[IPSM] Activist roots still thrive in Canada border crossing

[Devin]

Activist roots still thrive in Canada border crossing
Indian Defense League of America

Posted: July 23, 2004 - 10:04am EST
by: Jim Adams / Associate Editor / Indian Country Today


NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. - Activist movements among modern North American 
Indians have roots that go back well beyond AIM and the siege at Wounded 
Knee, and they are still very much alive in the annual Native march across 
the U.S. - Canada border, held here recently for its 77th continuous year.

This years march marked the coming forward of the third generation in the 
sponsoring Indian Defense League of America, as one long-time leader lay 
seriously ill in the hospital. Although the passing of the torch was 
tinged with sorrow, it presaged renewed vitality for what could very well 
be the oldest continuous Native protest movement in northern America. It 
is a movement with a clear but still not widely known influence on the 
more famous upsurge of the early 1970s.

The march itself across the Whirlpool Bridge east of Niagara Falls was 
well mannered, billed as a "walk" in its publicity because of security 
objections from the bridge commission. The great granddaughters of IDLA 
founder Clinton Rickard, a chief of the Tuscarora Nation, carried the 
banner of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy from the Canadian side 
to the center of the bridge where the group paused by tradition under its 
girders at exactly noon. Once across, the event turned into a daylong 
"celebration" of Native border crossing rights recognized by the Jay 
Treaty of 1794 and reaffirmed by the Treaty of Ghent of 1814. A picnic and 
festival in nearby Hyde Park offered corn soup, strawberries and speeches 
by long-time supporters, both Indian and non-Indian.

Event organizer Jolene Rickard, granddaughter of Chief Rickard, explained 
that the march alternates each year in starting from the U.S. or Canadian 
side. When it enters the U.S., she said, it is called a "celebration" 
because the U.S. government still honors the Jay Treaty. When it enters 
Canada, it is called a "commemoration" because the Ottawa government does 
not consider itself bound by a treaty made between the U.S. and Great 
Britain in its colonial era. (Jolene Rickard emphasized that leadership of 
IDLA now rests with a council of elders, but the organizing work is 
increasingly passing to the third generation of founding families such as 
her own, the Martins of the Six Nations Reserve and the Meness of the 
Kitigan-zibi (Algonquin) community of Canada.)

Speeches at the celebration were rich in historical memory, since several 
participants had academic backgrounds. (Rickard is a Ph.D. at the State 
University of New York - Buffalo). Barbara Graymont, who helped write 
Chief Rickards autobiography, "The Fighting Tuscarora" and is now in her 
late 70s, gave a fiery account of the U.S. attempt to deny entry to Aboriginals in the 
1920s.

But the event this year was also deeply conscious of its own history, as 
one long-time leader Harry "Jiggie" Hill lay in Buffalo General Hospital 
with a serious heart condition and other veterans have entered their 80s. 
One Mohawk elder, Ernie Benedict, now in his 80s, first marched in the 
crossing when he was 18. The early participants went on to a lifetime of 
activism with far-reaching impact.

Chief Rickard organized the first march in 1927 after a fateful visit from 
a traditional Cayuga leader Levi General, the Deskaheh, chief of the 
Younger Bear Clan. Deskaheh was one of the first to assert Iroquois 
national rights in an international forum, traveling to Geneva, 
Switzerland, in the early  20s to petition the new League of Nations, 
forerunner of the United Nations. While staying at Chief Rickards house on the Tuscarora territory in New York, Deskaheh fell ill and sent 
for his traditional medicine man from the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. 
But the medicine man was not allowed across the border.

The U.S. had just passed the Immigration Law of 1924, which denied entry 
to anyone who did not speak English. Although the measure was directed 
against Asians, it also barred the traditionally raised medicine man, who 
did not read or write English and only spoke his own language. He could 
not make it to Deskaheh, who passed away in Chief Rickards house.

Rickard was so moved that he began the border crossings and devoted his 
life to defending the right of free passage. But his influence extended 
far beyond the border. "You have to remember that when my grandfather 
stepped forward in the 1920s," said Jolene Rickard, "it was not popular to 
be a Native person who was refusing to let go of tradition.

"At the time, it was very popular not to be Indian, to fit in, to be 
progressive."

The border march represented a fundamental principle that the Native 
nations retained their rights regardless of the power of governments 
imposed by newcomers to the continent. Even today, said one recent 
participant who marched with his teen-aged daughter, it is the first 
experience many Native youths have in asserting their inherent national 
rights. For early marchers, it was a lesson that fed into the movement for 
sovereignty and self-determination.

Ernie Benedict and other Mohawk marchers took the activist spirit back to 
the Akwesasne community, said Rickard, where it evolved into the White 
Roots of Peace movement. This caravan of tribal elders traveled across the 
country in the late 60s, carrying a message of traditional revival to Indian communities, on 
and off reservation. At the American Indian Millennium conference at 
Cornell University in 2001, Wilma Mankiller, the former Cherokee 
president, described the impact of seeing the battered bus carrying the 
White Roots of Peace leaders arrive in Oakland, Calif., in the late 
60s. She said their message inspired her own career as well as the Bay 
Area activism that led to the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island.

The Mohawk activism led in other directions too, inspiring both armed 
resistance in the Oka incident and an intellectual revival centered on the 
publication Akwesasne Notes. (Journalism veterans of Akwesasne Notes play 
a prominent role in the editorial policy of this publication.)

The assertion of border rights fed into a message of self-determination 
and traditional identity that struggled with government policies of 
assimilation and termination and in the 70s triumphed completely. It was 
one of many sources, and possibly not the least, of the now nearly 
universal assertion of tribal sovereignty.

"Most people look at the 1970s as the start," said Rickard, "but if you 
scratch a little bit on the personalities involved, you will find they 
come from families that have held the idea of self-determination for 
generations."

This years border march promised that the tradition would continue for another 
generation, and more.

This article can be found at http://www.indiancountry.com/?1090591866