mohawk warriors - pamphlet - 2002 - Justice for Joe David

Justice for Joe David
The Collective Opposed to Police Brutality
2002
Kersplebedeb

Hi out there in the interland!  I borrowed Justice for Joe David from the Toronto Zine Library.

The authorship of Justice for Joe David is attributed to the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality.  The COPB is an organization that has existed since 1997 and it continues to stage anti-police actions as recently as March 2011.  There was a moderately sized anti-police protest in Montreal this past Wednesday (June 9, 2011) that turned violent.  The protest was in response to recent shootings by Montreal police in which an innocent bystander was killed in addition to a knife-wielding man.  I do not know if the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality had any involvement with that protest, even though it appears as their kind of thing.  Furthermore, they have published a magazine titled L'agent Provocateur, organize “know your rights” workshops, and provide support to victims of police misconduct.  Additionally, I suppose, they occasionally publish pamphlets such as Justice for Joe David that describe the details of a single event where unnecessary violence occurred at the hands of police.  

The pamphlet’s inner cover shows its publishing location as Mohawk territory, AKA Montreal.  Listing a city by First Nations territory something I’ve seen used by North American activists on Facebook as an alternative name for their home-city.  The subject of the text, Joe David, was a First Nations artist and prominent member of the Mohawk Warriors, a group of men who defended the blockade set up during the 1991 Oka Crisis in Western Quebec.   Joe David created a situation that became a standoff with police one night, in June 1999.  The situation ended with Joe David shot and paralyzed for the rest of his life (which ended in 2004, two years after the publication of this work).  The pamphlet, the text of which may be read here: http://www.kahonwes.com/newyork/kanehsatake0013.htm, charts a trajectory from David’s involvement in the Oka Crisis as a Mohawk Warrior, to his June 1999 standoff with reservation police on his property.


Justice for Joe David seeks to trace the roots of the conditions that lead to David’s severe wounding. The author(s) find a host of contributing issues stemming back to the Oka Crisis and police attitudes towards those who participated, including the emergence of Indigenous policing systems, the policies regarding First Nations communities developed under Prime Minister Jean Chretien, the rise of SWAT units within police departments, and as the attitudes toward David held by the particular police officers who attacked him.  The pamphlet falters unfortunately in its portrayal of the immediate events that lead to the attack on him.  The standoff began after David chased a youth on an ATV off his property.  The youth then called the police claiming David threatened him with a weapon.  When the police arrived and looked around, David looked out an upper-story window from his house, saw the unattended police car, and shot at it.  That David shot at the police car is undeniable, but the author chose to suggest that the youth was dissembling regarding any threats David issued, as though it’s difficult to believe that a man angry enough to unload his rifle on a police car may have previously threatened someone to protect his property.  Furthermore, while the pamphlet states that David acknowledged that shooting at the police car was an irrational decision that was bound to bring the wrong kind of attention on him, the author rationalizes his outburst by stating the years of oppression created a need to vent his rage.  There were probably many very good reasons for Joe David to have been angry at the time, however one doesn’t have to be a COPB opponent to think that discharging a firearm at a police car is going to require (and justify) an increased and immediate police response.

Ultimately, the standoff between David and the police ended badly, as the former Mohawk Warrior was shot under unseemly circumstances.  A judge found that the police actions taken against David constituted misconduct, and one of the officers has since been relieved of his duties due to a habitual and overzealous tendency towards violence.  The pamphlet authors allege that one officer in particular, Larry Ross, sought the end of David’s Warrior society and was ultimately the officer who shot the artist.

I take issue with how the pamphlet presents David’s bad behavior, however the pamphlet is quite strong in its analysis of the event otherwise.  It’s author(s) present good critiques of the system of indigenous self-policing as a strategy for the cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, and of Special Tactical Police units.  The pamphlet is well written and contains bibliographic references that do not appear on online reproductions of the work.  David’s encounter with police in 1999 can be read as a tragic event in the long aftermath of the Oka Crisis.   

The event may also be read as a marker of a continuing struggle for indigenous autonomy in Canada that has included such skirmishes as the ongoing Grand River land dispute in Caledonia, Ontario, and the May 2011 occupation of a sector of Toronto’s High Park believed to be an ancestral burial site.