Mohawk Mothers at Canada's Supreme Court Protecting Children's Graves and Those Yet Born

Mohawk Mothers at Supreme Court: The Power to Protect the Children, Their Graves and Those Yet Born

Article by Brenda Norrell, Censored News, Oct. 2O24

Mohawk Nation News 'Film: Mohawk Mothers Taking Message to Supreme Court of Canada'
https://mohawknationnews.com/blog/2024/10/17/film-mohawk-mothers-taking-message-to-supreme-court-of-canada/

OTTAWA, Canada -- "We wish we had seen our children who were taken from us, we wanted to see them grow up among us, but we couldn't, because we never saw them again," Kahentinetha said in front of Canada's Supreme Court.

Mohawk Mothers, Kanien’keha:ka Kahnistensera, filed a motion at the Supreme Court of Canada on Oct. 15, requesting a panel of experts to oversee and protect the graves at McGill University in Montreal.

"We have the right and responsibility to represent ourselves to the best of our ability," Kahentinetha said holding the Two Row, which represents the power they have been given to protect the children and the Earth. Kahentinetha said they are speaking to Canada, as a sovereign nation, as Nation to Nation.

The Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University's hospital was the site of the CIA's MK-Ultra mind control and torture experiments. One survivor of torture in her teens said that she saw Native children here, who vanished. She also saw the staff digging graves out back at night with red shovels.

"We've had enough," said Kwetiio at the Supreme Court, "of having to worry about our children, our babies, being brutally taken from our homes and communities by residential schools, the RCMP, the child welfare system."

"They take our children for the same reason that tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in the last year alone. They want to wipe us out, all Indigenous People."

"Genocide of murdering children is one of the worst things imaginable. Yet it continues to be done with total impunity."

Speaking on white supremacy and genocide, she said her people were used as test subjects in experiments. McGill University and the Canadian military, and their allies, sent in anthropologists and sociologists to study them in Kahnawake, and put their minds under a microscope in an attempt to break them, so they would forget their ways, their ceremonies.

The elders told them, "Don't let them take your mind."

"They wanted to find a way to break us, and break the code of our resistance."

Kwetiio said that on the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital, early in the search, the search dogs alerted them to a woman's dress and a child's shoe from the first half of the Twentieth Century, and tons of bones.

“As we got closer to the truth. When we found bones, when we had human-remain detection dogs pick up the scent of human remains, when we found shoes of children, everything was getting shut down,” said Kimberly Murray, Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites.

“I support this application, this Leave to Appeal,” Murray said. “It’s of national importance. We do not have a national law to protect the burial grounds of Indigenous ancestors. We do not have proper provincial territorial laws to protect the burial grounds of our ancestors.”

Murray pointed out that Mohawk Mothers represented themselves using Haudenosaunee law, the Great Law, and it was accepted in Canada's court.

"Words are powerful," said Dallas Canady-Binette, Kanehsata’kehró:non Karonhianóron, archaeology student at McGill and archaeological monitor at the site.

Canada's story wants to erase an entire people.

"Our story not only has a future, but it goes on without ending. This is because we have a responsibility to those yet born that life will go on, and to leave the Earth in a better shape than we found her."

“I know no other archaeologists that have had the police called on them in the middle of doing their job. I can think of no other field site that looks and operates like an open-air prison."

“Perhaps it was naive of me to believe that my university, and the province of Quebec, would agree that protecting the unmarked graves of Indigenous children was more important than a campus redevelopment project.”

Watch the film:

Mohawk Nation News

Film: Mohawk Mothers Taking Message to Supreme Court of Canada

https://mohawknationnews.com/blog/2024/10/17/film-mohawk-mothers-taking-message-to-supreme-court-of-canada/