Barbara Kay: Kahnawake’s ‘marry out, stay out’ policy is about survival, not race

How can Canadians condemn race-based discrimination on a reserve when we tolerate language-based discrimination in Quebec?

In 1984 the Mohawk community of Kahnawake came up with a controversial membership law that bans all “mixed race” couples from living on its Montreal-area territory. Violation of the policy may result in eviction and/or the cutting off of benefits. The Supreme Court of Canada is to rule on whether or not Mohawk woman Waneek Horn-Miller and six other plaintiffs were deprived of their Charter rights in the last year after being ordered to leave Kahnawake because they are married/partnered to whites.

Amongst other observers, the National Post editorial board is appalled by the policy. Inspired by a new incident, that of native Amanda Deer and her white boyfriend being driven from the reserve, their May 21 editorial stated that “in 2015, consenting adults should be able to take up residence with whomever they please, even if that residence happens to be on reserve.”

The policy is indeed race-based. But it is not inspired by racism, which implies hatred or contempt for others. The Mohawks are not denouncing intermarriage in itself (so the title for the editorial, “The town that bans interracial marriage” is therefore misleading). They do not hate white people or consider them inferior. They have no problem with Mohawks married to white people living elsewhere.

National survival is the issue. As I understand it, the Mohawks consider a policy under which intermarried couples enjoy the same rights as racially pure Mohawk couples will encourage more intermarriage, eventually resulting in a community so racially diluted that it will lose its cultural character and its raison d’être. As Kahnawake Mohawk Chief Michael Delisle said last fall: “All we are trying to do is preserve, not only culture and language and identity, but who we are as a people.”

Well, he has a point.

And it is a point that has been recognized as legitimate. Quebec’s Bill 101, which actively suppresses the language rights of anglophones in Quebec and education rights for children of anglophone Canadians from outside Quebec (effectively precluding a good deal of human inflow), was deemed kosher by the SCC on the grounds of linguistic — and therefore cultural — fragility.

It seems a little late in the game to be shocked that asymmetrical rights are accorded to aboriginals. Their reserves are not governed on democratic principles. They have no property rights as individuals. They are accorded affirmative rights in goods and services for which other Canadians aren’t eligible. The list of “equality” disparities is endless. First Nations are different from other Canadians, and here is one more difference that we may find unpalatable, but one that is really none of our business. It’s their territory, and who merits “citizenship” on sacred land is as fundamental to aboriginal identity as language is to québécois identity.

The Kahnawake policy is repugnant to us because we accept that creedal and constitutional democracies make for the best societies. But aboriginals were here before us, and it is only fair to concede that, having appropriated most of the lands they inhabited, we have no right to judge the way of life they choose to follow on the small domains over which they maintain sovereignty.

It’s not as if — like Jews, say, whose collective identity is also based on a piece of land that is sacred to them — aboriginal culture can continue to flourish in a diaspora. The Jewish religion became portable when its principles, sacred language and folkways were encoded in a written constitution, the Torah. First Nations do not have a constitution, only an oral tradition. Their culture is therefore not “portable.” Their numbers are small. The land is all.

Tribalism — or “reserve nationalism,” as one anthropologist puts it — is an ancient and organic form of human society. It has been around a lot longer than the nation state. Kinship is a tribe’s strength. It isn’t a pretty notion to us now, and certainly all the more distasteful given the genocides we have witnessed on grounds of bloodlines. But that doesn’t mean that such a system of cultural continuity is in itself immoral.

If, long ago, Canada had chosen brutally to dismantle the reserve system and insist on aboriginals’ integration, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because there would be no sacred aboriginal space, just deracinated aboriginals. But Canada did make the decision to protect their culture, which means acknowledging the legitimacy and importance of tribal bloodlines.

We can’t have our asymmetrical cake and eat it too. Apart from the deplorable bullying we’ve seen in enforcing the policy — mobbing, vandalizing, intimidation, which must be firmly suppressed — in principle, I side with Kahnawake.

National Post

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