Graeme Hamilton, National Post · Friday, Jul. 16, 2010
Twenty years ago, a teenaged Waneek Horn-Miller was behind the Mohawk lines at Oka and was stabbed by a soldier’s bayonet as the standoff ended. Ten years ago, she was the pride of her native Kahnawake when she co-captained Canada’s Olympic water polo team in Sydney. Today, however, because she is engaged to marry a white man, she has become the target of hate mail and a petition aimed at chasing her family from the Mohawk reserve.
Even this Mohawk role model is not immune from the nasty, simmering debate over the presence of non-natives in Kahnawake. As the band council threatens evictions of any non-natives living on the reserve with Mohawk partners, Ms. Horn-Miller is appealing for a change to a policy that is tearing families apart. “For a few generations now, people being told ‘marry out, you get out’ and being forced to leave, it hasn’t contributed to a healthier society,” she said in her first interview with outside media since she was targeted. “That is not the solution to solving our social problems and saving our language and culture.”
Ms. Horn-Miller, 34, is one of the best-known residents of Kahnawake, located just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. She was 14 in the summer of 1990 when her mother, native-rights activist Kahn-Tineta Horn, brought her and her younger sister to join the defence of land outside Oka considered sacred by the Mohawks. Among her duties was delivering food to armed native Warriors in trenches. “I’m ready to die, if something happens. I’m not scared,” she said at the time. When the 78-day standoff ended chaotically, she suffered a stab wound to the chest and a photo of her anguished face as she clutched her sister became a defining image of the crisis.
She then threw herself into sport, inspired by Kahnawake’s Alwyn Morris, a kayaker who won Olympic gold in 1984. In 2000, she became Kahnawake’s second Olympian, and she has travelled the continent promoting fitness in aboriginal communities. Tomorrow she will be in Winnipeg as the Assembly of First Nations announces a new sport and fitness program, for which she will serve as ambassador.
But to some back in Kahnawake, her long-term relationship with a non-native man and their decision to build a house in Kahnawake outweighs the good she has accomplished. Emotions over the issue of non-native residency in Kahnawake had been mounting since February, when the band council, acting on anonymous complaints, delivered eviction notices to 26 people deemed to be in violation of the band’s membership law. That law, aimed at “fulfilling our responsibility to defend our community and our Nation from external threat,” forbids racial intermingling on the reserve. (Mixed marriages pre-dating a 1981 moratorium are tolerated.) Among those who received eviction notices, five agreed to leave, three received the notices in error, 11 are pleading their cases with the band council and seven ignored the letters.
In April, with her new home under construction and the arrival of her first child a month away, Ms. Horn-Miller learned a petition had been submitted to the band council demanding a stop to building. About 50 people had signed the petition, complaining that Ms. Horn-Miller’s fiancé, Keith Morgan, had no right to live in the house. The contractor arrived at the work site one morning to find a note directed at Mr. Morgan telling him to leave. Days before she gave birth to her daughter, Konwaskennenhawi, Ms. Horn-Miller received an anonymous letter saying her half-Mohawk child was unwelcome on the reserve.
“I tried very hard to galvanize myself against emotionally reacting to that, but I couldn’t,” she said. “It was a hard time, really hard for me because I guess in a way I felt that no matter what I did, no matter what I accomplished, no matter how I tried to contribute, I was still being defined just as a baby-maker. That’s all that matters, our genetics, not who you are and what you contributed.”
In fact, the people behind the petition were mistaken in thinking Mr. Morgan, a Calgary-born judoka who represented Canada at four Olympic Games, was preparing to move in. He is completing his first year of medical school at a U.S. university in Dominica, a program that will take six years, Ms. Horn-Miller said. The band council issued a statement clarifying that Ms. Horn-Miller was within her rights to live in the house with her child and appealing for respectful dialogue. The council noted, however, that if Mr. Morgan were to move in with his family, the council “would have no choice but to take action against him.”
Tracey Deer, publisher of Kahnawake’s weekly newspaper, the Eastern Door, became friends with Ms. Horn-Miller while making the 2008 documentary, Club Native, about inter-racial relationships in Kahnawake. She was shocked by the treatment given to a “national role model” like Ms. Horn-Miller, eight months pregnant. She blames the band council’s approach to the issue, inviting anonymous calls to a snitch line, for poisoning the atmosphere in Kahnawake.
“The environment now in Kahnawake is definitely unpleasant,” she said. “It’s much more difficult to be a non-native person living here, because I think the action that the band council has taken has given people permission to be hostile, racist, openly. It’s given the stamp of approval that we can now behave this way, because we’ve got our own government encouraging it.”
She said her film was aimed at getting her community to rethink its “fundamentalist” attitudes. “I really don’t think we have a future if we stay on this blood notion for survival,” she said. “People are defined by their community, togetherness, unity. None of that is strong right now. Our language is endangered. Our culture is endangered. We are a very divided, fractured community, so I would love for us to switch our emphasis on these things that make us strong instead of being blood-based.”
The switch will not be easy. Even Ms. Horn-Miller, raised to believe she should never marry a non-native, felt torn when she began dating Mr. Morgan eight years ago. She initially informed him they could never marry or have children because of his race. Over time, her resolve softened. “One of the great things about meeting Keith was it brought me back to understanding how to look at someone not by the colour of their skin but for their humanity, for who they were as a human being,” she said. “That’s what I needed.”
Mr. Morgan, 36, said he realized Ms. Horn-Miller’s decision to build would be controversial. “I understand the community’s desire to protect their culture; in fact I support their effort. I’m just not sure that throwing out a few non-natives (who have ties to the community) is the best way to go about it,” he said in an email exchange with the National Post. He said he is prepared to learn the language and culture and pay for any services provided by the band if he is allowed to live in Kahnawake after he graduates.
“I feel that I have much to contribute to the community, and would love to do so if given the chance. However, I will not do so at any expense,” he said. “If we have done all that we can to make positive change and are still not wanted or accepted by the community for who we are, then we will go somewhere else.”
The community will hold consultations this fall on possible changes to the membership law. Joe Delaronde, Kahnawake’s political press attaché, said Ms. Horn-Miller’s and Mr. Morgan’s accomplishments are irrelevant to the debate over their status on the reserve. “It’s not about the personalities. It’s about the law,” he said. “What is your alternative, do we just let everybody bring in whoever they want, and then how long will it be until we just don’t exist?”
Ms. Horn-Miller said she is optimistic Kahnawake’s strong-willed Mohawks will reach a compromise. “We’re a tough, tough people and that is something that has helped us survive on the edge of Montreal, but it’s also harder to resolve internal conflict,” she said. She suggests non-natives in relationships with Mohawks could be allowed to live in Kahnawake on the condition they learn the language and culture and contribute to the community.
She hopes her two-month-old daughter, whose name means “she brings the peace,” will be welcomed as a Mohawk woman, but she realizes the path will not always be smooth. “We’re going to have to raise her to be strong,” Ms. Horn-Miller said. “She’s got a judo Dad and a water polo Mom, so I think she’s going to be a pretty good fighter.”