Time for celebration? Mohawks reflect on Montreal’s 375th anniversary – CBC

Scholar Gage Diabo, Chief Christine Zachary-Deom, artist Ellen Gabriel share their perspecti

May 17, 2017 ves

As Montreal turns 375 today, Mohawks are wrestling with how to approach a multimillion dollar celebration of the founding of a city on their unceded ancestral land.

“There’s still the part of me that’s cynical, that looks at it and sees us celebrating a colonial institution with violent roots as if it was this unequivocally great thing that’s worth celebrating with a giant summer long party,” said Gage Diabo, an aspiring filmmaker, writer and graduate student in First Nations literature at Concordia University.

“On the other side of it, there’s an opportunity here to achieve that great buzzword today of reconciliation — between not just the colonizers and the colonized, but all the different peoples that are currently residing in the Montreal area.”

Read More: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-375-anniversary-mohawks-1.4118405