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Serge Simon steps out of his truck, saunters across Route 148 and into the bushes.

He hops over a broken lath fence, landing in the shrubs on the other side of it. As he presses forward, Simon makes a show of quickly ducking, as though some wayward farmer just fired a rifle blast overhead.

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“We’re trespassing,” says Simon, flashing a mischievous smile. “But the way I see it, this is Mohawk land anyway. If anyone sees us, maybe they’ll freak out and think the natives have come to take back their territory.”

In theory, Simon is right. This field, the two-lane highway and nearby Mirabel airport are stretched across a vast plot of land the king of France ceded to Kanesatake’s Mohawks in 1733. For centuries, Simon’s ancestors hunted deer, gathered medicines and buried their dead along the southern banks of the Rivière du Nord.

Of course, in a much more practical sense, Simon is trespassing. The tract of land is privately owned and might one day be used as a route for TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline — a $12-billion structure that would carry oil from Alberta to terminals in Quebec and New Brunswick.