Spoken Here (Mark Abley, 2003, 2011) pp163-7
THE FIRST TIME I ever sensed the power of the Mohawk language, I was hunched over a student desk at McGill University in downtown Montreal. It was a damp February afternoon in 1997, mild enough for smokers to huddle in small groups outside the tobacco-free arts building. A short walk down the hill, a plaque proclaims this to be the site of Hochelaga – the Indian town whose inhabitants fed and puzzled over Jacques Cartier four and a half centuries ago. The Breton explorer decided that the great river that had brought him here would be called the “Saint-Laurent,” and he christened this hill “Mont Royal.” Both names have lasted.
Inside the building, several hundred people had given up part of their weekend to cram into a windowless amphitheater. It was the climax of a conference looking into the doubtful fate, the 440 recommendations, and the 3,537-page report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The federal government had set up the commission after the 1990 Oka crisis, with memories still fresh of masked Mohawk warriors eyeball to eyeball with heavily armed Canadian soldiers. The confrontation, a few miles west of Montreal Island, had lasted eleven weeks. By the time of the conference the memories had faded in society at large, although they remained crystalline among the Mohawks. Swiveling my desk, I noticed a good number of native men and women in the crowd: Mohawks had been joined by Crees. Hurons, and people from other groups that many Canadians still call “tribes” rather than “First Nations.” Up on the stage, the grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations -a handsome, brooding Cree man called Ovide Mercredi -sat down near a neoconservative newspaper columnist named Andrew Coyne. The two did not shake hands.
A man with a dark blue shirt, at ponytail, and suspenders bounded to the podium. He stood there for a minute. waiting for the hubbub to subside. I didn’t realize, at the time, that Ernie Benedict was the founder of the Native North American Travelling College, the holder of an honorary doctor of laws degree from Trent University, and the man who had once presented an eagle feather to Pope John Paul II at a huge outdoor mass. No wonder a McGill lecture hall held no terrors for him. Benedict was seventy-eight years old. He didn’t look it. Nor, when he opened his mouth, keeping his eyes half closed, did he sound it:
Ohenton karihwatehkwen ne’e ayontati’ niya’tewenhniserake tsi teyontenonhweratons. Akwekon enhskat tsi entitewahwe’nonni’ ne onkwa’nikbnra, tanon tenyethinonhweraton’ ne onkwehson’a ne’akwekon skennen akenhake’. Etho niyohtonhak ne onkwa’nikbnra . . .
In these words, or ones very like them, Ernie Benedict was giving succinct thanks for harmony and peace. But he didn’t stop there. Still speaking in the Kanien’keha language – otherwise known as Mohawk – he went on to do what he and other traditional Mohawks do before any ceremonial occasion, any religious gathering, any political meeting, any formal celebration. He confirmed his gratitude to the food plants and medicine plants, to the waters and wild animals, to the trees and birds and rain-bringing thunders . . . Lengthy, convoluted, dense with meaning, his words flowed out into the audience like the unexpected music of a dream.
I was struck by the tension in the crowd, the way surprise soon turned to anxiety. It wasn’t just the French- and English-speaking Canadians sitting in the big room who could not begin to understand Ernie Benedict, a small man who seemed to grow in stature as he spoke, swaying slightly, declining to make eye contact with anyone; it was also the members of other Indian nations. How long would he go on? Tete-watenonhweratons tsi shekon tewatkahthos ne kamhkwa tehohswathéton’ ro’tarihaton’ ne kentho onhwentsydke . . . Coyne leaned forward, pushing his head into his hands. In the unlikely event that he chose to recite the Ohemvn karihwutehkwen in its full splendor. Benedict might be standing at the microphone for two hours.
Not so. A few minutes after he began. he pronounced a refrain for the last time, Etho niyohtonhak ne onkwn’nikbnra, and switched to English. ‘We have had the help of all creatures from our Mother, the Earth,” he aid. ‘We will now return that love in thanks and greetings.” Such greetings have been uttered for centuries, not only in Mohawk and English but also in the languages of the live other nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy. They were – and still are – a people for whom oratory counts. Occasionally delivered in a long form, more often abbreviated, the greetings are both a prayer and a pledge of allegiance: a defining statement of belief. Under the artificial lights. Benedict greeted and thanked all the creatures of the world, moving on from terrestrial beings to the sun and “our grandmother the moon, who, we believe, is faithfully performing her task.” A purpose of the great prayer – the Iroquois thanksgiving address, it’s generally called, although a literal translation would be “the words that come before all else” – is that by the time a speaker falls silent, “now our minds are one.” Glancing at the panel waiting to speak, I thought it an unlikely prospect.
Sure enough, after Benedict sat down, Andrew Coyne stood up to denounce. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had recommended, along with much else, a concerted effort to keep traditional languages and cultures alive. But to the newspaper columnist its report marked “a fundamental departure from liberal-democratic values.” By highlighting the value of cultural difference, Coyne said, the commission displayed “the folly of identity politics” – a folly that led to “the elevation of identity above other concerns like fairness or freedom.” The report appeared to accept that “real nations are ethnic or cultural ones”. Coyne disagreed. There was, he argued, “something narcissistic” about the claims of aboriginal peoples and Quebecers alike. Above all, the report placed an unacceptable stress on collective rights and called for “a retreat into a traditional culture that is ill-suited to the demands of an industrial economy.”
He left the podium to meager applause and scattered cries of “Shame!” Yet nobody, I suspect, was shocked by Coyne’s polemic. He had said, clearly and forcefully, what a host of non-natives have always thought: Our law is the law. Our language is the language. Rights are individual. Differences will fade away.
“My voice has been angry for quite a while,” the following speaker, Ovide Mercredi, began in a tone of bitter quiet. He never looked at Coyne, but most of what he said over the next twenty minutes was a cold response. Coyne had attacked the royal commission’s appeal for a third order of government, an indigenous order, as threatening Canada with something alien: a racially based system of authority. “I don’t have any difficulty with the idea of racial government.” Mercredi retorted. “I see it every day of my life.” The longer he spoke, the angrier he seemed. His questions became rhetorical: “Have you seen us win anything lately? Are we getting our land back? Our resources? Are our languages guaranteed in your laws? Is the money spent on English and French being spent on the Cree language, the Ojibwa language, the Inuktitut language, and other indigenous languages of Canada?”
He mentioned those three, I imagine, because out of the fifty-three or so aboriginal languages still used in Canada, they appear the most likely to be spoken a couple of generations from now. Next to Navajo, Cree is the most widely heard native language in North America. It may have more than eighty thousand speakers, concentrated in small reserves across much of northern Canada and in the poor neighborhoods of cities. But even Cree speakers, like Mercredi, worry about eroding dialects and abandoned words. The Canadian constitution grants official status to English and French, giving indigenous languages no legal recognition. Most of these languages are now in a parlous condition. Of the six languages belonging to the Iroquois Confederacy, Ernie Benedict’s is the healthiest. Statistics are unreliable, as traditionalists refuse to recognize the jurisdiction or comply with the census demands of either the United States or Canada, but it’s clear that Mohawk still has hundreds of fluent speakers, as well as thousands of people who speak a limited version.
That day in Montreal, Ovide Mercredi kept going back to what he had just heard, or to what he thought he had heard: “You‘ll never survive on this land unless you assimilate to our society. Speak like us. dress like us, think like us.’ This is what’s called individual universality. There’s other names for it, like cultural genocide and racism.” At times. Mercredi said, it doesn’t pay to be mild mannered: “Those who sound the angriest, win. Let us not be ashamed to express our anger.” Finally he changed language. Using the tongue he had learned as a small boy amid the lakes, swamps, and evergreen forests of northern Manitoba. he spoke a few sentences in Cree, paused to look at the crowd, and then gave a rough translation: “I live different from you. Not that I hate you. But because I like the way we live ourselves, as people. The future must be different.”
With Cree words behind him, his anger appeared to dissolve. “I apologize for my tone of voice,” he said at last. A man in the crowd shouted, “No!” When Mercredi sat down, most of his listeners stood up. A few steps away from Coyne’s right ear, a woman beat a huge drum.
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