Wampum

[Orignally posed at Bobbie O'Neill's Native Unity. With Democrats shunning Tribes because they can't bring themselves to either (a) get a clue about the depth and breath of the Trust corruption, or (b) bring themselves to run against racism coded as "morality", or (c) are "co-beneficiaries" along with Pombo et alia, and Republicans running from the legacy of Nixon as fast as Rehnquist's smoking wings and cloven hooves will carry them, and Progressives and Greens systematically unable to deal with the jurisdictional distinctness of Indians, and an ecological framework that doesn't begin, and unfortunately end, in German Romantic Pastoralism, momentarily at least, it looks like we're heading back to 1924, the Land Before Time. Here's how our peers in Kahnawake/Akwesasne, play stickball. Enoy. ebw]

JEFF HEINRICH, The (Montreal) Gazette
Published: Sunday, January 15, 2006

Mike Delisle Jr. had some advice last month for the man who coaches his son's junior football team. It had nothing to do with sports. It had to do with the federal election.

Delisle is grand chief of Kahnawake, the Mohawk reserve just south of Montreal. The coach, Charlie Ghorayeb, is running as the Liberal candidate in Chateauguay-St. Constant.

Officially, the riding includes Kahnawake. But the Mohawks see things differently, as Delisle pointed out to his friend.

"He asked me whether it was worth his while to place advertisements for his campaign in our local newspaper and also in our post boxes, and he even invited me to one of his fundraisers," Delisle recalled.

The aspiring candidate needn't have bothered asking. The vast majority of Mohawks - who make up Canada's most populous native bands - don't vote in Canadian elections, on principle.

"I told him the ads would be a waste of his time and resources, and I politely declined the invitation," said Delisle, whose story was confirmed by Ghorayeb.

"He understood."

Welcome to Mohawk country, an election-free zone. Unlike most other Canadian native communities, the 9,300 Mohawks of Kahnawake, along with their 10,000 brethren of Akwesasne, which straddles the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall, Ont., boycott federal and provincial elections.

The Mohawks believe in governing themselves first, not helping non-natives govern, whether that means Canada, Quebec or anyplace else.

Voting in "alien nation" elections "places us in submission to foreign governments and as a result alienates us from our own," according to the lead editorial this week in The Eastern Door, Kahnawake's community paper. "You can't stand with one foot in two canoes."

It's an old position, dating back at least to 1960, when Ottawa first gave natives the right to vote. But these days, the Mohawk way runs contrary to a trend in Canadian aboriginal politics, whereby Assembly of First Nations and Metis National Council leaders, as well as the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec, are working with mainstream political parties to push aboriginal issues.

Fresh from negotiating a $5-billion aid deal in Kelowna, B.C. in November with Prime Minister Paul Martin and the premiers, national aboriginal leaders want natives to vote the Liberals back in on Jan. 23, or at least support New Democrats. The Metis believe their ballots could affect as many as 33 close ridings in the western provinces and up north, where natives are as much as one-quarter of some ridings' population.

The Conservatives? Forget it - they don't have any real official support.The Bloc Quebecois? In Quebec, they may be backed by the Crees, but the Mohawks? Never.

The Tories aren't getting the native vote for two reasons. First, the aboriginals fear they're not committed to the Kelowna deal. Last week Tory finance critic Monte Solberg said it had been "crafted at the last moment on the back of a napkin on the eve of an election (and) we're not going to honour that," a position the party quickly denied.

Second, a trusted advisor of Conservative leader Stephen Harper is Tom Flanagan, a Calgary political science professor whose publications (one of which is titled First Nations? Second Thoughts) the aboriginals view as anti-native.

The only hint of aboriginal support for the Tories came in a news report Friday that the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, which speaks for Canada's off-reserve natives, will endorse the party before election day. So far it hasn't happened.

In Quebec, Mohawks shun the the Bloc for the simple reason that it's a separatist party. Not that the Bloc hasn't tried to win them over.

On the highways leading to and from Kahnawake, for example, there are only two signs on native land advertising the election, and both are Bloc. The reserve has banned campaign ads, but the Bloc found a way around that by buying space on big commercial billboards already standing on real estate owned by the Mohawks.

Six weeks ago, at the start of the campaign, zealous Bloc volunteers started strapping campaign posters to utility poles, but after residents complained, Kahnawake Peacekeepers ordered Bloc campaigners off the territory, along with their signs.

Getting out the native vote isn't just something the Bloc and other parties would like. It's also a priority of Elections Canada. Since the early 1990s, the federal agency has aimed campaigns at the country's 735,000 registered natives, trying to convince them - in publications in English, French and 11 aboriginal languages - that voting is key to ensuring their self-determination.

In this and the last four elections, the agency has hired aboriginal community relations officers, elders and youth guides to get voters to polling stations in an increasing number of ridings - 48 in the 2004 election, 132 in this one. The goal is to increase aboriginal turnout substantially. It's usually minimal, about one-sixth the number of non-native votes, the agency estimates.

But Kahnawake is tough to crack. Turnout there is, simply, nil.

Any local resident who wants to vote - and of the 9,300 population there are perhaps half a dozen who do so each election, all of them non-natives married to natives, according to band council spokesperson Joe Delaronde - have to go into Chateauguay to do it. There are no polling stations in Kahnawake.

The Mohawks do follow the election on TV and in the newspapers. After all, they say, they're part of the story, however indirectly.

"It's not a matter of not being interested in the issues - we are interested, because we ourselves are one of the issues in Canadian politics," said Delisle, the grand chief. "We just don't consider ourselves part of the Canadian electorate, because we don't consider ourselves Canadian citizens."

jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com