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Saavedra-Vargas added that at powwows and other celebrations around the continent, “you can always meet Mohawk Warriors talking about how they are proud of what happened. They keep the memory alive.”

When the town of Oka decided in 1990 it was going to allow the expansion of a golf course on disputed territory _ including on a Mohawk burial ground _ people living in the neighbouring Mohawk community of Kanesatake rose up in defiance.

In response to the council’s decision, Mohawks barricaded a dirt road leading to the golf course.

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After they refused to obey a court injunction to stand down, a shootout ensued with provincial police officers and resulted in the death of Cpl. Marcel Lemay on July 11.

Where the bullet came from remains a mystery.

The Quebec government called in the Canadian Forces and roughly 800 members of the Royal 22e Regiment encircled the Mohawks in the pines with barbed wire.

“(Premier Robert Bourassa) called us into his office the day after (the shooting) and told us — he made it clear, he didn’t want any more death,” Sam Elkas, who was Quebec public security minister at the time, said in an interview.

After 78 days of negotiations, both sides struck a deal: the barricades made of dirt and mangled police vehicles were to come down in return for the cancellation of the golf course expansion.

The disputed territory remains an unsettled issue, however, and was never officially ceded by the Mohawks or handed over to the native community by federal or provincial governments.

“You reach a point after a while where you have to make a stand,” Kanesatake resident Linda Simon, who experienced the violence, said in an interview.

“The common lands had slowly been given away and sold and there came a point where people weren’t going to take it anymore.”

The 1990 events led to the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples, which helped usher in new agreements between natives and non-natives such as the resource-sharing deal in 2002 called the Paix des Braves (Peace of the Braves) between the Quebec government and the Grand Council of the Crees.