Back to the Land
Back to the Land
One of the last working Mohawk farms in Quebec is teaching future generations to be proud of their language, knowledge and their history of caring for the land.
KANESATAKE — The car rumbled deeper into Mohawk territory, beyond the pines and past a farm where chickens grazed around a long-dead pickup truck.
Valerie Gabriel’s place doesn’t look like the farms that have swallowed so much of her ancestral lands. There are no immaculate cornrows sweeping the horizon or John Deere harvesters threshing wheat by the bushel.
Instead, there is chaos.
When I pulled up to the farm last week, I saw shrubs overtaking a greenhouse and goats sunbathing in the August heat. A rez dog squirmed her way from under a rusted out Ford Mustang and chased a farmhand around the yard, imploring him to play.
This chaos is the driving force behind Dearhouse Farms — one of the last working Mohawk farms in Quebec. Gabriel and her partner Chuck Barnett raise livestock and grow trees on her family’s property west of Montreal, in Kanesatake. They also hire young Mohawks serious about learning the Kanien’kéha language and cultivating a relationship with the land.
Barnett emerged from the barn last week with his left arm held together by steel pins and plaster (the fallout from a goat-lifting accident).
“I leaned over to pick the goat up and before I could even get it off the ground, I ripped every muscle in my arm,” said Barnett, who comes from a long line of farmers. “Even the goat was embarrassed for me. But this isn’t a big deal. I’ve been kicked in the face by a moose. Have you ever been kicked in the face by a moose?”
I shook my head.
“Now there’s an injury,” he said, taking a drag of his cigarette. “This? This is nothing.”
Barnett leads a team of workers that includes two teenage boys, a young woman and a refrigerator-sized man named Jo Rice. When I met the crew, as Barnett calls them, they sat caked in mud and paint, waiting out the rest of their break in the shade as they took turns petting the rez dog.
Using a mix of soil they build from dead leaves and fungus, the crew grows trees that will thrive in the harshest conditions. But they’re not merely planting and selling trees, they’re rebuilding forests, putting together the ingredients to sustain plant and animal life in a rapidly changing climate.
One of their newest clients, the city of Montreal, is working with Dearhouse Farms to replace the 1,000 trees mowed down at Parc Jean Drapeau in 2017. Barnett’s plan involves a small army of goats, an ungodly amount of feces and a mountain of topsoil. More on that later.
But this isn’t the thrust of what goes on at the farm.
Gabriel and Barnett say their mission is to help Mohawk youth who don’t quite fit into the high school-to-college-to-job pipeline. They teach them the gamut of trades they would need to live off the land; planting and transplanting crops, fixing diesel engines, welding, carpentry and outfoxing the predators that feed on their crops and abscond with their chickens.
The deal is, if you give Barnett and Gabriel three summers, they’ll pay you a fair wage and make a bonafide farmer of you. What’s more, since most of the workers are also students at a Kanien’kéha immersion program, the farm provides a safe space for them to practice their language.
So far, three former students have gone on to become Mohawk language teachers.
“We never really know the personalities we’re going to get on the farm,” Barnett said. “Then they settle in after a few weeks and there’s this ‘a-ha!’ moment where you see this light come on in their eyes. ‘Wait, this place is safe, it's this hidden community of people who want me to be whatever I want to be and are willing to get behind me. I've never experienced this before.’
“That's when they show us who they really are because it's okay to be vulnerable and share your dreams.”
What the couple provides are the building blocks for sovereignty; a connection to the land, language and customs that go back since time immemorial. Barnett tries to downplay it but there’s something special happening on this farm in the hills above Lake of Two Mountains.
“I’m just trying to help people make that awkward transition into adulthood,” Barnett said. “I don’t even like the term teacher. I’m just someone passing knowledge along. Mostly, it’s by giving them the freedom to make mistakes and learn from that like I did when I was coming up.”
***
Kanathi:iostha Lazore knows how easy it is to lose a language.
She learned Kanien’kéha in elementary school, mastering the words of her ancestors in a classroom full of cousins, friends and other children she knew since birth. The language thrived in that warm place between the pines and the lacrosse box.
But her grasp of the language slipped when she started attending high school outside Kanesatake. Out there, in the vastness of Canada, English is ubiquitous. Out there, it was easier to go by “Julia” than to use her Mohawk name. Out there, the pressure to be just like every other kid was overwhelming.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak the language,” Lazore said. “It’s that, unlike some of the other kids you go to school with, you have this extra responsibility to hold onto the language in a world where almost no one speaks it. That’s a lot harder than you might think.”
Lazore isn’t alone. Of the 22,000 or so Mohawks that live inside Canada’s borders, only about 3,000 speak Kanien’kéha fluently, according to Statistics Canada. It can seem futile to fight for a language that 7.9 billion people on this planet will never even try to use. But Lazore was nevertheless inspired to reclaim her language while taking First Peoples studies at Concordia University.
“I knew about residential schools but I didn’t know how deep the wound was,” Lazore said. “So you read about all these problems, you talk about them and you start to realize how fragile our way of life is. When learned about all this trauma all over North America, it always brought me back home to my own community.
“So one day I said, ‘I have to get out of this classroom and do whatever I can to help back home.’”
It was this breakthrough that brought Lazore to the farm. When we spoke last week, she was putting the finishing touches on a goat shed the crew built out of timber and sheet metal. Sweat poured down Lazore’s cheeks and there were flecks of orange paint in her hair but she couldn’t seem to wipe the smile from her face.
“Before I came to the farm, I never thought of myself as a strong person,” Lazore said. “There’s no question about it now, I’m a strong girl. I used to say, ‘Oh, I’m not an athlete, I’m just a dainty woman’ and now I’m lifting cinder blocks and building sheds.”
In two weeks, she’ll start a Kaenien’kéha immersion program with Gabriel.
“I’m not just sitting on the couch waiting for life to happen,” Lazore said. “It’s exciting!”
This is the key to Barnett’s success. He gets people excited about learning. He gives them the space to fail, come up with their own solutions and fail again. Somewhere in this process, Barnett’s at the ready with a nugget of wisdom or the proper technique for using a chainsaw to make two pieces of timber fit together.
In the barn where Lazore, Gabriel and the boys took their break, Barnett sat next to a whiteboard that reflected the chaos in his mind. In one corner, he etched a list of instructions for timber framing over a hand drawn map of Maine, which was next to a few Kaenien’kéha words and a sketch of a methane molecule.
When he’s animated about something, Barnett gets philosophical. Picture a bald, broad-shouldered Plato with a cast that protrudes from his torso like the handle of a teacup. He may not wear a toga and Barnett seems to have a penchant for getting kicked in the head by hooved mammals, but his calling, in this life, is to educate the curious.
Call it armchair philosophy or plain old teaching, but Barnett is always deconstructing some concept and reframing in terms that even I — a washed up journalist and failed construction worker — can understand.
“Carbon is the universal Lego block that elements latch onto so they can create life,” he’ll say.
Or: “Adding fungus to soil is like adding yeast to a cake. It’s what activates the whole thing, it’s what causes the cake of life to rise”
But also: “If you want to build good farms, you have to build good farmers. And if you want to build good farmers, you have to build good people. But before you can build good people you have to build good soil.”
***
In Mohawk country, any conversation about language will lead you to an even trickier issue: land.
How can you hold on to a language if you don’t have a critical mass of people living together and speaking it? And if there isn’t enough land for Mohawks to grow their own crops and sustain themselves, how long can they resist being swallowed by Canada?
Because, at their core, Mohawks are a farming people.
Generations of shitty journalists obscured this fact by depicting them as cigarette smugglers and outlaws who rule over their turf with brutality. Beyond the racist underpinnings of this view, it ignores Mohawk history, culture and generations of knowledge.
Here’s the abridged version of the Mohawk creation story: before the earth came to be, a pregnant woman fell from the sky. She was caught by birds who carried her gently towards the sea, dropping Sky Woman onto the back of a giant turtle. Otter, beaver and other water animals gathered mud from the bottom of the sea and slapped it onto turtle’s back. Sky Woman dug her hands into the mud and planted tobacco and strawberries, the medicine plants.
She became the mother of the Haudenausonee (Iroquois) people — a confederacy of six nations whose territory stretches from the Seneca lands south of Lake Ontario to Mohawk territory in the Saint Lawrence and Hudson Valleys.
The Haudenosaunee, in turn, developed the Three Sisters planting technique of sowing corn, beans and squash in the same garden. These “sister” plants needed each other to survive the volatile northeastern climate. Beans enriched the soil with nitrogen, the leaves from squash kept weeds at bay and the cornstocks provided a pole from which the beans could grow. The science of Three Sisters farming was passed on through songs and stories from one generation to the next.
“Haudenosaunee farming is much more integrated than what you see on most commercial farms,” Barnett said. “You look at most farms and it’s row after row of cloned corn. They’re all genetically identical. The thing is, nature favours diversity because it builds tenacity, it builds resilience. You want to look at corn that’s resisted drought and heat, you want the offspring of that corn.
“I want the trees that have grown in the worst conditions, I want the dandelions that grow in concrete. I don’t want the crops that look pretty but need to be babied. We’re trying to grow adaptable plants for a changing world.”
Of course, to be a farmer you need land and most of that has been stolen by successive generations of settlers and colonizers. On the South Shore, Kahnawake went from being a territory of 40,000 acres in the 18th century to just over 10,000 acres today. Most of that land was mowed down to make way for suburbia; highways, strip malls, golf courses and power lines that all pass through Mohawk territory on their way across the river to Montreal.
“There’s thousands of years of good topsoil that we lost forever,” Barnett said. “Not just Mohawks but every living thing that fed off the land. It’s all gone now.”
Barnett’s maternal grandfather ran one of the last working farms in Kahnawake. He kept the business going by skirting the Indian Act.
“My great grandfather’s farm had to sell produce under the cover of darkness,” Barnett said. “It was illegal, under the Indian Act, for Indigenous people to sell their crops to non-Indigenous people. You know Steinberg’s, the chain of grocery stores? Mr. Steinberg kept us going by buying our crops in the dead of night.”
But soon even the most inventive farmers ran out of ways to subvert colonialism.
The last of the big family farms saw their demise in the late 1950s — when the federal government expropriated huge swaths of Mohawk land to build the Saint-Lawrence Seaway. Nutrient rich soil that once plunged into the river was dug up and flooded to make shipping lanes.
The mountain of clay unearthed by bulldozers was loaded onto trucks and dumped at the southern edge of Kahnawke, effectively suffocating the soil and leaving it barren. Clay is too dense for most roots to pierce, which is why — to this day — there’s a section of the reserve where almost nothing grows.
The scarcity of fertile land in Kahnawake is part of why Barnett moved to the sister community of Kanesatake, where Gabriel’s family has a working farm. Together, they specialize in restoring forests that have been razed by heavy industry.
One of their newest clients, the city of Montreal, hired Barnett’s crew to consult on the reforestation of Parc Jean-Drapeau. As a parting gift to his concert promoter friends, Mayor Denis Coderre ordered city workers to cut down 1,000 trees in the park so there’d be more space for music festivals like Osheaga or Île Sonique.
It devastated what little wildlife was left on the island park and it’s created an urban heat island that makes it even harder for plants to grow in the park. After she was elected in 2017, Mayor Valérie Plante vowed to undo the damage of Coderre’s folly.
“The problem with the park is, it’s too sterile,” Barnett said. “You need microbial life, you need insects because, if there’s no insects, there’s no field mice, there’s no amphibian life, no rabbits, no biodiversity.
“Without biodiversity the soil is so depleted that the only thing that grows in the park are invasive species. Here’s what I might recommend because I know they’ll never let me do one of my crazy ideas and put deer in the park. You get 100 goats, you let them loose, they eat all the invasive species, they shit everywhere, the shit gets tracked across the island and slowly, we start to see good soil take shape.”
There’s a growing consensus, in the scientific community, that Indigenous knowledge holds the key to fighting climate change. Though they account for just 4 per cent of the world’s population, Indigenous people maintain 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity, according to the United Nations. Their practice of fostering a diversity of plant and animal life creates “buffer zones” that help blunt the impact of wildfires and other extreme weather events.
Barnett says he was touched by Mayor Plante’s decision to hire a Mohawk business to repair the damage.
“I wish my grandfather were here to see this,” Barnett said. “In our world, Indigenous businesses don’t get these kinds of contracts. We are the descendants of residential school survivors. We come from a people who needed permission from the government to leave their reserve. We weren’t allowed to sell our crops to non-Nnatives, we weren’t allowed to compete in the free market. Now we have a hand in undoing some of the damage done to this land.
“We might leave a fingerprint on a piece of land we weren’t allowed to even be on in my lifetime.”
***
If it wasn’t for land theft, Lazore would have never been born.
During the 1990 Oka Crisis, her father took up arms and left his home community of Akwesasne to defend the pines in Kanesatake. It was during those long days in the forest, standing across from machine gun turrets and armored military vehicles, that Lazore’s father met her mom.
They bonded over the fight to keep her small corner of the world from getting even smaller. And though they were threatened by soldiers, hit with tear gas and saw their families beaten during the arrests that concluded the siege, they also saved what was left of the pines from being turned into an 18-hole golf course.
A few years later, Lazore came into the picture.
“So many of us grew up in the shadow of this horrific event,” Lazore said. “But I think that, after all that trauma, you’re seeing young people start to think about going back to the land. A lot of us aren’t waiting to be saved, we’re out here doing what we can to reclaim this piece of ourselves that’s missing.”
For Gabriel, who also grew up in the wake of the Oka Crisis, merely existing can feel like a political act.
“We’ve always been at war, we’ve always been fighting just to survive on our own land,” she said. “And it’s exhausting. It takes everything we have just to keep going but when we leave our community and go out into Canada, it’s like we don’t exist. So we work on our land, we live our values because our hearts want to be here, we want to pass this down to the ones who haven’t been born yet.”
For Rice, the theft of Mohawk territory doesn’t mean people have to give up on their relationship with the land. Since making his way to the farm four years ago, Rice has branched out into the poultry business.
There may be a dearth of good soil on his South Shore territory of Kahnawake but Rice is teaching people how to raise chickens and harvest their eggs. He posts some of his tutorials on a YouTube channel and sells chicks for $5 apiece.
“It’s not big livestock but if you have a small yard, you can raise chickens,” Rice said. “If you can have a little place for them to live, they’ll help feed your family. There’s a movement in Kahnawake where so many people want to be self-sustaining. Poultry is a small step towards that goal.”
It would be easy for Rice to throw up his arms and accept defeat. I probably would. But then, I don’t know what real struggle is, I have no idea what it is to have to resist genocide every day.
There is no silver lining here. No positive spin on the land theft and forced assimilation that have erased so much of the Mohawk nation. It’s a crime that lives in the DNA of those who’ve survived it and this fight won’t be over until land, language and traditions are reclaimed for the generations to come.
But that resistance is also bringing people together. They’re building something new without government grants or any other support other than their sense of solidarity to one and other.
These are people who’ve seen their way of life outlawed, people who — 32 years ago — had to fight the Canadian military just to hold onto what little wasn't already stolen. They know what it is to carry the hopes and dreams of a nation on their shoulders. These are the people you would want on your side in a crisis, because that’s all this country has ever given them.
“One day in the not too distant future I’ll be gone from this place,” Barnett said. “My kids are grown up but I don’t want to stop parenting. Farming is parenting., Yyou’re a steward of the land, you’re nurturing life, you’re getting up at 2 a.m. and reaching for a shotgun because something out there in the shadows is trying to eat your livestock.
“If I can say that I helped some kids get excited about working on the land, I’ve done something I can be proud of. One day, maybe this crew will come visit with their kids and I’ll see them passing down some of what they learned. And how cool is that?”