Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel (NYC Alan Lissner); Sean Carleton

The summer of 1990 was bookended by one of the most dramatic events in Canadian history. Thousands of paramilitary Quebec police and Canadian Armed Forces laid siege to the unceded territories of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, where the municipality of Oka sought to dig up an Indigenous cemetery and expand a golf course into a sacred area called The Pines.

Those traumatic months serve as the foundation for a compelling, accessible retrospective dialogue between land defender, artist, and filmmaker Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel and settler historian and Indigenous studies professor Sean Carleton. This rich, detailed, and intensely human conversation expertly serves as a vital primer on those pivotal events as well as the centuries-long colonial context that produced them and continues to inflict multi-generational damage.

As a David and Goliath story, the “Mohawk Crisis” produced disturbing images of Indigenous children peering through barbed wire at weapons-toting Canadian troops, armoured vehicles, and menacing military helicopters. Reporters often highlighted the spectacle of confrontation, rather than the issues underlying the conflict, but nonetheless contrasted the inflammatory bluster of politicians with the voice of a shy art student, Gabriel, whose daily updates on negotiations, the conditions behind the barricades, and the simple demands of her people made her an international symbol of a new generation of Indigenous resistance to colonial land theft.

Gabriel – who thought the crisis would either end in jail or death – courageously shares her honest vulnerability as someone whose early adulthood was upended by a massive volley of tear gas, stun grenades, and bullets aimed at the women staffing barricades on a secondary dirt road. Her nuanced narration of events before and since also illustrates how, beneath “sunny ways” reconciliation rhetoric, still-unaddressed issues of long-standing land inequities continue with contemporary encroachments on her people’s territory by condo developers and toxic waste dumping.

When the Pine Needles Fall is also a corrective to narrow narratives portraying 1990 as soldiers facing off against masked, camouflaged Indigenous men, a framing that erases the leadership and decision-making role of women who, in keeping with traditional Longhouse governance, are title holders to the land. Such reductionism, Gabriel argues, also erases the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) people’s 300-year battle to protect their lands from the predations of Sulpician seminarians, duplicitous governments, and a media milieu uninterested in such issues until guns are drawn.

Unlike dry Q&A templates that can dead-weight oral histories, this dialogue between respectful and deeply informed interlocutors generously shines considerable light on the diverse tapestry of contemporary Indigenous scholars and advocates whose works provide perfect follow-up reading (including a powerful introduction and afterword by, respectively, Indigenous professors Pamela Palmater and Audra Simpson). Carleton’s questions are well-researched, while Gabriel’s responses illustrate a depth of wisdom, patience, humility, and careful consideration informed by her decades of front-line activism, her work presenting to United Nations and Parliamentary committees, leading Quebec Native Women Inc., and mentoring subsequent movements from Idle No More to the ongoing campaign for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Gabriel’s personal story is equally compelling (“life as an Indigenous person is challenging on a daily basis”), sharing the history of her family and ancestors, her experiences of racism, the path to political consciousness, and how art and storytelling are centring acts in her life. A remarkable lesser-known piece of history is also shared: Gabriel was a eulogist at the funeral of John Ciaccia (the Quebec minister of native affairs with whom she negotiated 30 years previously). She also developed a friendship with Francine Lemay, a staunch reconciliation supporter and sister of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officer Marcel Lemay, whose death sparked a major escalation of the crisis. (He was likely killed by SQ friendly fire.)

While collections of conversations can feature content overlap, in this instance, such repetition serves the narrative well: reminders of truths require retelling before we can truly take to heart and act on what reconciliation means. Despite having earned the right to be cynical, Gabriel exhibits a revolutionary patience rooted in hope that history’s lessons, nurtured and shared in these powerful pages, will ultimately provide the spark for Indigenous land justice.