OKA: A POLITICAL CRISIS AND ITS LEGACY
Harry Swain
The Oka crisis of 1990 was hardly a model of restraint. Two lives were lost during the 78-day conflict between natives from the Kanesatake settlement and the surrounding white population. Three levels of government, two police forces and one army took on a handful of armed-to-the-teeth Mohawks, all for the sake of a tiny swath of land. Yet Swain presents those sweaty, engrossing summer days as a tragic yet absurd spectacle that could have been much, much worse were it not for cooler heads on both sides of the barricade. The deputy minister of Indian and northern affairs in Brian Mulroney’s government, Swain illustrates the undeniable brutality visited upon the natives in this part of the world and how, through a string of centuries-old broken promises, they were marooned on smaller and smaller pieces of land. The message is clear: for natives, every chunk of ground is crucial.
Swain’s targets are many, not the least being his own department, which he portrays as a lumbering, bureaucratic beast—a graveyard of ambition—rescued by a few bright minds, his own included. He accuses the Warrior faction, much of which was imported from Akwesasne and points south, of piggybacking on the conflict for their own purposes. He faults the residents of neighbouring Chateauguay for racism, and the Sûreté du Québec for expanding their ranks following the shooting death of Cpl. Marcel Lemay—despite government orders to do just the opposite. The media, meanwhile, only served to prolong the standoff. It took heroes to save the day, and they are equally as numerous: federal Indian affairs minister Tom Siddon and his provincial equivalent John Ciaccia for eloquence and perseverance; Kanesatake’s calm, sad-eyed matriarch, Ellen Gabriel; the Canadian army, for not falling into the same violent trap as the SQ. What makes the book so readable is Swain’s compelling portrayal of the dull inner workings of government, and how it somehow managed to stave off further bloodshed.
- MARTIN PATRIQUIN
THE TOP 100 CANADIAN SINGLES
Bob Mersereau
Randy Bachman is the king of Canadian music. Based on the list in this well-illustrated coffee-table book, Bachman not only can lay partial claim to the No. 1 Canadian single of all time, the Guess Who’s American Woman, but to three other Guess Who tracks, two by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and two by Trooper, an act signed and produced by Bachman. No wonder the CBC gave him a weekly show to prattle on about the glory days.
Mersereau curated a jury consisting of approximately 700 Canadian musicians, industry types, DJs and journalists (including this writer)—and a large number of people listed only as “music fans”—to submit a top 10 list. On the surface, the results skew toward Bachman’s generation; of the final 10, only two songs are post-1980, and one of those, by Leonard Cohen, didn’t become a hit until two decades later. Delving deeper, however, almost half of the top 100 come from after 1980; of more recent artists, Arcade Fire has two tracks and Sloan has three.
A list does not make a book, of course, and Mersereau managed to track down the vast majority of the artists for informative interviews. He was only turned down by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Feist, but captures their work perfectly well without their help, as he does with the few francophones on the list. To his credit, Mersereau did his homework in Quebec, and offers a separate, non-annotated francophone list of 100 singles as a primer on the province’s pop culture for the rest of Canada, which still doesn’t know the difference between Robert Charlebois and Jean Leloup.
Such a list is bound to be somewhat predictable; what’s a bit sad is how homogenous it is, musically. This is a classic-rock radio programmer’s dream come true, with two hip-hop tracks, no disco and even very little pop. On the other hand, Nickelback is nowhere to be found.
- MICHAEL BARCLAY
