Great Peace of Montreal Saved The Nation

Canadians who have lived here through the generations are among humanity’s pre-eminent survivors. It’s not easy, even now, to get through the long, cold dark of winter. It was immeasurably harsher way back when, not to mention the Indigenous welcome that wasn’t always the warmest. Not all who came here made it through. Not all who came here stayed. Not all stay who come today.

I’m fortunate to be among the survivors. I know I am because my family claims a certain distinction among survivors. We don’t talk about it much. It’s nothing to brag about and I wouldn’t be bringing it up were it not for Prime Minister Trudeau’s earnest embrace of the First Nations’ cause and his apparent determination to right the wrongs so exhaustively documented by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 and certain to be by the national enquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, which will report in 2019.

My family has a carried interest, you might say. We believe we count the most family members ever killed at one strike by warriors of First Nations. That’s our distinction. Back on the day these particular First Nations were Iroquois. Launched from Mohawk territory, it is said the raid was led by Onondaga and Seneca, with contingents from Cayuga and Oneida nations, fifteen hundred warriors in all. They descended on a sleeping village and slaughtered more than 70 habitants, their wives and children — some where they stood petrified and some taken for torture — including Jean Mouflet, my great8grandfather (8 counts the number of greats), his wife Anne Dodin, my great8grandmother (fille du roi), their daughters Marguerite and Gabrielle, their grandson Jean Chateaudeau and his dad Mathias. A half dozen family dead, almost ten percent of all the casualties in the Lachine Massacre, which to this day is counted one of the worst mass killings in Canadian history. Their daughter Anne, wife of Mathias and mother of Jean, was carried away.

It was only a dozen years after this lamentable incident that thirteen hundred chiefs and leading members of forty First Nations assembled a few miles east of Lachine at Montreal for a meeting convened by Canada’s government of the day to settle grievances and devise a better way forward. The delegates succeeded brilliantly, putting paid to a century of frontier wars and clearing the way for the next hundred years during which, for the most part, mutual accommodation and respect prevailed. Signed Aug. 4, 1701, twelfth anniversary of the Lachine Massacre, the Great Peace of Montreal was a meeting of minds and an historic event that ensured survival of the infant colony, so recently vulnerable to attack, and permitted its growth.

That was when forty First Nations covered most of northeastern America and Canada to the west stopped at Fort Frontenac, now Kingston, Ontario. Today there are 600 First Nations, more or less, with homelands within every province’s boundaries. Each would like a new and revised nation-to-nation deal with Canada. Most of the 600 know they’re on the less equal side of this negotiation, so they’ve combined in the Assembly of First Nations. But the AFN is funded by government in order to influence government and has become schizoid trying to reconcile the contradiction. Some of the 600 would have their chiefs sit with the federal cabinet to decide. Stranger things have happened. But the process is uncertain.

Here’s what strikes me about the Great Peace of Montreal. There were thirteen hundred reps there from forty First Nations. Many had been at preparatory conferences. They didn’t all get to talk but they got to caucus after working sessions and out at night to party and meet other observers. It wasn’t a back room deal among politicians, sachems and traders. What brought about a signal triumph of Canada-First Nations diplomacy was face-to-face discussion in open forum with ample time to prepare and share and ample participation from all interest groups in each community.

Not a bad format for consultation to arrive at a new meeting of minds, which I take it is the Prime Minister’s objective. Let it run as long as it need run. Let every nation be well represented. Let RCAP, TTC, MMIW and the like set the start for an open agenda. And pick a good location, somewhere that everyone likes to be. Montreal works for me.