In a show of solidarity with other aboriginal protesters across Canada yesterday, Mohawks shut one of Montreal's busiest bridges for 80 minutes at lunchtime and slowed morning rush-hour traffic to a crawl on highways through the Kahnawake reserve.

"It's our experience with the government of Canada that you have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four to get their attention," Joe Deom, a traditional longhouse elder, said after walking up the deserted Mercier Bridge with 150 other flag-waving protesters at noon hour.

"And as you can see, we're getting their attention," Deom told reporters.

"This is the beginning of the native peoples' coming together and standing in defence of our mother Earth," added Stuart Myiow, 44, leader of a separate longhouse on the reserve.

"This is not the end - this is only the beginning." The Mohawks' day of protest began early, as rush-hour commuters could see a dozen purple and white flags of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy and red and yellow flags of the Warrior Society flying from the eastern girders of the Mercier.

At 9 a.m., about 20 people in Myiow's group stood at a traffic light on Highway 138 leading to and from the bridge, blocking a lane in either direction and slowing traffic to a crawl. With Kahnawake Peacekeepers directing the flow, the group held up a big white banner that said: "Canadian government still practising genocide upon native people with fraudulent self-government policy." Caught in the sudden traffic jam, commuters were surprised by the unannounced slowdown.

"I heard about (the suspension of service by) Via Rail, but I did not expect this," said Patricia Orsini, running half an hour late for the Montreal engineering firm where she works in accounts.

Others were sympathetic to the aboriginals' cause.

"They're fighting for their rights, for their sovereignty - I can deal with 10 minutes of extra traffic," said William Miller, 24, a Chateauguay resident heading downtown to Concordia University to coach football.

On Highway 30, a few kilometres to the east, another small group also slowed traffic by blocking a lane. Like the Highway 138 protest, the demonstrators stayed for about an hour before leaving peacefully.

At 10 a.m., the elected leaders of Kahnawake's federally recognized band council held a news conference outside the community's sports complex to proclaim their solidarity.

Grand Chief Mike Delisle Jr. said relations with the federal and provincial governments "are reaching the boiling point" and are "heading for disaster" unless serious negotiations on old grievances, especially land claims, are begun.

His declaration came one day after Kahnawake signed an agreement with the governments that gives the reserve the power to seek tenders for much-needed repair work on the Mercier Bridge, expected to begin this summer.

Though not taking part in the highway and bridge protests, Delisle refused to call them unlawful blockades, but rather "peaceful demonstrations," "an education process" and "more of an action." But he acknowledged they might have "diluted, to an extent" the message of the day by irritating commuters.

As a sign to the general public they were driving through Mohawk land, Delisle and his council unfurled a 4.5-by-6-metre Iroquois Confederacy flag atop a tall lamp standard in the sports complex's playing field, in full view of Highway 138 traffic.

Delisle and other chiefs also planted Iroquois Confederacy flags in seven locations off the South Shore reserve to designate what they consider their ancestral lands.

At 11:30 a.m., protesters from the two longhouses gathered at the base of the on ramps to the bridge along Highway 138 and, to the east, along Highway 132. Peacekeepers blocked traffic at their end and the Surete du Quebec blocked traffic at the LaSalle end of the span on Montreal Island, and at noon the two groups started walking up the deserted ramps.

They met below the bridge's flag-festooned grey steel girders overlooking the St. Lawrence Seaway. In a black T-shirt that identified him as "One Pissed-Off Native," Deom, surrounded by his group from the Highway 132 longhouse, read a statement by Kenneth Deer, secretary of the Iroquois Confederacy's Kahnawake branch.

In it, Deer said, the "Mohawk nation at Kahnawake has elected to express its solidarity with all indigenous peoples of Canada by marching up the Mercier Bridge and adorning it with our national flags." Disassociating the protest from the Assembly of First Nations and its leader, Phil Fontaine, Deer wrote that "our grassroots and non-violent method of protest shall be an effective action to affirm" several things, including Ottawa's "lack of good faith" in settling aboriginal land claims.

There were some laughs and a few whoops afterward, when Myiow spotted a pleasure boat cruising downriver far below. Leaning over and shouting into his loudspeaker, he upbraided the intruder thus: "Hey, get out of the seaway!" To reporters, Myiow identified himself as part of the "longhouse up the hill," a separate one from that on Highway 132.

The two groups then headed back down the ramps and gathered again at the base with their flags to await the traffic. At 1:22 p.m. - 80 minutes after it had all begun - the lanes reopened in both directions and the cars and trucks started moving again.

It was a long wait for Laval resident Irene Riopelle. Owner of a women's clothing company in Anjou, she had been making a morning business call to a boutique near the bridge in St. Constant, and got caught in the Highway 132 traffic jam on her return. At 12:40 p.m., she was first in line to cross the bridge.

Rolling down her window for a reporter, she expressed no sympathy for the Mohawks.

"They're bothering people like me who are working today to be able to get away for the long weekend," said Riopelle, who planned a weekend at the cottage.

"If I'm going to get to the country, I'll have to work later tonight, that's all - just because of all this mess."