The culprit is not some errant racist landlord trying to throw one tenant out of a building. It’s the Kahnawake Mohawk council, which has a law that bans all “mixed race” couples from living anywhere in its Montreal-area territory.Well, technically, it bans mixed race couples married or living common-law after May 22, 1981... which conveniently immunises just who exactly? Well, statistically speaking, that'd be anyone mid-fifties and older.
Apparently racial purity can be "grandfathered."
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RELATED: Let's just blame Stephen Harper
Of course, Waneek saves her rage, not for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, (whom she is, coincidentally, currently suing) but for the wiley white man...
“I ask this to Kahnawa’kehró:non, ‘Is this who we have become? A people who will throw out families and seek to control others through fear and intimidation?’” Horn-Miller wrote.You mean the government with that pesky Charter of Rights, the document that clearly prohibits the notorious "Kahnawake Membership Law?"
“ I am not asking everyone to agree 100 percent with me or my views, but I just cannot believe this is who we are – a people doing the dirty work of the government and the Indian Act and fracturing our community from within.”
It's like a hunger strike that packs on the pounds. I'm so confused.
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UPDATE: Grassroots group, huh?
I think we used to call them "Nightriders."
APTN National News**********
MONTREAL--A grassroots group mailed eviction notices to about 40 people living in Kahnawake as part of a campaign to drive out mixed-couples from homes in the community.
LAST WORD: It's quiet at Tyendinaga
Letter from John Ferguson to William Claus, Deputy Superintendent General, Indian Affairs, 5 March 1819, concerning threats made by Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte to passers-by; the influence of white lumbermen over the Mohawks; lineage (in relation to a General Order on 2 November 1818 that presents should not be given to the descendants of Europeans):Well, technically they are all descendants of Americans, forced out of the Mohawk Valley in New York by non-aboriginal countrymen and relocated by the British to reservations north of the 49th parallel.
“Will not a difficulty arise, as to who these people are?
In the Mohawk village here, a large proportion are the immediate (perhaps the second generation) descendants of Germans; there is also a family of immediate descendants of Africans: Are they to be considered as Indians? There are also some descendants of Americans, whose ancestors were Europeans. Will they come within the intention of the Order? In fact there are but few real Indians amongst them.”
There were all kinds of non-aboriginal folk already settled in Upper and Lower Canada before the reservations were established.