The Kahnawà꞉ke Mohawk Territory (, in the Mohawk language) is a First Nations reserve on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada, across from Montreal. Established as Seigneury Sault du St-Louis by French Canadians in 1719 as a Jesuit mission, it was formerly known as Caughnawaga (after the ancestral Mohawk villages named Caughnawaga (Kahnàwa꞉ke) in the Mohawk Valley of New York). There are 17 European spelling variations of the Mohawk Kahnawake and the name Kahnawà꞉ke refers to at least three historical places in New York State, in addition to the latest one.
Kahnawà꞉ke's territory totals an area of . Its resident population numbers slightly above 8,000, with a significant number living off reserve. Its land base today is unevenly distributed due to the federal Indian Act, which governs individual land possession. It has rules that are different from those applying to Canadian non-reserve areas. Most Kahnawà꞉ke residents originally spoke Kanien'kéha, the Mohawk language, and some learned French when trading with and allied with French colonists. Together with most of four Haudenosaunee nations, including the Mohawk, they allied with the British government during the American Revolutionary War and the Lower Canada Rebellion. They have since become mostly English speaking.
Although people of European descent traditionally refer to the residents of Kahnawake as Mohawk, their autonym is Kanien’kehá꞉ka (the "People of the Flint"). Another meaning is "those who speak [the language] Kanien'kéha"). The Kanien’kehá꞉ka were historically the most easterly nation of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) and are known as the "Keepers of the Eastern Door". They controlled territory on both sides of the Mohawk River and west of the Hudson River in present-day New York, where they protected other parts of the confederacy to the west against invasion by tribes from present-day New England and the coastal areas.
Kahnawake is one of several self-governing Kanien’kehá꞉ka territories of the Mohawk Nation within the borders of Canada, including Kanesatake on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River northwest of Montreal; Tyendinaga in Ontario; Akwesasne, which straddles the borders of Quebec, Ontario and New York across the Saint Lawrence River; and the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario north of Lake Erie. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British considered Kahnawake one of the Seven Nations of Canada.
The name is derived from the Mohawk word kahnawà꞉ke, meaning "place of the rapids", referring to their major village Caughnawaga near the rapids of the Mohawk River in what is today central New York. When converted Catholic Mohawk moved to the Montréal area, they named the new settlement after their former one. The proximity of the Lachine Rapids also influenced their naming decision.
History Historical land claim
Kahnawake was created under what was known as the Seigneurie du Sault-Saint-Louis, a territory which the French Crown granted in 1680 to the Jesuits to "protect" and "nurture" those Mohawk newly converted to Catholicism. When the seigneury was granted, the government intended the territory to be closed to European settlement. But the Jesuits assumed rights as seigneurs of the Sault, and permitted French and other European colonists to settle there and collected their rents.Gerald Alfred, 1995: To Right Certain Wrongs: A Report on Research into Lands Known as the Seigneury of Sault St-Louis, Kahnawake: Kahnawake Seigneury Office
The Jesuits managed the seigneury until April 1762, after the British defeated France in the Seven Years' War and took over their territory east of the Mississippi River in New France. The new British governor, Thomas Gage, ordered the reserve to be entirely and exclusively vested in the Mohawk, under the supervision of the Indian Department.Alfred, Gerald R. 1995: Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism, Toronto: Oxford University Press
Despite repeated complaints by the Mohawk, many government agents continued to allow non-Native encroachment, and mismanaged the lands and rents. Surveyors were found to have modified some old maps at the expense of the Kahnawake people. From the late 1880s until the 1950s, the Mohawk were required by the government to make numerous land cessions to enable construction of railway, hydro-electric, and telephone company industrial projects along the river.
As a result, Kahnawake today has only . In the late 20th century, the Mohawk Nation was pursuing land claims with the Canadian government to regain lost land. The modern claim touches the municipalities of Saint-Constant, Sainte-Catherine, Saint-Mathieu, Delson, Candiac and Saint-Philippe. Led by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake and the reserve's Inter-governmental Relations Team, the community has filed claims with the government of Canada. It is seeking monetary compensation NOTE: Kahnawake is not seeking financial compensation for the mismanagement of the land. Kahnawake recognizes the full extent of the 'seigneury" to be Kahnawake Mohawk Territory and is moving to reacquire its land along with financial compensation for infrastructure criscrossing the territory. and symbolic recognition of its claim.Rosenburg, Dan, 1999: "Land claims issue dragging its heels", The Eastern Door 8(4)
Multi-cultural community Kahnawake was settled by a variety of historic Indigenous peoples, although the Mohawk became by far the majority. They and other tribes had a practice of adopting captives into the tribe, often to replace people lost to illness or warfare. They generally chose to adopt young women and children taken in raids, as these were believed to be more amenable to assimilation. Individual families adopted such captives, and made them full members of their clan and tribe. The practice preceded European encounter, but later some European captives were also assimilated as Mohawk. The Mohawk had a matrilineal kinship system, with children considered born into the clan of the mother and deriving their status from her family.
There was some European settlement after the reserve land was "donated" by the French Crown in the mid-17th century. The French government stationed French colonial troops there (who formed liaisons with local women and had children by them). Shopkeepers also formed families, and through the 18th century, many marriages occurred between European men and Indian women. Multiracial children born to Mohawk mothers were readily assimilated into the mother's family, clan, and nation.Faribault-Beauregard, Marthe, 1993: Mariages de Saint-François-Xavier du Sault St-Louis, 1735-1972, Montréal: Société généalogique canadienne-française
During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the English and French were competing in North America and in Europe. Together with allied First Nations or Native American tribes, they conducted raids along the undefined border between the territories of New France and New England. Captives were sometimes held for ransom, and European families and communities worked to buy them back. In some cases, families of the Indigenous communities kept captives for adoption. For instance, more than 100 captives were taken during the 1704 Raid on Deerfield; they were forced overland to Montreal and Kahnawake. The minister of Deerfield was ransomed, but his teenage daughter was kept by a Mohawk family. She ultimately married a Mohawk man and had a family with him, choosing to stay with her new family rather than return to Deerfield.John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994
As a result of this history, many Kahnawake people have been of mixed ancestry but identify as Mohawk. Backgrounds may include ancestry of other Haudenosaunee nations, such as the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora; and/or French, English, Anglo-American, Scots and Irish. By the 1790s and early 19th century, visitors often described the visible "great mixture of blood" at Kahnawake. They noted that many children who appeared to be of European ancestry were being brought up culturally as Mohawk.Weld, Isaac, 1807: Travels through the United-States and Upper and Lower Canada during the years 1795, 1796, 1797, Volume 2. New York: Augustus M. Kelley At times there has been more tension about the relations of full-blood and mixed-race members of the tribe, both in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In other areas of Canada, particularly the Red River region in the west, Métis descendants of European trappers and Indigenous women, gradually developed what has become a separate, recognized ethnic group, based on a distinct hunting and trading culture.
Kahnawake surnames, such as Beauvais, D'Ailleboust, de La Ronde Thibaudière, Delisle, de Lorimier, Giasson, Johnson, Mailloux, McComber, McGregor, Montour, Phillips, Rice, Stacey, Tarbell, and Williams, represent the evidence of tribal members' adoption of and intermarriage with non-Natives. Tarbell ancestors, for instance, were John and Zachary, brothers captured as young children from Groton, Massachusetts in 1707 during Queen Anne's War and taken to Canada. Adopted by Mohawk families in Kahnawake, the boys became assimilated: they were baptized as Catholic and renamed, learned the Mohawk ways and were also given Mohawk names, married women who were daughters of chiefs, reared children with them, and became chiefs themselves.Darren Bonaparte, "The History of Akwesasne" , The Wampum Chronicles, accessed 1 Feb 2010
Historic sources document the sometimes strained relations between Mohawk and ethnic Europeans at Kahnawake, usually over property and competition for limited resources. In 1722, community residents objected to the garrison of French soldiers because they feared it would cause "horrible discord" and showed the French did not trust the locals. In the mid-1720s, the community evicted the Desaulnier sisters, traders who were garnering profits formerly earned by members of Kahnawake. In 1771, twenty-two Mohawk pressed British officials to help them prevent two local families from bringing French families to settle "on lands reserved for their common use". In 1812, many were opposed to specific types of "mixed" marriages. In 1822, Nicolas Doucet, an agent of the British Indian Department reported that the community was growing frustrated by marriages in which white husbands acquired rights over the lives and properties of their Mohawk wives according to British Canadian laws. This was in opposition to Haudenosaunee culture, which had a matrilineal kinship system, with descent and property invested in the maternal line.Matthieu Sossoyan: The Kahnawake Iroquois and the Lower-Canadian Rebellions, 1837-1838 , McGill University, Master's Thesis in Anthropology, 1999: p. 82-85
Abuse of alcohol was a continuing problem. In 1828, the village expelled white traders who were "poisoning" the Haudenosaunee "with rum and spirituous liquors". Tensions rose at the time of the 1837-38 Lower Canada Rebellion. The Mohawk had suffered incursions on their land, including non-Natives' taking valuable firewood. The Kahnawake cooperated with the British Crown against the Patriotes, largely over the issue of preserving their land and expressing their collective identity. Before and after the Rebellions, the community was fiercely divided regarding the rights of mixed-race residents, such as Antoine-Georges de Lorimier (the son of Claude-Nicolas-Guillaume de Lorimier), and whether he should be evicted. Although his mother was Mohawk and native to Kahnawake, because of his father's and his own connections to the European community, Georges de Lorimier became a controversial figure in Kahnawake, even after his death in 1863.