Hitchhiking Adventures – Part 17

Going slowly west, that was my only idea.

I had been with the Mohawk on their little Indian reservation for four days, spending time with my host family of a Mohawk activist and journalist. That was in Montreal and now I wanted to be on my own for a while, somewhere in nature. But that plan didn't work out and here's what happened.

I was sitting on the bus and struck up a conversation with a man who was short and wiry, with short-cropped hair, maybe 40 years old. He asked me where I was going. I said: “I don´t know.” He invited me to his place. That sounded good. At least I had a place to stay. He lived in an old house with a big garden. Everything was very simple. There was an outhouse and no running water. Everything was super simple and he liked it that way. That was what he was looking for three years ago. I slept in a place that was a half-room, half-stable, a place where a tractor should usually be. For the first time in my life, I shared my room with bats. I helped the man a little in his vegetable garden. His goal was to be as self-sufficient as possible.

We had long talks about eco-friendly lifestyles, education and schools. We had a lot of ideas in common. It was nice and he was nice, too. My visit was especially interesting because my host had a rather interesting life story. He used to be an elite soldier, but then went on to earn money as a bounty hunter. In Canada, there are these posters at the post office, for example. I had noticed them before. Photos of people who are wanted because of some crime they committed and for whom a reward is offered. His strategy was: choose somebody, try to find him, earn some money. That's how he made his living for some time. It really worked, a few times. Now he was taking care of lettuce and hunting snails instead of bank robbers.

What made me very thoughtful was what he told me after he knew that I had been with the Mohawk Indians before, on their reservation just outside Montreal, just across the wide St. Lawrence River.

He said something like this: “Wow, you've been to the Mohawk. They're dangerous, they're terrorists, they're like a cult that brainwashes their children. I fought against them when they organised an uprising in 1990. They had blocked the huge bridge over the St. Lawrence River. They stood there behind barricades, holding guns. Thousands of cars have to cross the bridge every day, good people on their way to work. Now nothing worked because of those crazy people and their blockade. Then we came, the elite soldiers. The whole thing culminated in a shoot-out between the tribesmen and the Quebec provincial police, costing the lives of a policeman and of one of them. The protests escalated into a two-month roadblock.”

I asked him if he knew the reason for the protest of the Mohawk. He didn’t. I told him. It was triggered by plans to build a golf course on the traditional Indians burial ground. Playing golf on a cemetery, that was the idea of some investors and they got the government’s permission.

Wow, now I was visiting one of the soldiers who had fought against my host father and his son four years before. After the rebellion was put down, the soldiers then searched the reservation, looking for people, drugs and weapons. In the house of my host brother, they prised up the floorboards to see if he had any weapons hidden underneath. That was four years ago. It felt strange.

And it was really weird. Within a week, I was told the same story twice, by people I all really liked and respected. But the same story was told so differently each time and if I had only heard one, I would have probably agreed with it. It's a pity my elite soldier never visited the Indians. He never met any of them.

But at least I was able to tell him about them a little, for example, about the school director of the so-called “survival school” of the Mohawk whom I met while I was shown their school on the reservation. On some reservations, like on that one, they managed to found their own independent school in the 1970s, because the government schools were very bad for the Indian children. They were very authoritarian and racist, with a lot of violence and even sexual abuse. They were forbidden to speak their own language or practice their religious ceremonies. Only Christianity was allowed. Most of these boarding schools were run by churches. If they were lucky, the children there saw their parents twice a year. Many children there have committed suicide. It was just so completely different from their home. Indian families have always been quite anti-authoritarian. Family life was usually much more loving than it was in Europe. It was breaking their hearts. And their children also had to go to these schools. It destroyed the people and their culture. At the end of May 2021, the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former boarding school shocked the whole country. A few weeks later, another mass grave with over 600 children's bodies was also discovered near a boarding school. The parents didn’t get informed in the old days. Their children had simply disappeared.

That was the reason why the Indians wanted to organise their own education. It was a way of survival. Unfortunately, there were very few of these schools, far too few for the Indian children. Also, they weren’t allowed to have their own schools. But the Indians founded them anyway and they called them “survival schools”. The Canadian government couldn't really do much about it. The survival school of the Mohawk was built right on the reservation border and on the other side of that border, right next to the school, the Canadian government built a waste incineration plant. I visited that school and was allowed to talk to the headmaster, a Mohawk Indian.

I asked him: “So, you teach Mohawk religion, right?”

No, we don't. You know, there are so many different religions, which one is the right one? Religion is a private matter, it's up to the family.”

“But you teach your own traditions, right?”

“Yes, but not too much. We also teach physics and chemistry because we mustn’t predetermine the children's lives. We have to educate them, so that they have all the freedom to decide for themselves where and how they want to live, whether they want to live the Indian, the Mohawk way, or the white lifestyle, or a combination or whatever. We have to give them everything, so that they can decide for themselves. We do want to support young people to think independently, to be able to make their own decisions.”

So much about the rumour that the Mohawk are brainwashing their children. My bounty hunter looked at me and became very thoughtful.