Mohawks, Defying Police, Dig in Near Quebec Town

OKA, Canada —  Hundreds of Quebec provincial police moved into the town of Oka on Thursday and surrounded a band of defiant Mohawk Indians intent on stopping the expansion of a golf course onto land they claim encroaches on their ancestral territory.

The Mohawks on Thursday dug trenches and reinforced barricades with captured police cars as they prepared for a possible showdown with law enforcement officials.

The police had stormed the Mohawks’ barricades early Wednesday but retreated after a fierce gun battle that left one police officer dead.

Police returned in force overnight, but police spokesman Richard Bordon would not disclose how many were involved in the operation. News reports put the police force in Oka, 25 miles west of Montreal, at between 1,000 and 2,000.

There was no sign, however, that police were preparing another assault on the Mohawk stronghold.

An aide to Quebec Native Affairs Minister John Ciaccia said the minister was negotiating from his Montreal office with members of the Mohawk Band Council and their Warriors Society in hopes of ending the four-month dispute.

About 50 Mohawks are defending a hilltop barricade in the town. The town council wants to use forest land occupied by the Indians to expand a nine-hole golf course to 18 holes.

Mohawks from another Quebec reservation, the Kahnawake Reserve south of Montreal, continued to express their support for the Indians’ cause in Oka by blocking the Mercier Bridge into Montreal.

Soon after dawn Wednesday, police stormed the Mohawks’ barricades, and Cpl. Marcel Lemay, 31, was killed in the gunfight.

The police issued a statement deploring Lemay’s death and pledging to bring his killers to justice. But the Mohawks said they overheard police on one of the seized car radios saying Lemay had been shot accidentally by one of his fellow officers.

Government officials, many of whom had sympathized with the Mohawks’ claims, were unclear who authorized the police action.

The Quebec government had been anxious to prevent another outbreak of violence such as one that occurred recently at the Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border.

Two Mohawks were killed in gun battles at Akwesasne in May, prompting Quebec and New York police to raid the reservation and negotiate a truce between Indian factions warring over whether to allow gambling on the reservation.