Daniel Rück, The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada

Abstract

In the summer of 2021, the Rotisken’rakéhte, often referred to as the Mohawk Warrior Society, undertook an action with a group of Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke community members to reclaim a piece of forested land immediately adjacent to the Kahnawà:ke reserve boundary (Deer 2021). The parcel in question falls within the former Seigneury of Sault Saint-Louis, the over 18,000-hectare stretch of Kahnawà:ke territory where Rück’s incisive historical account of settler colonial attrition takes place. The current land reclamation action, prompted by a March 2021 Chateauguay municipality rezoning by-law greenlighting a 290-unit housing development, is but the most recent iteration of centuries of Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke struggle to defend and reclaim their land. Similarly, three months earlier and 60 kilometres up the road, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kanehsata:ké land defenders put out a call for support because the municipality of Oka had once again moved to seize and develop the Sacred Pines (Kanehsata:ké Land Defenders 2020). The Pines is an unceded Kanehsata'kehró:non burial site stolen by Jesuit missionaries. The municipality of Oka’s 1990 approval of a golf course extension onto the site triggered the Oka uprising. Oka’s current mayor, Pascal Quevillon, has embarked on several public racist screeds against the Kanien’kehá:ka of Kanehsata:ké. In reading The Laws and the Land, one is confronted with the striking symmetries between the settler colonial invasion of Kahnawà:ke throughout the 19th century and the ongoing attempts by settler governments, real estate developers, and far-right community groups to secure, entrench, and extend settler control over Kanien’kehá:ka land. To be sure, the techniques and rationalities of settler colonial governance have undergone significant conceptual reordering due in no small part to the multiple crises of state legitimacy driven by Indigenous uprisings and