Blockade brings many frustrations to businesswoman

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Christina Montour runs a business on Oka's main street, but her mind and her heart is often behind the Mohawk blockade just down the road.

She has a daughter, Natalie, 22 and two nieces at Kanesatake.

"I feel as though I have a nightmare and I can't get over it. I don't sleep good not knowing what goes on behind the barricades during the night. It could get violent. Anything could happen. There's so many rumors, it's very tiring. It has everybody worried.

"I never thought it would go this far."

Montour, a licensed leather instructor, runs a Native crafts' shop on the village's main street, just down the road from the police blockade at St. Michel and St. George. The main street, Highway 344, has been blocked about four and a half months. Police unsuccessfully stormed the blockade July 11 in an attempt to dislodge Mohawk Warriors.

Montour said the strangle-hold around Oka and Kanesatake frustrated even the non-Natives living behind the Mohawk lines. "We're really surrounded by cops on the river as well as in the village. It's really hard to bring anything on the reserve.

"The white people were fed up. They told them 'You have to let us get through with the food or we're going to come down with guns."

She suspects police were trying to break down the spirit of the Natives. "It doesn't look as though they're going to be discouraged; they're holding on."

Montour lives day-to-day with trying to make a living selling handicrafts while police blockades have reduced traffic to a trickle. The ferry between the village and Hudson, a walk across Lake of Two Mountains, has also been closed by the Surete du Quebec.

The blockade also put a strain on her marriage. SQ officers refused to allow her non-Native husband, an agronomist with the provincial government, into Oka.

"I think that's extreme abuse," she said.

Access is limited to residents, police, the news media and workers.

Montour, a member of the Kanwsatake band, said the dispute has also cooled relations between the estimated 200 Natives and the 1,000 non-Natives in the community.

"We can feel it. There's tension."

"People I normally had very good support from now don't even look."

"I'm surprised and I'm sorry. We grew up together. Now I don't even think they want to look at us. We shared the recreational grounds, the skating rink. Everybody knows everybody in a small community."

The silence speaks stronger than words, she says, noting she wonders who she can now even get a hello from when a greeting a neighbor. "That pretty well spells out everything."

But Natives and non-Natives do have one thing in common. They're both disappointed the dispute hasn't been settled, she said.

"Everybody would like to win, but there will be only one who will win. I think it's very hard to have a compromise under the circumstances.

"It's going to be tense until we get outside help from the provincial and federal government. We need their help to come to an agreement.

"I'm hoping the people with authority will come forward and (help us) avoid bloodshed with peaceful negotiations and not demand too much on the part of the Mohawks, because they're only trying to hold on to the small piece of land we have left for recreational purposes."

Although the dispute seems far from settled, many non-Natives seem to feel they are already on the losing end. They held protest marches in the town shortly after the federal government announced it would spend $1.4 million, Whites 0."

At her shop Skawanes, which opened in June, Montour sells scarfs, T-shirts with the inscription Kanesatake Mohawk Territory - they're very popular these days - decoy birds, totem poles, leather goods, head bands, headdresses, dolls, handmade moccasins and tapes.

She sells her own goods as well as those done by Kanesatake, Huron and Six Nations Indians.

Her business was visited twice by SQ officers after the failed police assault.

"I was really scared. Being new back to my reserve, I didn't know what the ules are. I though maybe I'll be asked to close. But they wanted to buy Indian head stickers, which I don't carry. But I think they wanted to check what I had in my store. They maybe were shopping, around for their own curiosity," she chuckles.