To the Editor:

I am from Akwesasne and served as a land rights negotiator from 1986-1991. I am firmly opposed to the current land "settlement" proposal since it undermines our status as an Indigenous nation, surrenders our rights to self determination and abandons our duties towards the natural world. It turns our stolen territory into a mere commodity, an unliving thing to be bartered about for short term material gain.

The impending deal is rooted in the theft of millions of acres of Mohawk land by the slave owner Alexander Macomb, an individual who made his wealth selling supplies to the British military during the American Revolution. Rather than face treason charges he bribed New York state legislators to purchase almost 4,000,000 acres of Mohawk-Oneida lands in direct defiance of US federal laws enacted to prevent individuals from taking Native territory. Perhaps to prevent violence at Akwesasne he set aside "six miles square" around the village of St. Regis, an area which extended into the British Upper Canada.

This act was followed by the controversial "Seven Nations of Canada Treaty" of 1796 in which Louis Cook, am African American colonel in the US Army, joined William Gray, a US soldier, to affirm Macomb's purchase and confine the Mohawks to its 14,460 acres instead of the 9.9 million acres which still constitutes the aboriginal land area of the Mohawk Nation.

To further undermine the Mohawk community and create artificial division, New York state created the St. Regis Tribal Council in 1892, an entity meant to frustrate the governance of Akwesasne as a singular people. The impending deal gives the Tribal Council complete control over all of the US side of Akwesasne, gives up our rightful title to the St. Lawrence River islands, including Barnhart, exempts the St. Lawrence Seaway from the massive ecological damages it has caused to the region, places our lands into the ambiguous category of US "trust", has no provision for the restoration and cleansing of the contaminated claim areas, releases New York from its legal liabilities resulting from  the theft of our lands while failing to protect our territory from state jurisdiction.

Akwesasne's status as a self-governing Native people is a critical part of the regional economy and provides hundreds of jobs to non-Natives. This will be at risk if the settlement deal, as it now is, passes. It will also alienate the Mohawks from the homelands of our ancestors. 

We have endured because we have sustained a deep and abiding connection with the earth despite being restricted to a tiny faction of our original territory. This deal diminishes that intimate relationship in a most fundamental and ultimately fateful way since it abandons our duties as caretakers of an earth now under stress and places a dollar value on the inherently sacred.

It must not pass.

Doug George-Kanentiio
Akwesasne Mohawk Territory