“How could Canada send hundreds of heavily armed police officers, an entire division of the army with tanks, jets, and boats to surround and starve an Indigenous community?” asked Tahieròn:iohte Dan David, a Kanien’kéha:ka (Mohawk) journalist, writer and one of the founders of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN).
In an interview before his death in January 2026, David raised that question while reflecting on what he witnessed during the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance, the 1990 events which, outside the community, are typically referred to as the Oka Crisis.
“They would never have done that to any other town in Canada. But they did that in Kanehsatà:ke, because for them we were uppity Indians who wanted recognition,” he said.
What David spoke about was not a distant event from the early days of colonisation. It happened 36 years ago, when Quebec’s provincial police and the Canadian army surrounded and attacked his community of Kanehsatà:ke, a Mohawk territory just northwest of Montreal.
Like many other Indigenous writers and scholars, David stressed that little has changed for Indigenous Peoples in Canada since the 1990 siege. They continue to fight for control over their land and resources, while governments have broken treaties and responded harshly when Indigenous communities stand up for their rights.
Still, the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance stands out in Canada’s recent history for its intensity and impact.
On 11 July 1990, as Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officers and the Mohawks defending their territory engaged in a gunfight, David was in another Indigenous community, about a four-hour drive from Kanehsatà:ke. When news of the clash reached him, he immediately returned home and spent the 78 days of siege behind the barricades with his people.
Beginning on July 11 and lasting until September 26, 1990, Kanehsatà:ke was the centre of a brutal standoff between Indigenous land defenders and government forces. One provincial police officer was killed, several people on both sides were injured, and Canada found itself at the centre of international attention.
By mid-August, about 4,000 soldiers supported with artillery, armoured vehicles, navy vessels, and the air force were stationed around Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, another Mohawk community just to the Southeast of Montreal. To put that in perspective, about 5,100 Canadian troops served in the Persian Gulf War that year, with no more than 2,700 deployed at one time.
The operation was so massive it used up the army’s entire national stockpile of barbed wire, according to historian Timothy C. Winegard.
Over three decades after the incident, Canadian officials still refer to it as the Oka Crisis, describing it as a dispute over the expansion of a golf course in the neighboring town of Oka. But to the Mohawks, it is the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance, a struggle rooted in centuries of defending their ancestral lands.
“A lot of people in Canada see that as an isolated incident, tied to one moment in history,” David said. “But this started long ago, right when the King of France began granting land to settlers.”
Centuries of struggle
On a warm and humid summer day, Wanda Gabriel pulls a folding chair from the back of her car, sets it down by the Ottawa River in Oka, and looks back 36 years. Back then, she was 30 years old, a high school dropout with four children. Today, Gabriel is an Adjunct Professor at McGill University.
Oka is a small town of about 4,000 people on the north shore of the Ottawa River. In summer, its beaches draw crowds from Montreal; in winter, people gather to ice fish on the frozen river, a practice with deep Indigenous roots.
Just west of Oka lies Kanehsatà:ke. Unlike most Indigenous reserves, Kanehsatà:ke is not one connected piece of land. Instead, as Gabriel explains, it is “a checkerboard of Indigenous and settler lands,” the result of divisions imposed by the Canadian government.
A golf course still stands there today. Next to it is the pine forest and the Indigenous burial place that the mayor of Oka once planned to destroy to expand the course and build condominiums.
Gabriel remembers how, after the police raid on 11 July, people in the community told her there were no barricades on another road at the north end of the community leading into Kanehsatà:ke. So, with her 13-year-old daughter, she drove there in a van and blocked it.
The first barricades, she recalls, went up in March of that year as Oka’s threat to the forest and cemetery grew. But, as both she and David stress, the fight over this land did not begin in 1990.
“When the King of France came to settle this land, he said, ‘Okay, we recognise there are Mohawks here, and we want the Sulpician seminary to protect the land.’ But the Sulpicians slowly sold off parcels of land to incoming settlers,” Gabriel says.
That process started in the mid 18th century. Over time, as control of the territory shifted between the French and the British, the colonial powers grabbed more land from the Mohawks and forced out more families.
Explaining how the colonial regimes pushed Indigenous peoples out of their territory, David said: “The whole goal was to sell the land as profitably as possible, to get rid of the Indians as quickly as possible, and to bring in settlers wherever they might be coming from.
Only here, despite their best efforts to make life miserable and hard, there were holdouts, mostly Mohawks, who refused to leave.”
For nearly three centuries, the Mohawks fought to defend and reclaim their ancestral lands through legal channels. By the late 20th century, their frustration had turned to resistance.
That resistance reached its peak in 1990, when the Canadian army, equipped with armoured vehicles, planes, helicopters, and military boats, confronted a small group of Mohawks.
Although the centre of the confrontation was Kanehsatà:ke, Indigenous Peoples across Canada joined in solidarity. The Mohawks of the Kahnawà:ke reserve, south of Montreal, quickly blocked the Honoré-Mercier Bridge, one of the main routes connecting the island of Montreal to south shore suburbs (and an important trucking route to the U.S. border). In British Columbia, Indigenous activists stopped trains in protest.
Settler racism, Indigenous unity
The resistance at Kanehsatà:ke left a lasting mark on Canadian society, politics, and the government’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples. That summer, the military operation ended with the Mohawk land defenders surrendering. However, the consequences of the resistance extended beyond the standoff itself.
One of those consequences was the exposure of anti-Indigenous racism in Canadian society.
Montrealer author and life-long activist Dimitrios Roussopoulos calls that event a “stark reminder of Canada’s ongoing racism” toward Indigenous Peoples.
He says that what shocked many observers was not only the use of police and military force against a small group of Mohawks, but also the behaviour of many residents in Montreal, Oka, and Châteauguay. One widely remembered incident was the burning of a Mohawk effigy hanging from a lamppost in Châteauguay.
Roussopoulos, who helped organise demonstrations in downtown Montreal in support of the Mohawks in 1990, recalls several violent reactions from local residents. One such moment came when about 150 demonstrators, after gathering in Parc Lafontaine, began marching along Saint-Denis Street.
“What struck me was the very negative reaction of people sitting in the open cafés,” he says. “They grew angry, and some threw beer bottles at us, shouting, ‘Who the hell are you to defend the Mohawks?’”
According to Roussopoulos, this hostility reflected a broader racist attitude againstIndigenous Peoples’ right to challenge their treatment. He argues that this prejudice influenced how both the federal and Quebec governments responded to the Mohawk resistance.
“Oka revealed a deep contradiction within Quebec nationalism,” Roussopoulos explains. “French Canadians were—and still are—raised to believe this is their land. But in 1990, they were suddenly confronted with Indigenous Peoples saying, ‘No, historically, we were here first, and you’re occupying our land.’”
As racist attitudes among some settlers became visible during the resistance, Indigenous communities across Canada also began to coordinate more closely in response. Activists say the standoff helped create a shared sense of purpose.
“The biggest achievement was unity, and that we found our voice across the country,” says Gabriel, who lived through the standoff. “People from different communities stood up in support of us. I think that was the first time there was such a unified resistance to what was happening to Indigenous Peoples.”
That sense of unity was not only political but also personal. For many who took part, including Gabriel, it became a moment of transformation and healing.
“That summer awakened me,” she explains. “Behind the barricades, spiritual leaders and faith keepers from other nations helped us maintain peace in our hearts. It was both resistance and renewal,” she recalls.
“It was very spiritual and transformative for me.” After that summer, Gabriel returned to school, completed her education, and later earned a master’s degree in social work. “I wanted to understand what happened to us and bring about transformation and healing in my community,” she stresses.
However, the awakening brought by the resistance did not take the same form for everyone. For some, it was spiritual and collective, while for others, it meant a painful loss of trust in Canada’s institutions.
For David, it changed his view of the Canadian government and its relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Before the 1990 resistance, he believed in what he called “Canada’s myth”.
“I believed that the government was making progress,” he said. “Like a lot of people, I believed in the myth. I half-believed it, because there was a little scepticism. But after that, I was disillusioned.”
Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer, an Indigenous educator and rights advocate, said this sense of disappointment was not limited to Indigenous Peoples or Canadians. The resistance, he explains, made people around the world question Canada’s myth as a country that treats Indigenous Peoples fairly.
Canada’s mythmaking
On the morning of July 11, 1990, Deer was asleep at his home in Kahnawà:ke, just south of Montreal, when the phone rang around 5:45 a.m. “I got a call telling me that the police were moving into Oka,” he recalls, 36 years later.
“I knew something was going to happen,” he adds. “You didn’t need to be a psychic to know there was going to be a reaction.”
After the first violent clash between police and land defenders, Deer was among the Indigenous representatives the community chose to send to Kanehsatà:ke to negotiate with officials in hopes of ending the siege and addressing their demands.
When the early talks broke down, the resistors sent Deer to Geneva to bring international attention to what was happening in Canada; to expose, as he puts it, “the paternalism and the racism that were ingrained in Canadian legislation.”
At the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, he found an audience curious to listen. “There was already a buzz,” he says. “Everyone had questions about what was going on in Canada. I answered their questions from the Mohawk viewpoint. From that moment on, Canada was on the defensive.”
Canadian politicians have long promoted an international image of themselves as a non-colonial, multicultural democracy that respects Indigenous Peoples. In recent years, scholars such as Liam Midzain-Gobin and Heather A. Smith have questioned that narrative, describing it as “the myth of Canada.”
The events at Kanehsatà:ke showed the gap between that image and the experiences of Indigenous communities.
Now, 36 years later, Deer says the core issues behind the 1990 resistance remain unresolved.
Despite years of public discussion and official reports, including the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and the national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), he says little has changed for Indigenous peoples.
“We still have a long way to go,” he says. “Recognizing the fundamental rights of self-determination over land, territory, and natural resources remains one of the main unresolved issues. Canada has made some efforts, but it certainly wasn’t enough.”
David agreed with Deer. Speaking at his home in Kanehsatà:ke during one of the last interviews he gave before his death, he argued that meaningful changes were still needed in settler–Indigenous relations.
“There are minor tweaks to the system,” he said. “But nothing really changes, not that fundamental change that we need to have if we’re going to move forward and develop this relationship.”
About the author
Changiz M. Varzi
Changiz M. Varzi is a journalist and photographer covering the direct and indirect impact of conflicts around the world.
