This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

This is an Honour Song is a collection of narratives, poetry, and essays exploring the broad impact of the 1990 resistance at Kanehsata: ke, otherwise known as the Oka Crisis. The book is written by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, activists and traditional people, and is sung as an Honour Song celebrating the commitment, sacrifices, and achievements of the Kanien'kehaka individuals and communities involved. This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades

Book review of This Is An Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades (Leeanne Betasamosake Simpson, ed)

This anthology revisits the events and issues and ongoing concerns of what is better known as the Oka Crisis (French: Crise d'Oka) during the period July 11 - September 26, 1990 in Oka, Quebec. The voices represented and self-represented register protest, analysis, reflection, activism and realizations about Indigenous histories and prophecies, Indigeneity, colonialism, racism, policing and politics in Canada, not just at the epicenter of Oka, but ranging widely from Mohawk lands into Ojibway and Cree and Inuit and Metis and various First Nations territories.

The contributor list consists of activists, artists, singer/songwriters, playwrights, poets, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, etc., in their various personal and professional capacities, some of whom are well-known noble stalwarts, many of whom are women and matriarchs and fighters of the cause of decolonization and indigenization in Canada. Their different takes and consciousnesses emerge and continue to evolve around this crisis, the stand in the Pines, and continue to ignite the spirit and imagination and to establish new as well as re-establish old facts on the ground.

As it were a primary pivot in recent Indigenous struggle, Kanehsatà:ke, a Kanien'kéha:ka Mohawk settlement on the shore of the Lake of Two Mountains in southeastern Quebec, galvanized a stronger than ever movement that is physical in occupation and blockade as tactics of maneuver against the economic and political power of the settler state that disrespects treaty and dishonours sacred ground. This book attests to and honours instead the persistence of memory of struggle of ancestors (of both native and settler, the former under the heavy hand of assimilation, the former in the viability of settling among the Hurons, etc.) and tests the promise of mutual understanding between the once welcomed people from away and the peoples that welcomed and helped them in wampum.

This pivotal moment as well as this book will continue to be sung of and sung even as the possibilities of a repeat of the acute police state in Canada and Quebec threaten to be imposed in what is going to be more than just the extension of a nine-hole golf course, this time in Alberta and through unceded territories across British Columbia an utterly destructive extractive industry that poisons everything it touches.





Paperback essential reading for those of us living as settlers within canada's borders & especially those of us on kanien'kehá:ka territory. this collection views the events & impacts of the 1990 resistance at kanehsatà:ke through the prisms of many different people's experiences with the resistance and the echoes of that summer. there is also important info about treaties, governance, interdependence, and justice under the legitimate law of this land (indigenous law), which is essential for settlers to understand as well as possible, since if we are going to live on this land, the bare minimum is trying to live rightly under that legitimate law. i especially appreciated wanda nanibush's love and other resistances: responding to kanehsatà:ke through artistic practice; daina augaitis & rebecca belmore's conversation ayum-ee-aawach oomama-mowan: speaking to their mother, about the 2-metre megaphone that was installed in different places & used to amplify the voices of indigenous people speaking directly to the earth; patricia a. monture's the human right to celebrate: achieving justice for aboriginal peoples, based on the teaching of her 16-year-old daughter who asked, why don't we have the human right to celebrate, rather than just be safe?; and robinder kaur sehdev's lessons from the bridge: on the possibilities of anti-racist feminist alliances in indigenous spaces, which draws connections between womanism/woman of colour feminism notions of the bridge & the resistance at kanehsatà:ke, which gives some ideas of living right as a settler in these territories. Paperback

Summary This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades