you a gun. You can wear army fatigues and play Rambo.”

Oka, which doesn’t have legal status as an Indian reservation, had been immune from much of this up until now. Indians and whites live side by side in the prosperous-looking village. There have been some minor disputes over land use, but the Warriors didn’t penetrate--until now.

When the local Mohawks first made their anti-golf-course encampment last March, they were alone, says Jacobs. They waited, the government ignored them, their morale wavered. Then along came the Warriors, offering help.

News of a gun battle over a golf course prompted a sharp swing in public opinion toward the Mohawks.

“Many, many people support the Indians,” said a local white woman who didn’t want to be identified. “They’re not here to provoke. They’re here to defend.”

But that doesn’t mean opinion has swung in favor of the Warrior Society or its broader political goals. Mohawks in Oka, those not manning the barricades, at any rate, tended to look the other way and mumble noncommittal answers when asked whether they thought the Warriors’ aid would help them over the long term.

“I know (the Warriors’) frustrations have been built up over a long time,” said Lucy Gaspe, a young Mohawk who was cruising the village on her bicycle. “They’ve been promised things for years and never received them. A lot of times they represent the feelings of the people. But I don’t like violence. No one does.”