St Kateri’s shrine was the reason we’d thought to visit Montreal in the first place, so, as you might imagine, standing here by the quiet banks of the Saint Laurent after months of anticipation felt pretty good.
Our Lyft driver’s GPS had been acting up, which meant that I’d get a chance to have my longest exchange in French of the trip (which also felt really good). More significantly, it also led to experiencing this church from this vantage point first.
I don’t know what was special about this tree, but it literally took my breath away. Christine was walking by the waterway below as I figured out my first of the roll (see next post) and after I took the shot and turned around, I let out an audible gasp; the tree was scintillating with little flying insects that I would later learn were mayflies.
We saw similar swarms at Habitat 67, which the tour guide called “mannes,” though their official name in French is much more beautiful: “éphémères,” true to their scientific name, ephemeroptera, from the Greek “ephemeros” or “short-lived.”
The symbolism of the ephemeral mayfly has not been lost on poets and theologians, who find meaning in their seemingly meaningless lives.
We were here because of Christine’s project, but along the way I’d become intensely invested in learning about this place, for reasons not entirely clear to me at the time. That sort of thing is nothing new to me, but it feels odd whenever it happens.
Something takes ahold of me for a while with the urgency of a messenger with important news. Sometimes I have a strong sense of what or why; other times I just pay attention until it’s gone.
But in those few moments outside this church, before we went in and did what we’d come here to do, I felt like everything was happening for a reason and it didn’t matter if I knew what that was.
That word, “éphémère,” had struck me elsewhere, the day before we came here—the day we went to visit Leonard Cohen’s grave. Scroll back and see for yourself.
Why did that word jump out at me? I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t expecting any mayflies and I definitely didn’t know they were called by that name; and yet, here it was at each station in my oddball pilgrimage, from the Mont Royal Cemetary to Saint Kateri’s Shrine to Habitat 67; first as a word, then as words incarnate.
Maybe it’s like the sermon I heard today: these thin places where we meet something of the divine are special to us because our awareness of its pervasiveness is fleeting.
Every space is sacred, every ground is holy; “surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” We hold on to these short-lived moments of clarity in order to remember where we are when the signs are confused, and the path is not so clear.
At least, that’s the meaning I’m giving to these seemingly meaningless flies.
Much of what made the Mohawk resurgence in local and regional politics in the last half century was driven by a renaissance in traditional Mohawk belief systems in contradistinction to Christian colonialism. That anti-church rhetoric is found all over the writings of Karoniaktajeh (Louis Hall), the spiritual father of the Mohawk Warrior Society and designer of their flag, which is now a symbol of indigenous solidarity and power across the continent.
Karoniaktajeh had been schooled in Catholic institutions and was preparing for a life in the priesthood when he tripped over the blatant contradictions between church teachings and church actions towards this land. The cognitive dissonance and blatant lies he encountered as he deepened his study of European thought and history led to a very decisive break and return to his literal and philosophical roots in the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) confederation and constitution, or “Great Law of Peace.” This was the law of the longhouse people. It rejected all foreign laws including those of the church.
I was curious to see how palpable that break would be in the streets of Kahnawake today. Was Kateri’s church isolated in any way? Or was this globalized site of pilgrimage kept away from these thorny questions?
f the subtleties, but one thing I did notice was that the militance of Mohawk traditionalism was kept elsewhere; even the cultural center felt like an extension of the church, with religious beadwork on sale among the souvenirs.
I expected to see some indication of the history of Mohawk resistance — a photo from Oka, a Warrior Flag, etc. — but that might not be the image that locals think pilgrims and tourists want to see.
One of the guides at the center asked us how long we’d be in town and warmly invited us to the annual Pow Wow next time we’re here. I hope we get to do that. At the very least, I’d love to spend a few more days and have a chance to see and hear a little bit more behind the polite exterior that made us feel so welcome.
Is Louis Hall’s legacy still alive in Kahnawake?
As annoying as it might sound coming from an outsider and a tourist (and a newly minted gringo at that), the first thing that struck me about Kahnawake was how delightfully ordinary and, well, suburban it was.
Granted, we probably saw the more manicured riverside properties by the touristic church, but still – there is something radically affirming of indigenous sovereignty to simply “be.” Existence is resistance, we often say where I’m from.
Indigenous power is founded on that most fundamental right to be left alone; that freedom to be ordinary.
In my part of the world, “territories” stand out; they are securitized or marginalized, and almost always stigmatized. They get called strongholds or enclaves and you’re warned not to go “over there.” And while we barely scratched the surface of a place that’s known much conflict and, indeed, even violence, what I felt “over here” was peace – a gentleness of climate, a lightness of attitude, a slowness of time.
Here and there, we saw signs and symbols that pointed to those heavier histories, but nothing screamed for attention.
Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe I didn’t feel like I stood out, so everything around me felt a little calmer and soft spoken.
There are so many layers I still don’t understand about the history of this place. I really should say “histories” because so much of the struggle for freedom and autonomy here is fought on discursive planes; so much of what we know about Canada and Quebec must be “un-known” so that the real knowledge that Karoniaktajeh wrote about can be gained.
For example, the Mohawks sided with the British during those early days of intra-imperial struggle. I love reading about that time in Karoniaktajeh’s telling; he wrote about how the Warriors took advantage of French racism, literally scaring their soldiers half to death because of all the awful things they were taught about those “savages.” He also made sure to point out how the Brits took credit for the Warriors’ actions. It’s sometimes hard to separate his facts from his sarcasm in these stories.
But that’s part of the point. As Kahente Horn-Miller puts it: “Humor is in every Indigenous culture and may be indicative of survival through the worst parts of colonization. … In order to be able to rationalize it one has to laugh first. This laughter prevents us from being overwhelmed by feelings of rage, frustration … we laugh at all that colonialism has attempted to do to us.”
So yeah, there are things I saw here that I didn’t get, like these symbols of military service or markers of colonial history. But maybe I’m not supposed to get it. Maybe I’m just supposed to laugh.
There’s something comforting about that attitude; it even reminds me of home – like how the most popular joke I heard in Beirut in July of 2006 was told by the bombed and displaced themselves.
Existence is resistance.
Existence is also absolutely mundane. It’s a teenage cashier trying much too hard to look cool while struggling with a plastic bag, sighing “no worriesssss” when you say that it’s ok, because we brought a tote.
It’s Stacey’s Convenience store, where you tried to get an energy drink because there wasn’t much else on offer, but they only took cash, so Stacey told you that the store across the way had that drink too, if you wanted.
Existence is resistance. Resistance is ordinary. People are complicated. And life is good when we allow it to be.
There’s a tendency among the moderately-mobile to treat words like “tourist” as a pejorative, as though passing lightly through a place without claim or possession is a lesser form of inhabiting the world than settlement or habitation. And we know all the very good reasons to think that way; we’ve all suffered through the entitlements and bad behaviors of people on holiday, wherever they might be. But there’s something odd about a binary that casts a shadow of inauthenticity over being someone’s guest. There’s something gross and colonial about that too.
We are all guests on mothership earth; the Mohawk worldview would even argue that all that we possess now is in fact borrowed from the seventh generation in our future.
And when the Europeans first arrived on these shores, the Mohawks negotiated an agreement that came to be known as the Two Row Wampum: “In one row is a ship with our White Brothers’ ways; in the other a canoe with our ways. Each will travel down the river of life side by side. Neither will attempt to steer the other’s vessel.” They then sealed this with a covenant that laid out the principles that uphold the treaty: “Together we will travel in Friendship and in Peace Forever; as long as the grass is green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and as long as our Mother Earth will last.”
What did friendship mean here? It meant that the two will never be the same. It meant that peace was an act of mutual hospitality – not absorption, not assimilation, not even unity. Each would be a guest in the other’s vessel. Forever.
Tourism isn’t necessarily a noble thing, but it can be respectful. It can acknowledge that what one visits will never be one’s own to possess or lay claim to or integrate with or even comprehend. Together, we can travel in peace and friendship, and that’s enough.
Indigeneity is the breaking point of every western worldview; I watched three documentaries on Quebec separatism, for example, and read a whole book on Expo 67 before coming here, and not once did I see a word uttered about the First Nations. Yes, bilingualism and “cheap labor” and modernism are all very interesting contentions, but they all miss the point when the original sin of colonization is omitted.
Indigeneity cuts across the western divides of left and right; when you read about Mohawk traditions from a western perspective, you are challenged to think all categories anew.
Are these traditions gender essentialist or expansive? Are they matriarchal or patriarchal? Are they pacifist or violent? Our answers say more about who we are and have become than the cultures we interrogate.
When indigenous people stand up for a “culturally modified tree” like Luma, for example, or call for the dismantling of a dam like Snake River, they are posing a radical challenge to the whole system — to land use, to energy extraction, to sound policy — progressive or otherwise.
That’s why the future is indigenous.
The only hope for healing what’s left of this world is in that radical questioning of what we’ve come to take for granted when the west was “won” on our behalf.
Native people are well aware of the ironies and hypocrisies of French separatists, for example. Karoniaktajeh called the leader of the Parti Québécois a “ripping conqueror and plunderer of Québec.” In 1977, “the separatist Parti Québécois…sent riot police to Kuujjuaq in northern Québec, after Inuit demonstrated against Québec’s proposed Charter of the French Language, which would force them to use French.” And we all know what happened in Oka and Kahnawake in 1990.
But the native challenge is a universal one. It brings up the idea of the colonialism of ideas themselves:
“Epistemological racism means that our current range of research epistemologies-positivism to postmodernisms/post structuralisms-arise out of the social history and culture of the dominant race, [and] that these epistemologies logically reflect and reinforce that social history and that racial group (while excluding the epistemologies of other races/cultures).” (Scheurich and Young, 1997)
Are we prepared to face up to what that challenge might mean for our most cherished beliefs, no matter where we might lie on the spectrum of western plausibility?