Saturday 23 September 2000

Too high a price

The Gazette

There is so little left of what it once meant to be aboriginal. A way of life, customs, culture, the languages that carried the intellectual wealth of a people, their spirituality, their sense of connection with the world around them, so much of it is gone.

If today, faced with such loss, bands such as the Mohawks of Kahnawake choose to restrict who can live among them as true aboriginals, they act out of desperation. Still, they are wrong to do so. By restricting residency on the reserve to Mohawks, they hope to stop assimilation and preserve their language, culture and bloodline. Instead, they send out a race-based message of exclusion.

This week, the Mohawk band council sent a two-page notice to all homes on the South Shore reserve, saying that non-aboriginals married to or living with a Mohawk should "respect the wishes of the community at large and vacate our territory immediately."

These are presumably people Mohawks have fallen in love with, married, had children by or simply care enough for to live together under the same roof. Ordering them out of their homes because they do not meet a bloodline test is an ugly thing to do.

Not that the band doesn't have the legal right to do it. It has had the right since 1981, when it adopted a membership code, calling for a moratorium on "mixed" marriages and insisting on at least a 50-per-cent bloodline to qualify as Mohawk.

A number of band members sued, arguing the code was discriminatory. Others sought redress through the human-rights commission. The courts ruled that Mohawks can impose any membership policy they decide is essential for their survival as a people.

As with any arbitrary system, idiotic consequences soon flowed. The name of resident Bo Curotte, for instance, was removed from ballot for grand chief in 1994 after the council ruled he had only 48 per cent aboriginal blood. Mr. Curotte was told that he lost blood percentage points in part because his family adopted a black woman in the 19th century.

The same year, 1994, Mohawks also demonstrated in front of homes of non-Indians living as spouses or companions of Mohawks, ordering them to leave.

Calculating bloodlines, vigilante-type groups demonstrating outside of private homes: how can those actions not recall ethnic cleansing? Whatever the purpose, this is too high a price to pay.