From Kanehsatà:ke to Palestine

A review of Ellen Gabriel and Sean Carleton’s When the Pine Needles Fall

Review by Nick Gottlieb / November 29, 2024 / CANADIAN DIMENSION



In the summer of 1990, Ellen Gabriel (Katsi’tsakwas) was chosen by the People of the Longhouse and her community of Kanehsatà:ke to be their spokesperson during the infamous “Oka Crisis,” a 78-day standoff to protect ancestral Kanien’kéha:ka (Mohawk) land in Québec.

 Photo by Caitlyn Richard.

When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance

Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton

Between the Lines, 2024

At 5:15 am on July 11, 1990, the Sûreté de Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, along with the RCMP and other paramilitary units, marched on a blockade on a dirt road in Kanehsatà:ke, about 50 kilometres west of Montréal. As Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel tells it in her new memoir, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, written in conversation with Sean Carleton (a former Canadian Dimension editorial board member), there were just five women at the blockade that day, including Gabriel, when the police arrived. After a three-hour standoff, the SQ began shooting at the land defenders. Gabriel and the other women took refuge in an area known as “The Pines,” the forest that the Kanien’kehá:ka have been actively protecting since Sulpician missionaries first arrived in the region that is now southwestern Québec in 1717.

This raid, during which a police officer, Marcel Lemay, was killed, initiated a 78-day standoff that would come to be known as the “Oka Crisis,” or as Carleton clarifies in the book, “more correctly, the siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke.” According to Gabriel, throughout the standoff, there was a concerted effort to depict Mohawk land defenders as dangerous criminals, thus legitimating the overwhelming force that the SQ, the RCMP, and eventually, the Canadian military brought to bear. Even today, the famous photograph of an armed Mohawk warrior in fatigues staring down a Canadian solider dominates our collective memory of the conflict. But Gabriel argues that the narrative popularized by the media distracted from the land struggle at the heart of the dispute and activated “existing fears and racist attitudes to justify [Canada’s] use of force.”

Gabriel was the spokesperson for the Kanien’kehà:ka defending “The Pines” from a proposed nine-hole golf course expansion in 1990. Nearly 35 years later, When the Pine Needles Fall offers a counter-history that retells the story of the conflict in two important ways. First, Gabriel humanizes and feminizes the Mohawk resistance, making it clear that while there were armed male warriors (there had to be, the state came in guns ablaze) “the women were really the leaders of the movement,” backed by elders and the wider community. Second, Gabriel historicizes the crisis, complicating it as not simply a conflict between radical land defenders and the municipality of Oka. That superficial narrative is the colonizer’s version of the story: recalcitrant Indians refuse to accept Canada’s civilizing offer of progress and development. Gabriel’s version situates the crisis as the latest entry in a centuries-long history of violent occupation and land theft that began in 1717.

These twin projects of re-humanization and re-historicization are part of the fight against colonialism everywhere it occurs, including in Palestine today. The Al-Aqsa Flood, like the Mohawk Crisis of 1990, did not occur in a historical vacuum. Hamas’s attack was part of the armed Palestinian struggle provoked by the Israeli occupation and colonialism. The violent retaliation of October 7 was just the latest eruption in a century-long history of genocide and dispossession. Indeed, the Palestinian resistance is not, as we are often told, made up of human animals who don’t “put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” as William Westmoreland, the American general who oversaw the Vietnam War, once said of the “Oriental.” If anything, the shocking number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza—made up predominantly, according to a newly published UN report, of children between the ages of five and nine—should make it clear that it is the colonizers who do not value life.

Gabriel’s memoir outlines a longue durée history of Kanehsatà:ke that has many parallels with the present conflict in Israel-Palestine. In 1717, Louis XIV, the King of France, granted the Sulpician missionaries title to the land of Kanehsatà:ke. Two centuries later, in 1917, the British government gave its support to the World Zionist Organization’s project of establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was then under British occupation. In the late 1800s, the Sulpicians established the town of Oka by forcibly expelling Gabriel’s ancestors from their homes, leaving them with nothing but the clothes on their back. In 1948, the Zionists did the same across most of Palestine, forcing 750,000 people from their homes during the Nakba.

In the years following the initial land theft, in both cases, the colonial powers turned the territory that remained into Swiss cheese. Gabriel writes that Kanehsatà:ke, unlike most reserves in Canada, is “more like a checkerboard, with French settlers scattered throughout—a direct result of our lands illegally being sold by the Sulpician priests dating back to the 1700s.” The West Bank’s territorial integrity has been similarly disintegrating as settlements pop up and grow, a process that has accelerated over the last year. In the Naqab Desert, the Israeli state seizes new land by bulldozing Bedouin villages and inventing legal loopholes to render their land titles invalid, which in many cases are clearly traceable to Ottoman legal registries.

Kanehsatà:ke’s history shows that land and riches have been the core drivers of the colonial project from its inception, from the Sulpician missionaries who stole land and sold it for profit to the real estate developers trying to fragment the land further to sell condominiums. The same process continues to play out in Israel-Palestine, with auctions even taking place in Canada to sell land in the occupied West Bank.

In March of this year, Gabriel spoke at a webinar I helped organize and made these connections herself: the dehumanization, the killings, the theft of children, and the land dispossession are linked across these two struggles. Remarkably, according to Gabriel, the paramilitary police force that invaded Kanehsatà:ke in 1990 was the first in North America to have trained in Israel (they even carried Israeli-made weapons).

Gabriel’s memoir is not about Palestine, though she does explicitly mention the solidarity of Palestinians in Canada during her people’s 1990 struggle. When the Pine Needles Fall is about settler capitalism and a life of resistance to it. This is a story that transcends specific geographic contexts and engages by necessity with global structures and processes. Gabriel’s life’s work charts a path forward that combines resistance grounded in the most effective elements of traditional governance—what Glen Coulthard would call Indigenous resurgence—with a commitment to feminism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism. This path requires us to recognize and reckon with the mess that colonialism has made of so many communities, both settler and Indigenous alike. And it requires the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ right to land and self-determination, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace is four times as old as Canada. “Who,” Gabriel asked during the webinar, “is Canada to tell us what is legal or what is not?” The settler capitalist order will not last forever—it cannot, for the Earth’s sake. And so, we keep fighting, “because,” Gabriel writes, “the struggle continues.”

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.