BRIDGES AND BARRICADES

1991 | 36 pages | Co-Publisher, Co-Editor, Designer

The landmark 1990 Kanehsatake Resistance — known misleadingly as “Oka Crisis”  — was misrepresented in mainstream media around the world as a violent and dangerous rebellion. Bridges and Barricades was an independently published 36-page booklet that went behind the headlines of the day, to lift up on the deep history of Kanyen’kehà:ka (Mohawk) relationship to land, and the settler encroachment leading up to the resistance movement, a 78-day standoff with the Quebec Police and Canadian Army over the extension of a municipal golf course on ancestral burial grounds. With a print run of 3,000, the booklet was distributed for free locally on reserve at Kanehsatake and Kahnawake, throughout  Montreal, and made its way widely across the continent, unexpectedly throughout the prison library system. The publishing team received dozens of long hand-written letters from Indigneous people held in prison, detailing their personal experiences with encroachment and theft on their Nations’ lands.