[IPSM] two gazette articles re: kanehsatake

Wed Jan 12 05:20:54 PST 2005

One year after fleeing the blaze
James Gabriel's wife tells of life in exile from Kanesatake

      JEFF HEINRICH 
      THE GAZETTE 

January 10, 2005

            CREDIT: PHIL CARPENTER, THE GAZETTE 
            Kanesatake Mohawk Grand Chief James Gabriel, his 4-year-old son Phoenix (from left), 6-year-old son Raven and wife Lyndia were forced into hiding after their home was burned down almost a year ago. They now live somewhere in eastern Ontario. 

Jan. 12 will not be a happy anniversary for James Gabriel and his family. It's the date a year ago when their farmhouse on a back road of Kanesatake was burned down by arsonists, a crime for which justice has still not been done.

Under cover of darkness on that frigid night, Gabriel and his wife and their two young sons were forced to flee what had been their home town, a picturesque Mohawk village on rolling land along the Ottawa River next to Oka, southwest of Montreal.

Gabriel was the community's grand chief at the time - its mayor, of sorts, three times elected. And he'd done a daring, some say foolhardy, thing that day.

He'd brought in a special force of dozens of aboriginal police officers from across Quebec to combat what Gabriel claimed was a deep-rooted drug-running problem in Kanesatake.

But the get-tough strategy - highly unusual in aboriginal policing in Canada - didn't work.

Overpowered by Gabriel's opponents, the police never got to do their job.

And the crisis that erupted - a siege at the Kanesatake police station, and the torching of Gabriel's house - plunged the community into months of turmoil, as those who sought to overthrow Gabriel threatened more violence if he and his "goons" in the Kanesatake police ever returned.

To outsiders, the turn of events seemed like something out of the Wild West: the mayor of a fractious frontier town brings in a new sheriff to lay down the law. But in the end, things get ugly and the sheriff and the mayor are run out of town. In this case, the mayor also had a family. And it's their story that has yet to be told publicly - until now.

In an exclusive interview given on condition their location not be revealed, Gabriel's wife, Lyndia, talked to The Gazette one afternoon last week in the eastern Ontario town where she and the couple's sons, Raven, 6, and Phoenix, almost 5, have been hiding out for the past year.

James Gabriel was there, visiting for the winter holidays. Lyndia, a rough-skinned blond whose strong body suggests her earlier career as a rodeo rider, sat at the family's kitchen table chain-smoking du Mauriers and drinking coffee. Phoenix, his eyes squinting out of thick glasses just like his brother wears, was in the next room killing imaginary enemies in his World of Warcraft video game. Curly-haired Raven amused himself with a toy bow-and-arrow and catapult he made with his dad.

The domestic calm was deceiving. Since the arson, mother and sons have been under psychological counselling, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Raven, the sensitive, older one, has nightmares about what he and Phoenix call "the scumbags" in Kanesatake who burned them out of their house, and is getting anger-management help from a pediatric psychologist to deal with it.

The first few days at his new school in Ontario, he hid under the teacher's desk, afraid to answer questions in class. Some days, he makes his mother despair by declaring he doesn't want to be "native" anymore, seeing what his own people did to him and his family.

Phoenix, the bold, younger one, simply wants revenge. Like his brother, he says he can't wait to be a police officer when he grows up, so he can "put the scumbags in jail" back home.

But there is no "home" left.

The family farmhouse on Centre Rd. is a ruin. On its exposed concrete foundation, supporters have painted the words "CHILDREN LIVED HERE ..." and off the front steps hang broken toys they rescued from the ashes - a bicycle training wheel, a plastic cart, a Tonka truck. Gone are the antique furniture, jewelry, Super-8 films and family photos that Lyndia inherited from her grandmother shortly before the fire. Gone is the easy flow of family life between their house and Gabriel's mother and sisters, who live just a short walk across the fields. Since November, James has spent his weekdays at his mother's house, without incident so far.

"It's been very, very difficult, especially being away from Jim and the other kids," Lyndia, 43, said last week, referring to her other children from a previous marriage: Mathieu, 21, a student at CEGEP Montmorency, and Alexandra, 16, who lives with relatives and goes to high school near Montreal. "We're split up, everyone. We're very family-oriented, and our whole life was back home on the farm and in the fields, doing family things."

James Gabriel and Lyndia Cooper first met 23 years ago. He was the son of a mixed marriage: his silversmith father, Jeffrey Gabriel, was a full Mohawk, his mother a British woman named Margaret Fifield, who'd immigrated to Canada as a teenager from Folkestone, England. Raised in eastern Ontario and with only some distant aboriginal bloodlines, Lyndia was a rodeo rider who'd moved to her aunt's in Pierrefonds, on Montreal's West Island, to learn French, and happened to keep her horse at the Gabriel family's 12-acre farm in Kanesatake.

In 1990, divorced a year from her ex-husband, Lyndia took up with James. He helped raise Alexandra and Mathieu, and a decade later the other two boys followed. Dividing her time between Kanesatake and working as a Makivik employee in the Arctic, in 2000 Lyndia got a new job with Kanesatake's local optometrist, a job she held up to the time of the fire last year.

Lyndia relives the event daily through her boys. They remember the pickup truck that drove up against their house that afternoon; the eggs that were pelted at their window; the mad scramble to pack some overnight clothes, insurance policies and medical cards as the final attack seemed near; the phone call at supper at a restaurant telling them their house was in flames; the drive to a Laval hotel room, where a search on TV for cartoons to entertain the stressed-out kids yielded only live footage of the crisis in Kanesatake, and Raven's stunned reaction: "Mommy, that's our house."

In Ontario, finding a place to settle wasn't easy. No one wanted to rent to them at first, fearing reprisals by Gabriel's enemies. The local school was worried about taking in the kids, too, and even the first few counsellors they and their mother met got spooked and passed them to other colleagues. But after a while, things fell into place. Security at the school was established: to avoid a kidnapping, only designated people could pick up the kids after class. People in the town developed a conspiracy of silence to protect the family: if any stranger passed through asking about them, they'd be told, 'Sorry, never heard of them."

Lest they seemed paranoid, James would remind anyone that they and their children had received death threats. One anonymous Kanesatake Web site warned he'd someday watch his kids be strangled in front of him, and the Surete du Quebec checked out a tip about a contract that had apparently been put out on his life.

They also had to endure rumours in Kanesatake that they were living high off the hog thanks to insurance payments for the arson. In fact, they were only partly paid six months after it happened, and even lost a chunk because they didn't start rebuilding within 16 weeks of the blaze.

At the same time, they've also had lots of support over the last year: donations of clothes, toys and cash from churches and sympathizers, and stacks of letters from well-wishers. And there's more hope on the horizon.

This morning in Quebec Superior Court in St. Jerome, the 24 people accused in connection with the events of Jan. 12, 2004, are to have a date set for their trial on charges of rioting and forcible confinement. One of them, Joseph Daye, is to reappear Jan. 28 for a preliminary inquiry on the charge of arson. And on Feb. 19, elections are slated to take place in Kanesatake to choose a new band council.

Gabriel - feeling damned if he'll give in to the intimidation of his opponents - is running again. His only declared rival is Steven Bonspille, a self-assured ex-band councillor who has vowed to defeat Gabriel by offering local Mohawks a future free of the kind of "provocative" tactics that got him in trouble a year ago.

Lyndia worries about the community she left behind. She has clear memories of Kanesatake as a place where 13-year-olds and younger show up stoned at school, their fingertips stained from picking the buds of marijuana plants for $150 a day, their pride inflated artificially by free drugs, cell phones and pagers.

"The parents are in on this, that's what makes me so mad," she said. "It's an easy life for them, but they're sacrificing their kids for it, and the good people around them have to put up with it. Life in Kanesatake is being made so miserable. A whole generation of kids is uneducated, they have no job skills, no life outside Kanesatake. And someday they'll have kids and it'll be the same thing all over again."

She and James have made a pact to never give up their fight against the crime they see around them. They hope others will have the strength to follow. "If there is no law and order, what do you have? Nothing," Lyndia said. "It's a question of right and wrong and being strong. You have to be strong."

At which point, Raven came to the table frustrated, holding a wooden arrow. It was long but the tip was blunt, and he wanted permission to put a point on it. He mentioned using a nail, but his dad said, "No, only when you're old enough to be responsible."

Then Raven got a thin wooden skewer, neatly cut off the pointy tip with a pair of scissors and held the stick up for consideration.

"No, Raven," Lyndia said. "You know the rule. What's our motto? That's right: Safety first."

If only.

jheinrich at thegazette.canwest.com

Bonspille waits for the vote
'We've been decimated over the past year; every aspect of our community has been hit'

      JEFF HEINRICH 
      The Gazette 

January 10, 2005

            CREDIT: JOHN KENNEY, THE GAZETTE 
            The main issue in Kanesatake's elections will be the community's shaky finances, says Steven Bonspille. 

In the midst of the crisis of Kanesatake, Steven Bonspille became a father again. Now he wants his infant son to inherit a better community, with Bonspille as its leader.

The diminutive spokesperson of dissent wants to unseat James Gabriel as grand chief in elections tentatively slated for Feb. 19.

These days, Bonspille is living quietly at his home across the highway from the Mohawk village's band council office, eager to get the campaign going.

While he waits, he's helping his francophone Huron girlfriend, Isabelle Picard, care for Noah Francis, their son born Aug. 25. With them is 8-year-old Samuel, Bonspille's son from his former marriage.

"Having a newborn son just reinforces my outlook and my commitment to the community to make things better here for Kanesatake," Bonspille, 38, said last week before taking Noah for a vaccination shot. "We've been decimated over the past year; every aspect of our community has been hit hard - finances, families, human resources. There's a lot of work to do."

Finances are key. Now managed by an auditing firm, Kanesatake is in receivership and deeply in debt - no one knows just how much, anywhere from $2 million to $9 million.

"That's the great election issue, I think," said Bonspille, already talking like the campaign has begun. "What about the rest of Kanesatake? It's been left behind to pay for policing."

Kanesatake's cultural heritage centre, which Bonspille used to run, has closed down for lack of funds. A Mohawk elders' home in the Pines - site of the 1990 Oka Crisis - is broke and about to close. The local health centre is paying back money oversubsidized by Health Canada. And the local high school was almost closed after it didn't renew its lease on time.

Unlike Gabriel, whose family hasn't moved back to the community out of fear for their safety, Bonspille is thriving there, even if things are still far from normal. Looking out the window in the middle of the night with sleepless Noah, Bonspille can see Surete du Quebec patrol cars parked at the band council parking lot and rolling by on Highway 344.

"They're also parked under our sovereignty sign at the top of the hill (up from Oka), watching the traffic go by," Bonspille said. Like many local Mohawks, he'd prefer an aboriginal force instead - but this time, of his constituents' own choosing, not Gabriel's.

There's no love lost between the two men. Bonspille mocks Gabriel, taunting him through the media. And Gabriel responds in kind to each low blow, calling Bonspille a "puppet for the criminal element."

"I think he's a bit paranoid, to tell you the truth," Bonspille said of his rival. "He's been home, but I never see him. I'm here every day, and I never see him. And I never hear of anything happening to him."

One issue that he won't be bringing up in the election is the Jan. 12, 2004, arson of Gabriel's house. Although Gabriel is sure to gain some sympathy votes for it, Bonspille is choosing to ignore it.

"People want to forget it. They don't want to remember it. I want to forget all that business," he said. "Let's get on with an election here in Kanesatake."

jheinrich at thegazette.canwest.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/ipsm-l/attachments/20050112/88194d7a/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 80937-28087.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 15171 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/ipsm-l/attachments/20050112/88194d7a/attachment.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 80572-27906.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 10223 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/ipsm-l/attachments/20050112/88194d7a/attachment-0001.jpg>