In March 1990, armed warriors from Kanesatake — one of several Mohawk communities in Canada and the United States that constitute the eastern-most nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — erected barricades to prevent the further extension of a private golf course into their land. When a police invasion four months later ended in the death of an officer, nearly three thousand Canadian soldiers descended. Mohawks from Kahnawake blockaded the Mercier Bridge into Montreal in solidarity. A seventy-eight day standoff ensued.

For the Canadian state, this indigenous revolt — known in colonial memory as “Oka Crisis” — was one of the largest and most expensive military operations in the last half century. “From the vantage point of the colonial state,” scholar and activist Glen Coulthard writes, “things were already out of control in Indian Country.” Indeed, the late 1980s witnessed frequent eruptions of indigenous militancy across Canada’s claimed territories in defense of land, culture, and nationhood.

For much of Canadian history — and that of the United States — resistance to settler colonialism was met with swift and brutal violence; “quieter” years brought programs of coercive, genocidal assimilation. But over the past decades, and especially in the aftermath of the confrontation near Oka, the field of battle seemingly softened.