student uprising - 2015 - In Defiance

In Defiance

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois

BTS

2015

In 2012 a broad coalition of Quebec University and Cegep students went on strike to challenge a tuition hike proposed by the province’s liberal government. The strike grew out of a student’s general assembly vote at Valleyfield Cegep, southwest of Montreal, to include over 150,000 students and protests that involved over 200,000 people. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was one of the spokespersons for CLASSE,  Coalition large de l’ASSÉ, an organization formed out of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, one of the largest student unions, specifically for the purpose of challenging the proposed hike. As a figurehead of a successful social movement he was the target of a ton of criticism issued by the press, professional politicians, and other sources. In Defiance is the English translation of Nadeau-Dubois’ these events as he saw them, and his response to some of the criticism he received during the events of spring/summer 2012.

In In Defiance, Nadeau-Dubois is telling the story of the student strike from his perspective, which was often situated in a meeting room or some other nerve centre of decision or communication, rather than out on the street. His book tells the story of the student strikes but it also subverts the standard modes of representations of the dominant institutions of Quebec society, and it subverts the myth of the younger generations as apolitical. Nadeau-Dubois book, and the events of 2012, reveal his supposedly apolitical generation rather as deeply engaged in politics and social justice, while it was the dominant political establishment that cynically sought to prevent his generation’s participation in politics through undemocratic authoritarian means and dismissively shallow and trite communication practices. Secondly, if one sees the government as protectors of democracy, the media as a source of enlightenment, the courts and police as sources of order and justice, then Nadeau-Dubois reveals all of these institutions to function in opposition to how they represent themselves. The Government is undemocratic, the media is a source of confusion and disinformation, the courts produce injustice and the police create violence and chaos. The overarching message of Nadeau-Dubois book seems to be that while these institutions champion democratic liberties and social progress in practice they seek to constrain society into a shape formed by a very specific neo-liberal worldview, but in spite of that change is possible.

punk - 1993 - Hard Core Logo

Hard Core Logo

Michael Turner

Arsenal Pulp Press

1993

197 pages

This book attained legendary status for me. I knew it was out there, somewhere, like a cryptid, but library catalog searches turned up nothing or pointed towards Bruce MacDonald’s 1996 film or its related literature: including a graphic novel adaptation, and a 2011 film studies book. For years I’ve been checking whatever libraries I’ve had access to for this book and finally found that York University’s Scott Library has a copy, so, thank you for that.

Bruce MacDonald’s film adaptation of Hard Core Logo is great. His documentary-style drama of an aging, reunited Canadian punk band disintegrating into complete annihilation during a very short tour of the western provinces is possibly the best punk rock movie and one of the best Canadian films ever. I’ve watched Hard Core Logo many times. I love the film and while I recognize that the film represents sad and anxious grown men caught in the disappointing trap of the expectation of punk authenticity where their meager success is based on the requirement to project teenage angst, nihilism, and willful failure at all times, I also recognize that they’re a great band with great songs. Now I see where the songs come from.

It’s difficult, impossible rather, for me at least, to first see a film without it affecting my experience of later reading the text it’s based on. I began reading Cormac McCarthy novels because I loved the Coen Bros adaptation of No Country for Old Men, but it was a disappointment to read that novel with the screen images of its characters in my head. I experienced something similar with reading Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, but Hard Core Logo isn’t a novel in the typical way. Rather than narrating the story of the band’s short tour, author Michael Turner structured his novel as a series of notes and ephemera generated by the band during the tour, beginning with a letter requesting that Hard Core Logo play a benefit show, and ending with a want ad written by lead singer Joe Dick seeking bandmates after they broke up in Edmonton. Each page is a different text, one page is a contract to perform, the next are the lyrics to one of their songs, the next page is a page of bassist John’s tour journal or an interview with Billy Talent.

These documents come together to tell the story of Hard Core Logo’s reunion and rapid fragmentation over a period of a few days. The thing that stands out the most for me are the lyrics to the songs, they’re complete, the're the songs that are performed in the film, and they’re good. I love the versions of them that are performed in the film, and I love the DOA rendition “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?”, because they’re great punk songs. Who is Michael Turner who wrote all these great lyrics for a band that doesn’t exist? I don’t know of him beyond Hard Core Logo but apparently he’s a poet and he was in a band called Hard Rock Miners that was probably pretty good if he was involved in the songwriting.

underground railroad - 2009 - A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

Kathleen Bradford

Scholastic Canada

2009

224 pages

A Desperate Road to Freedom is a work of fiction written in the style of a young girl's personal journal as she tells the story of her escape, with her family, from a slave farm in Virginia to a homestead in Ontario. Julia May Jackson, with her parents and siblings, flee slavery through the underground railroad to settle into the Owen Sound region. The book is a part of an interesting series, titled 'Dear Canada', put out by Scholastic Canada, of fictional journals written by girls who lived through times of historical trauma in the Canadian and (sometimes) American contexts. Other books in the series are written from the perspective of girls who lived through the internment of Japanese Canadian’s for example, or through the War of 1812. I intend to read the books on the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and the Red River Metis rebellion too.

I don’t know about other books in the series but what I admire about this particular entry is that it does not idealize Canadian society or sanitize it of its own racism. The history of slavery and the underground railroad in North America provides an opportunity for Canadians to compare our history with that of the (still) deeply racist US, with the potential for us to view ourselves historically as a nation as having more enlightened attitudes towards race. The diary of Julia May Jackson tells the story of racist brutality and murder in the US, but also of racial prejudice experienced after her family’s escape, in Ontario, where even the friendly folks of the area express their prejudices in subtle but no less upsetting terms.

punk - 2003 - I, Shithead: A Life in Punk

I, Shithead: A Life in Punk
Joey Keithley
Arsenal Pulp Press
2003
237 pages

Joey Keithley has served his country as the only constant member of the long-lived Vancouver based band, DOA. DOA is notable for being the first truly original Canadian punk band to have an impact on the punk subculture. Keithley's band was a vanguard of the turn to hardcore punk which emphasized shorter songs, intense lead singers, basic song construction, and the DIY ethic. DOA formed in 1978 (after beginning as 'The Skulls') and has been touring and recording ever since, releasing their most recent studio album, We Come in Peace, in 2012. Since their incarnation, the band has released MANY great albums featuring a shifting lineup that always has Keithley (who went by the name Joe Shithead for much of his early career) at the band's centre.

Keithley has also become one of a small number of punk heroes who has written his memoirs of the scene. I, Shithead contains Keithley's memories of emerging into the punk scene during the mid-70s up to the early 1990s, considering the band's been around for an additional ten years past this book's publication, there's lots of band history left unrecorded by its figurehead.

These recollections of the early years of punk are great to read because of how they describe the emergence of an international punk scene becoming a subculture. Keithley's book is full of all sorts of anecdotes about playing to BC bikers, dealing with slimy promoters and owners, drinking beer, getting rowdy, dealing with cops, fighting with jerks in the audience, and so on, everything that makes a great punk story. The book, as a memoir and as a punk history, is at its best when Keithly talks about his touring stories and playing with, and befriending, some other now historically relevant punk band at a legion hall or divey club with 100 people in the audience. DOA and a large number of other bands mentioned as friends of the author, are still talked about, and knowing the origins and music of classic groups like Husker Du and Flipper is part of what makes up the credibility of newcomers to the scene. It made me happy when Keithley said that he dragged Steven Leickie of the Viletones through a pool of his urine in a Toronto club.

I, Shithead is also relevant for explaining how a group of not very responsible men of working-class origins and limited financial means carry out a complicated undertaking such as a multi-date concert tour. This book answers questions like, how does a man make a living as the lead singer of a punk band (he doesn't - so he holds a side job as a taxi-driver). And it explains Keithley's need to keep politics in music. Close to the end of the book Keithley had estimated that he had done over 200 benefit concerts by about 1990. I'm hoping for another book that covers the band's history up to the present day.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.

outlaw bikers - book - 2006 - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire

Angels of Death: Inside the Biker’s Global Crime Empire

Julian Sher and William Marsden

Alfred A. Knopf

2006

464 pages

Angels of Death is a survey of recent, to the time of publication, violent crimes committed by various bikers around the world. The title is a dramatic misnomer, as the inclusion of the word ‘angels’ strongly suggests that the book is exclusively about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which it isn’t.  Furthermore, the authors, two Montreal journalists turned true-crime writers, claim that there’s a worldwide biker syndicate but they never ground that assertion in facts. What they do, instead, is show that the outlaw biker subculture is global and that everywhere bikers live bad things, sometimes truly atrocious things, happen. Angels of Death is primarily a series of lurid true-crime murder stories connected by the mode of transportation the killers chose.

new age, Process Church - book - 2009 - Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment

Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment
Timothy Wylie
(ed.) Adam Parfrey
Feral House
2009

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s.  The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone.  They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine.  Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together.

Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville.  Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration.

Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period.  The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.  

Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work.  Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, bandidos mc - book - 2009 - The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club
Alex Caine
Vintage
2009
222 pages

This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs.  Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.  

The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members.  Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs.

Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred.  According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution.  That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.

There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty.  

All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker.  Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood.

Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.  

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2008 - Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Alex Caine
Random House
2008
304 pages

Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau).  By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.

Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant.  He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty.

The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein.  In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.

The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club.  He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie.  This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture.  Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.

Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?

Palestinian nationalism - film - 2004 - Discordia

Discordia
Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal
National Film Board of Canada
2004
68 minutes

Discordia is a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada that records the strife at Concordia University over the issue of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The events depicted in the film begin with a 2002 visit to the campus by (then) former and also future Israeli Prime Minister Bejnamin Netanyahu at which protests gave way to rioting. This event was followed by an attenuated struggle for student space between members of the progressive Student Union and members of the Concordia chapter of Hillel (an international organization for Jewish university students).

Directed by Ben Addleman and Samir Mallal, Discordia captures the events of this struggle as they unfold. At the centre of the struggle was a challenge to the right for Hillel to use campus as recruiting grounds for the Israeli Defense Force. The students of Hillel saw their recruitment efforts necessary to protect Israel, a Jewish island in an ocean of Arab hostility, while Arab students took the actions of Hillel as a provocation against them, and as a means of evoking the actual violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the people who actually do the fighting for that organization. The film thus captures numerous interviews with the students involved as well as moments of direct conflict between the groups, as well as moments of friendship and solidarity among the members of either side. Finally, the documentary also captures reactions by a number of students who are not interested in the strife these issues have caused and are simply frustrated by it having temporarily taken over campus life.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this kind of subject matter is the question of where bigotry and politically conscious activism overlap. Consistently, the argument is made against pro-Palestinian activists that their work is basically anti-semitic. There’s no question that in the broader spectrum of pro-Palestinian expressions a strong anti-semitism can be found that pushes the immediate socio-political realities of the central issues to the side (often to indulge in age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish manipulations). In this particular documentary, the weight of dealing with the present issues as bigotry falls mostly upon the shoulders of Hillel members, both in accusations they make of their adversaries, and in their attitude towards the other. The pro-Palestine Concordia Student Union is headed by Aaron Mate, a young Jewish activist who currently works as a producer for Democracy Now!, a daily social justice radio program carried by the Pacifica Radio network, and Samir Elatrash, a Canadian-Palestinian student with family in the occupied territories. Hillel is primarily represented by Noah Sarna, a leader of the Concordia chapter and a sincere and passionate fighter for Israel. There are some instances of unadulterated Anti-Semitism expressed, but more common are the Islamophobic statements of the Hillel students. Furthermore, Aaron Mate is characterized as a self-hating Jew during the documentary and also off screen by his opponents. This charge against Mate suggests that in some circles Jewishness demands unlimited support for Israel and all of its policies.

This film was released after the release of another documentary about the Netanyahu riots called Confrontation at Concordia, directed by Martin Himel. I haven’t seen Himel’s film (I’ve now added it to my watchlist) but according to wikipedia it heavily emphasizes the anti-Israel sentiments expressed and the anti-free speech dimension of the riots which ultimately succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from speaking. In interviews, Himel also was someone who regarded Discordia as flawed for its heavy presence of Aaron Mate, the “self-hating jew” who sided with Palestinians. During a talk given by Himel about the two documentaries, he said,  “In my Concordia, we did interview the Arab student leader Samir Elatrash, as well as the Jewish student leader Patrick Amar. But Discordia, besides interviewing Elatrash, interviewed a self-hating Jew who agreed with the Arabs. There was no interview with Amar or any other self-respecting Jewish spokesperson.” This kind of statement indicates a point of view where race and ethnicity determines political disposition. Discordia challenges that notion however, showing that Anti-Israel doesn’t have to mean Anti-Semetic, and in fact, opposition to oppression of Palestinians doesn’t have to mean death-to-Israel. The struggle over this issue is far more nuanced in its actual manifestations than a simple clash of ethnic hatreds.

Discordia is essentially a film about the subaltern struggle for Palestinian sovereignty from Israel, and an example of how this conflict carried out by diasporic communities far from the centre of the fight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its epicentre in Jerusalem’s West bank and the Gaza Strip - the ‘Occupied Territories’ - but it has its peripheral battlegrounds on university campuses and public spaces and events such as, for example, the Toronto Pride Parade, where the presence of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is an annual source of controversy. At these peripheral sites of conflict, ideologies, flows of influence, rhetorics, symbols, and attitudes are the means of attack and the ground upon which the battle is waged, and they are relevant to the overall conflict.

mohawk warriors - film - 1992 - Acts of Defiance

Acts of Defiance
Alec G. MacLeod
National Film Board of Canada
1992
104 Minutes

Acts of Defiance is just one of a small number of NFB documentaries that recorded the events of the 1990 Oka Crisis that took place in the Western Quebec communities of Oka and Kanetesake. The crisis erupted when the municipal government of the Oka permitted the expansion of a golf course and luxury housing development on land long used by the Mohawk people of Kanetesake for things like the burial of their dead. The Mohawk Warrior society mounted a campaign of armed resistance against this expansion which ultimately failed although the crises led to a renewal of First Nations activism in Canada and the rise of warrior societies in many First Nations communities.

Defiance, directed by Alec MacLeod, opens with the scene of an illegal bingo game at a Kanetesake community hall during which it is announced that the first prize (a lawnmower) was donated by the Warriors, demonstrating how the Warrior Society was already woven into community life in the area.  MacLeod’s film includes voices from all of the involved communities in his treatment of this crisis however it is the voices of the Mohawks and their Warriors that are represented most sympathetically by the director. Members of the Warriors (essentially those Mohawks who defended the disputed lands from construction crews and law enforcement) were the primary source of verbal information pertaining to the events and were shown admired and celebrated by their community.  Conversely, the police and military (Canadian Forces were called into Oka) appear absurd at best and heavy handed at worst, while politicians (such as the mayor of Oka, Jean Oulette) appear mean spirited, corrupt, and arrogant.  This privileging of the Mohawk voices challenges the representation of the events appearing in much of the press coverage of the crisis at the time, most of which consisted of statements issued by law enforcement, military, and governmental personnel who had an interest in resolving the dispute to the favour of land developers.  

The film shows the decision to develop land long used by Mohawks as a contemporary form of colonial dispossession of First Nations sovereignty. A striking fact stated early in the film is that more Mohawk land had been taken legally for development since 1950 than in the entire previous era of Mohawk-European contact. The disputed land was originally used by Mohawks for grazing their animals, then European settlers began playing golf there (thus scaring Mohawk animals) and eventually a legal apparatus organized to privilege white interests could only recognize the space as a golf course. The film, through its many Native voices, expresses a more recent history of Mohawk anger at Canadian politics and society: their exclusion from the Meech Lake negotiations, and the shooting of a man named David Cross during a dispute with police. Such events, in addition to the continual encroachment of First Nations land, led to the development of an intense resentment towards a dominant society that appeared to only show them disrespect and demand obedience.
Much of Acts of Defiance is about the inability (or refusal) of outsiders to understand Mohawk resentment and opposition to them. The Mohawk Warriors fought in infrequent gun battles with police and military during the summer of 1990, but MacLeod’s film also shows unarmed Kanehtesake villagers standing up to armed personnel (who are also empowered by governmental authority) as well.  Furthermore, it is clear from watching the film that the heavy handed actions of police (who are shown seizing cases of soft drinks during searches of all vehicles entering or leaving the Mohawk community) steeled the resolve of the entire Mohawk population against government forces. While the Quebec police produced the local First Nations community in its entirety as adversary, the military largely seemed present for the purpose of producing a particular representation of the events that advance a long-standing Euro/Native colonial discourse.  

Famous photo of Canadian Forces private Paul Cloutier in staring contest with Mohawk Warrior Brad  Larocque.  Here is Vancouver punk band DOA's appropriation of of the image for the cover of their 1993 album, Loggerheads.

Brief end notes: The film ends with a celebration of the Warriors society members who spent time in jail.  The celebrated members, both men and women, were named in the film and the list included the sculptor Joe David who was later paralyzed in a violent dispute with reserve police.  The film also borrows heavily from CBC’s coverage of the events, much of which can be found on the CBC digital archives.  Finally, Warren Kinsella’s Web of Hate, a history of organized racist activity in Canada includes accounts of pogroms, anti-Mohawk rallies, by the good people of Oka.