Oka Crisis Analysis

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On July 11th, 1990, in Oka, Quebec was the beginning of a 78-day standoff between the Mohawks First Nations group, the Quebec police and the Canadian military. The conflict aroused due to a proposition to expand an existing golf course from a nine-hole to an eighteen-hole facility on grounds that the Mohawks claimed to belong to them. The twenty-two hectares piece of land the Mohawk people claim held value to them because it is where the Mohawk’s ancestor’s burial grounds are located and it held sentimental value to them. The Mohawks set up barricades to the land on March 11th, 1990 but the issue gained international attention after an injunction was granted on June 30th, 1990 allowing the expansion of the golf course and the Mayor of Oka requested …show more content…
Oral culture continues through radio broadcasting in many rural areas that are secluded from the “city life” in provinces and territories across Canada. The new coverage was not accurate when reporting about the “Oka crisis”. In the documentary, it was seen that many mainstream news sources had left the barricaded area and the news that was being reported was based on hearsay. Seen in the documentary Jeffery York from the Globe and Mail said, “there are no broadcast reporters remaining, what really surprise me is that in a country like Canada, the army is telling us what we can and can not publish and report on the nightly news” (Koenig & Neale, 1993). “One of the destructive waves of budget cuts to indigenous media in recent history came in 1990, the same year that violence erupted in the Kanehsatake Mohawk Territory near Oka, Quebec” (Alia, p.43, 1999). This budget cut impacted how news and awareness was brought to the aboriginal community. “Many people believed that the cuts were punitive, directly related to those events, and aimed at silencing Aboriginal voices. Regardless of whether this was the case, exacerbated tensions contributed to the difficulty of assuring accurate coverage of the Oka crisis” (Alia, p.43, 1999). The lack of resources for the aboriginal people to voice their concerns amongst their own
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