Election Day & NY-23: Wha..?

I grew up in this Congressional District. It has been been represented by a Republican Congressman for over 100 years.

Last night, that changed.

The unfolding saga of this race and campaign has been chronicled many other places. But here’s the basics:

- Local Republican bosses choose a local Republican stalwart — and longtime Assemblywoman for their party’s nominee for a special election. Her name is Dede Scozzafava, and when I was a reporter in NNY, she had a reputation for being one the nicer people in the regional political establishment. A well-liked, moderate straight-shooter.

- Locally, this should have meant another totally boring Congressional election. No suspense, just the usual — the Republican nominee wins by 60, 70, or 80 percent.

- But then the national right-wing tea-party gang decided to take it as a personal affront that someone somewhere in an out-of-the-way part of the country who supports equal marriage rights and legal abortion would dare to call herself a Republican.

It is shocking and saddening to me the pure hatred and vitriol poured out by national right-wingers against Scozzafava, and the local Party leaders who endorsed her.  But their tactics worked. Money poured in for the previously marginal third-party Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman.  So did endorsements from Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, and the like. Soon, Scozzafava was running third, behind Hoffman and the Democratic nominee, Bill Owens. So Dede dropped out of the race last weekend, with just a few days til the election. National Republicans cheered and praised her for doing the right thing, by making way for Hoffma. Then she endorsed Owens.

(Here’s Jon Stewart’s treatment of the story thus far, including a shout-out to Plattsburgh. (Skip ahead to 5:21.))

This is the point at which the whole thing reached its climax of nuttiness.

This is a picture of Joe Biden shaking hands at the Northside Improvement League in Watertown. My mind boggles.

(Norm Johnston, Watertown Daily Times)

Pollsters and pundits mostly predicted Hoffman would win, possibly big. But they were wrong. There were a few local quirks that most pundits did not take into account. One, a lot of unions had backed Scozzafava. And with her gone, their  went straight to the Democrat. (Unions backing the R? Only in NNY, where the R is married to the president of the district’s Central Trades Council.)

Two — yes, registered Republicans vastly outnumber Democrats in this district. But in NNY, the Democratic infrastructure is so atrophied that registering as anything but a Republican can disenfranchise you. Many local races (town supervisor, County legislator, highway superintendent, etc.) are decided in the Republican primary because there’s no Democratic challenger. If you’re not registered Republican, you just don’t get a vote at all. So some people register R even if their feelings on national issues are left of center.

And finally, there’s the “mood of the electorate.” Some national observers had painted this race as an Obama referendum because the district went blue for the president last year, while still giving its old Republican incumbent Congressman over 60% of the vote.

National observers, do not use NY-23 as a reflection of the national voter mood. I am pretty sure that the mood of the average NY-23 voter at the beginning of this campaign was, “Dede, sure — I always vote Republican. I mean, not last year, for president, because Bush was getting kind of crazy. In retrospect, I shouldn’t've trusted a man who doesn’t drink. Speaking of — I’m sorry to leave you standing there. Would you like a beer? We can go sit on the porch if you want. The leaves are nice this time of year.”

Then, after the wingers started up, that mood changed to, “Wha..? Dede’s a Fasco-Marxist? Why didn’t I know that?? This is troubling. Let’s have a beer on the porch and think about it.”

And finally, the mood settled, as it’s been known to do in the North Country from time to time, upon, “Who do these come-from-aways think they are, anyway? Let’s go out and spite them.”

And that’s the mood that brought us to a win for Democrat Bill Owens of NYS’s northernmost district.

As with everything else in this race, though, it’s a weird mixed bag. Bill Owens is not a progressive — he’s a blue-dog, and he’s actually to the right of Dede on some social issues. So this is a happy ending, but not an ecstatic one.

And speaking of wierd mixed bags…

What is going on in this picture? It comes from a slideshow at the Watertown Daily Times, that depicts the final day of the campaign, photo-essay style. This particular photo has no caption, and there’s no indication of whether these mild-looking people are supporters of Obama and Hilary Clinton, or if they want to see them decapitated.* Good old WDT. I love them, but they do sometimes lose their heads in the excitement of covering that rare NNY event of national interest.

On a final note, the fact that I now live in Brooklyn means that I didn’t get to participate in this historic North Country election. But hey, I did get to vote for Jimmy McMillan for mayor of NYC.

I think I came out ahead.

*(There’s also no indication of why North Country 15-t0-22-year-olds are so into Jimi Hendrix. My cousin’s kids have the exact same shirt. It’s like no one told them that he’s 70 and dead.)

WPA Paintings at the Smithsonian

I spent a few recent days in D.C. to send off McFly and Mr. McFly on their travels with a grand bon voyage. Between bouts of Oklahoma college football, multiple games of Ticket to Ride, and long walks in search of Thai food, we found some time for historic art.

Specifically, 1934: A New Deal for Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — an exhibit of paintings from the Public Works Art Project’s first year of existence.

At Madrid Coal Mine, New Mexico
Carl Redin
b. Sweden
d. Los Gatos, Calif.

I’ve written about New Deal post office murals twice before, but WPA/PWAP art came first, and its intent was different. The post office murals were competitive commissions made for specific places, and local committees had some say in their content. In contrast, the primary purpose of PWAP art was to get people paychecks. Artists who were hired could paint what they wanted, as long as their content could somehow be categorized as “the American Scene.”

Golden Gate Bridge
Ray Strong
b. Corvallis, Ore.
d. Three Rivers, Calif.

Very quickly, the federal government became proud owner of hundreds of new works, and paintings were quickly distributed here and there — to hang in government-owned buildings (including the White House), for loan to museums, and to travel the country in special free exhibitions. It’s funny to see, on the line for acquisition information under each art work in the exhibit, the coldly bureaucratic “Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor” (instead of, for example, the coldly paternalistic “Bequeath of Mr. and Mrs. Muckety-Muck”).

The Farmer’s Kitchen
Ivan Albright
b. Harvey, Ill.
d. Woodstock, Vt.

It’s easy to tell that the money for the 1934 arts program came through in the middle of winter. It’s as if the artists, excited at the prospect of a paycheck, and instructed to portray “the American Scene,” raced out their front doors into America, and painted the first subject to present itself. Snow shoveling is a recurring theme.

Manhattan Skyline
John Cunning
b. Albany, N.Y.
d. New York, N.Y.

As do desolate farm scenes. This one is by Washington State painter Kenjiro Nomura, who was later interned with other Japanese at a camp in Idaho during World War II. He continued to make art while detained, and an exhibit of this work toured in during the 1990s, though I can’t find any images online. Leads, anyone?

The Farm
Kenjiro Nomura
b. Gifuken, Japan
d. Seattle, Wash.

Here’s one of our group’s favorites. It also has one of the better titles in the show.

Gold Is Where You Find It
Tyrone Comfort
b. Port Huron, Mich.
d. Los Angeles, Calif.

(While browsing the great JimmyWayne’s Flickr stream of post office murals, I found a photo of a 1939 montage mural in Fayetteville, W.Va., by one Nixford Baldwin, that includes an image strikingly like Comfort’s. But that’s a New Deal art mystery for another day.)

And finally, I couldn’t wrap up this post without mentioning that New York state got represented twice. There’s a view of paper-factory workers in Glens Falls, N.Y., the men at the giant paper rolls looking square like Lego people.

And then there’s this view of a railroad overpass in Binghamton. According to the museum’s, commentary, this painting was produced not as an original artwork, exactly, but as an effort to document a WPA construction project. A photo was printed on canvas, and the unidentified artist painted over it. The museum owns at least two other similar works. But I’m still puzzled. Why all the effort, when a photo would have been just fine for documenting? Was this an ultimate “make-work” project? Or an honest effort fine art? Whatever the case, I find it funny that this is one of top two “favorite-ed” pieces on the exhibit’s photostream.

Unidentified: (Underpass- Binghamton, New York)
Unknown Artist

Speaking of that photostream, it’s a good one. All the photos in this post came from there. And the Museum also provides a second stream of hundreds more paintings and drawings that were made in 1934, including many made for the WPA.

Bloggers’ reviews of the show’s artistic merit have ranged from adoring to borderline dismissive. There’s no doubt that the PWAP artists were not all, or mostly, greats. For some true mediocrity (along with some intriguing nuggets), go trolling through the Museum’s second photostream mentioned above. But for the windows of social and political imagination this show opens up, I relished it.

The show’s on display through January 3 — in DC and on Flickr. Go, via one medium or the other, and tell me what you think.

CPB’s Latest: Mapping Main Street

If it were true that the history of geography boils down to the project of specifying vs. the project of generalizing (as my instructor of Geographical Thought and Theory would have it), the producers of this project come down squarely on the side of specifying.

Their goal is to collect photos, and/or sound recordings from every Main Street in America. The reason?

“When politicians and the media mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States.”

Main Street, Cambria, California

I can appreciate that, sort of.  But, then what?

Regional Food & Drink: Cheese and Ice Cream in Northern New York

Northern New York state is not yet a destination for regional-food foodies, and that’s understandable. NNY foodways are based on the cuisine of northern European peasantry, transferred to an even harsher growing climate, and then ravaged and overhauled by the 1950s prepared-food revolution. It’s understandable that my favorite dish as a child was cube steak.

But as I was reminded during a recent visit, there are still important elements of food culture here, and they’re mainly milk-based.

This sign, at a gas station off the highway, on the western outskirt of my hometown , sums it up:

1) Ice cream (soft-serve or hard cone, sundae or banana split) from a stand is like a summertime food group. I might go so far as to wager that there as many ice cream stands of one sort or another in southern Jefferson County as there are sit-down restaurants. And they’re not just for kids. They’re like afternoon tea — a mini-meal to punctuate the afternoon or the evening. They’re attached to gas stations and grocery stores, inside bars, and free-standing all over the place. One we visited was far from any main road, beside a hay field. We were there half an hour in the middle of a weekday afternoon, and while we sat eating our cones at a picnic table, the place served four different parties of adults — all aged 35 and up.

The thing about these places is that the ice cream is not particularly high-quality — the hard ice cream is Hershey’s brand or Mercer’s brand, and everyone makes their soft-serve from the same mix. Going to get ice cream isn’t as much about the ice cream as the comfort, the routine, and another excuse to eat outside during the precious few months when this is possible.

2) And then, for year round comfort, there’s cheese.
In the photo above, 2X, 3X, and 4X refer to the sharpness of cheddar, which is the only kind of cheese with any local gravitas. Mild, medium, and sharp are irrelevant — bland supermarket cheese. The X-rated versions are made at the cheese factory in town, which has had several different owners through the years and now belongs to multi-state Great Lakes cheese, which bought it from the milk producers cooperative Dairylea sometime in the late 80s/early 90s. But the 2X/3X/4X system predates Great Lakes by a good long while. My own family is a 4X family, with 2X kept on hand for children and dogs. (Not for the elderly, who tend to like 4X just fine, alongside their Canadian rye, and their laments for the faded popularity of Limburger.) Chunks of it are served along almost anything, including pie. My uncle eats 4X crumbled on his breakfast cereal.

All the X-rated cheeses are white (not dyed yellow/orange) and sold at local stores in giant blocks wrapped in plastic wrap, which is why this is pretty funny.

Finally, the curds, as mentioned on the sign. Cheese curds, a early stage that cheese goes through during production (think curds and whey), show up in other regional cuisines: Quebeckers melt them on gravy and French fries, and call the mess poutine; Wisonsinites deep fry them and put them on bar menus, where they taste virtually the same as decent mozzarella sticks. But northern New York is the only place I’ve been that prizes them in their pure state: raw and so fresh that they squeak when you bite into them. Fresh, they’re salty and delicious and go down like popcorn. But after a day or two, they’re stale and rubbery, so they just don’t travel well. You have to get them right out of the factory.

So there you have it, regional-food foodies! Come to NNY for a good deal on some sharp cheddar, and some really fresh cheese curd. Then go get some ice cream. Take alternating bites of your hot fudge sundae and your cheese foods, and marvel at the variety of forms people will devise for milk, when they’ve got no fresh vegetables for 8 months of the year, and no tradition of using spices or seasonings to speak of.Maybe hardship should start counting for something in the accounting of regional foodways…

An Old Small-Town Story

Maybe it’s because my memories of being a small-town reporter will always be all-too fresh, but today I can’t stop thinking about this story.

It’s an old American tale with 100 variations, but this one has an Alaska twist.

An isolated village. Out-of-towner moves in. Out-of-towner expresses viewpoints contrary to public consensus; bystander with a personal motive publicizes her words; community hysteria, violence ensue.

(Image via. Admittedly, the Tituba story has some race, nationality, and language outsider issues that don’t apply to Eileen Goode. Also, E.G. is getting shoved, spit on, and threatened, not jailed or executed.)

Indian Farmers: The Dept. of Ag Corrects Its Numbers

Indian Country Today has some new coverage of the U.S. Census of Agriculture — that exhaustive survey of everything related to American farmers and farming. The Ag Census comes out every five years, and the 2007 data went public a few months ago. (Browsing this data is highly recommended for fans of maps and obscure geographical information.)

The Ag Census is important because it helps determine where federal farm subsidies go. And advocacy groups have long accused the federal government of systematically under-counting, and therefore under-supporting, Indian agriculture. But in 2007, for the first time, the Ag Census made a concerted effort to count individual farms on every single reservation.

The result is an 88 percent increase in the number of Indian farmers in the U.S., a comparison that the Ag Census American Indian Fact Sheet reports without comment. But as the ICT coverage points out, this result is an effect of better counting, rather than of a huge surge in the incidence of farming on Indian reservations.

Source: 2007 Ag Census -- Fact Sheet on American Indian Farmers

So where are the Indian farmers? A quick look tells us that many of them are Navajo or Hopi sheepherders in the Four Corners area, especially in Arizona and New Mexico. Other states with relatively high rates of Indian farming include Nevada, Montana, and Oklahoma.

While it’s a small issue in comparison, the undercount of Indian farmers is an echo of another, graver example of racism at the Department of Agriculture: the well-documented federal subsidy gap between white and black farmers, which has led to a steady, deacdes-long drop in the percentage of black farm owners in the U.S. I recognize that these two issues are very different in scale and effect, but there’s a basic problem here: Despite the popular conception, independent farming and the creation of rural communities in the U.S. are and always have been multicultural, multiracial endeavors — not the purview solely of ruggedly pink-cheeked white people. Sadly, the U.S. government is among those who have contributed to erasing people of color of from the rural landscape, both the real and represented versions.

Reading by the Map

Larry McMurtry, Texas Author (L).   Barry Champlain, Fictional Texas Shock Jock (R).  (Omnivoracious; ericbogosian.com)

Books of the States is a project that just makes me glad to have the Internet and be able to read. Each post features a state, and discusses a short list of great books in which a place or places from that state figure prominently. The number of  officially crowned books is equal to the state’s number of electoral votes, but there are plenty of honorable mentions in each category. It’s a delight just to browse. (The project is embedded in the Omnivoracious blog, which is a product of Amazon.com.)

Of course, there’s plenty to argue with on the various lists (I won’t even mention the fact that except for Ironweed, of Albany, every one of the New York selections is set in NYC), but browsing them is just fun. And don’t despair, because the posts’ authors are soliciting additions and suggestions before issuing the “final” lists. Act fast, because that deadline is approaching!

In any case, one thought I had while browsing the lists rises a bit above quibble status:  I like to remember that the character and identity of a place changes over time, and according to whose eyes you look through. Gauging authenticity of place by a one-perspective view of the past is foolish and inaccurate. Take Texas. Books of the States names Larry McMurtry the most Texas author. I can’t complain — I love that man. But did poster Cristina Henríquez really have to choose Lonesome Dove as the most Texas book? Just because of the horses and cowboy hats? More than half the book isn’t even set in Texas! McMurtry wrote many fine-grained portraits of  Texans who aren’t cowboys, but who are completely steeped in and shaped by their surroundings, from Houston academics to small-town high school football players. These books — The Last Picture Show, Moving On, Leaving Cheyenne, for examples — give insight into places seldom encountered in popular culture, and contribute to a more complete view of the many different Texases that simultaneously have existed. But cowboys have been accepted as the officially authentic Texan identity, and so a story about a couple of them on a cattle drive becomes the quintessential Texas book.

Which remindes me — last night, I watched the Eric Bogosian movie Talk Radio. Set in Dallas in the rapidly urbanizing 1980s, the city — a place where newcomers are streaming into a wide-open economy and a narrowly defined local culture — provides a backdrop of tension to the onscreen unraveling of a Jewish talk-show host locked in a combative relationship with his largely redneck audience.  Place is not a domainant theme of the movie (and elements of the story are actually borrowed from the life of a real-life radio host in Denver), but it plays an important supporting role. And the Dallas portrayed here — dark, vaguely hostile, slightly unhinged and unsure of its identity — is no less authentic, I propose, than one that shows the sun glinting off the spurs of a stern, sinewy cowboy.

So maybe I will host my own representation game: What’s your favorite book or movie about place that leads the viewer/reader to new or little-explored understandings of that place? What books or movies have altered/enhanced/tilted/expanded your understanding of the character of a place?

Thanks to R.M. for introducing me to the Books of the States.

Sunshine on: Non-Profit Salaries

Sunshine!

The highest paid voice in public radio? Robert Siegel drinks to that. Via.

I love simple tools that make any public information more accessible and useful. This post is about such a tool, even though the information it accesses isn’t spatial information, per se.

Guidestar.org posts IRS tax returns for all federally recognized non-profit organizations, and lets you access them for free. There’s a wealth of financial information there, but the aspect that my nosy little heart latched onto first is that fact that with these documents, you can learn the salaries of the highest paid people in the organization.

Right away, I looked up the 990 of my own non-profit employer, and learned that our own President/CEO is paid only 4 times what I know to be the salary of the lowest paid employees in the organization. From a pay-equity standpoint, not bad! (It doesn’t change the fact that the lowest salaries are piteous, but still.)

But why stop there? Public radio employees are the non-profit employees I interact with most, so I did some poking around on their salaries.

First, the most obvious employer: National Public Radio itself.

The highest paid on-air talent at the national network headquarters? Robert Siegel, the calm and soothing host of All Things Considered. His salary in 2006?  $322,640, plus  $27,648 in benefits (“contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation”). No wonder he always sounds so well-fed and relaxed when he blurts out one of those trademark chortles!

Brian Lehrer looks for spatial concentrations of people making over $200,000. Via.

Even better paid is NPR Managing Editor Barbara Rehm, coming in at $356, 735, plus  $26,404 in benefits. (She oversees all NPR News shows, and about 200 editors, reporters, and hosts.) Rounding out NPR’s five  top-paid journalists:

• Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne ($300,478, plus  $31,000 in benefits)
• ME co-host Steve Inskeep ($293,077, plus $38,165 in benefits)
• Science correspondent Richard L. Harris (a steep drop from the others: $170,994, plus $19,273).

There’s a quirk to the 990 Forms — they show all salaries for officers and directors of the company (CEO, VPs, directors, etc. NPR, for example, lists 13 VPs, who each make between $150K and $250K.) But once those directors are listed, the 990 shows just the top five salaries over $50,000 in the rest of the organization. This creates fairly arbitrary results — if it’s a very small organization, there may be no additional salaries listed. And if it’s an enormous organization, like NPR, only a tiny percentage of employees who make more than $50K are listed. (NPR has 656 of them.)

NPR itself, however, is only one creator of public radio programming. Let’s look at some others.

WBEZ is the radio station in Chicago that produce This American Life and plenty of local programming.

Here’s their 2006 run-down:

• Ira Glass, host and executive producer of This American Life: $208,881
• Account Executive Paul Friedman: $152,765
• President and CEO Torey Malatia: $142, 265
  
• This American Life Executive Producer Julie Snyder: $127 896
• Alex Blumberg: $126, 168
• VP for Finance Donna Moore: $102,384

Yes, so the bigwigs at TAL are doing well for themselves, but it’s easy to see why: they produce an innovative show with massive national fan following, and a fair bit of underwriting support.

Less understandable, to my mind, is the salary of Brian Lehrer, the highest paid voice at WNYC, my current local station — well, a lot of the salaries at WNYC seem over the top to me, actually. Here are their 2006 top six:

• CEO Laura Walker: $454,808 (plus $31k in aditional benefits)
• Executive Director of Underwriting: $251,041 (+ $12K benefits)
• CCO /Sr. VP for Programming Dean Cappello: $241,700 (+ $26k benefits)
• Sr Director Underwriting Dean Cappello: $228,476 (+ $18k benefits)
• VP for Development Barbara Banivoglio:  $219, 623 (+ $13k benefits)
• Brian Lehrer, Host of The Brian Lehrer Show: $204, 835 (+ $25k benefits)

I’m no expert on executive compensation, but I’d like to point out that Laura Walker, CEO of one individual radio station, makes a bigger salary than the CEO of all NPR. That seems kind of large, especially considering the dismal state of WNYC’s local news coverage, and its incredibly stuffy local-broadcast productions, which feature nerdy old white male Manhattanites droning on for hours at a time, as they have the same way for years.

Speaking of which, Brian Lehrer? He hosts a  locally broadcast call-in show. There’s no original reporting, and a third of the time is taken up by yahoos calling in to spout off. For comparison, Ira Glass and Terry Gross, hosts of station-produced, nationally distributed shows brought home $208,881 and $189,421, respectively.

Here are a few more major station run-downs:

KCRW in Los Angeles gets the prize for lowest top salaries, with only three over $100,000:

• General Manager Ruth Seymour: $145, 808
• Nic Harcourt, Music Director and Host of Morning Becomes Eclectic: $129,150
• Development Associate Lyle Laver: $117,689
• Assistant General Manager Jennifer Ferro: $97, 930
• Director of Special Events Elizabeth Macdonald:  $73,250
• Matt Holzman, producer of The Business: $72,250

Minnesota Public Radio / American Public Media is a behemouth. They own stations in Los Angeles, Idaho, and throughout Minnesota; they run a long-form documentary arm, American Radioworks; and they produce a lot of national shows. In 2006, their CEO Bill Kling worked 20 hours/week and earned $347, 428. Senior VP James Russell brought home $429, 655, and seven other VPs all brought home more than $200,000.

Here’s their highest paid on-air talent:

• Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace: $158,250
• Christopher Farrell, host of Marketplace Money: $148,458
• Krista Tippett, host of Speaking of Faith: $140,285
• William Radke, then-host of Weekend America: $137, 262

I found no record for Garrison Keillor, host of APM-distributed Prairie Home Companion.

So…what? Am I saying that public radio superstars and effective executives don’t deserve high salaries? Not exactly. It would be nice if the 990s provided some info on the lowest paid employees in an organization, so that potential donors could evaluate whether pay-equity principles are at work.

But the larger concern for donors to public radio stations should be, I think, where is the station putting its priorities? Do journalists or executives get higher salaries? By how much? What kind of journalism does the station invest the most money in? Coverage of stock markets or of social issues? What do you think of their choices?

Check your local public radio station and let me know what you think.

Borders and Bridges, Part 2: “Canadian conservatives” is not an oxymoron

Akwesasne, Six Nations, and Warrior Society flags wave at the Cornwall Island border crossing. Credit: Sandra Cuffee

Well, they’re no Iranian election protests, but the demonstrations against arming guards at the U.S.-Canada border crossing at Akwesasne continue, and the bridges remain closed.

And still, no direct talks between the Mohawks and the Canadians.

The closest thing to an actual two-way dialogue between the two sides — a speech given by Akwesasne Grand Chief Tim Thompson at a large native-issues event last week in Ottawa — was reported by The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national daily :

“The minister of public safety, Peter Van Loan, is a liar,” Mr. Thompson blurted out in front of Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl, who shifted in his chair as the words were spoken.

Uncomfortable body language. That’s what  the Canadians have come up with when charged with flouting a judgement of the Supreme Court of Canada. Which, must be said (as I did last week), is an improvement over past behavior.

Even New York state’s two senators have told the Canadians to grow up. Here’s Chuck Schumer’s prepared statement on the issue:

“We must work together, let cooler heads prevail, and open this crossing as soon as possible. I have no doubt that negotiating in good faith can forge a sensible solution to this situation.”

In other words, “You’re afraid of talking to a few thousand Mohawks? What’s the big frickin’ deal, guys?”

So why is the Canadian government acting like a child who’s been to enough anger-management training to know he should count to 10 before hitting anyone, but isn’t exactly sure what to do next?

I think the answer is connected to two distinctly Canadian experiences. First, there’s the nature of the right wing in Canada, which, contrary to popular-U.S. belief, plays a big role in Canadian politics — though one that’s quite different from that of the right wing in the U.S.

Canadian right-wingers are less concerned with social issues like gay rights, abortion, and health care and more concerned with national sovereignty and security. It may sound funny, but in Canada, gay marriage is a moot point, while establishing the sovereignty of the national government is a motivating political issue.

An improvised ferry shuttles cars to Cornwall Island from the southern shore of Akwesasne. As one ICT commenter wrote, "Always those Mohawks lol." Credit: Indian Country Today

Recall the decades-long Quebec separatist movement and the narrow margin by which Quebecois voted down a 1995 referendum on secession. Recall the existence of quasi-self-governing territory of Nunavut, where the official language is neither French nor English, but Inutikut. Realize that in a national survey, 38 percent of Newfoundlanders identify their ethnicity as “Newfoundlander.” There are plenty of Canadians who shift in their seats when talk turns to patriotism, the federal government, or Canadianism generally, and no love lost among various Canadian regions, which tend to have much stronger identities than a somewhat forced sense of Canadianess.

So instead of focusing on issues of how to assert state power in domestic issues, Canadian conservatives feel like they have to establish  the concept that Canada is a state, and it has power. So they rail against the Quebecois sepratism and cultural preservation laws, they push for militarized borders, they rally for more fighting in Afghanistan, and they see a few thousand Mohawks trying to assert some limited sovereignty rights as a vital threat to Canada’s vulnerable nationhood.

Kids chalk the pavement in front of the abandoned Customs station. Credit: Sandra Cuffee

Case in point, a muddle-headed editorial in Canada’s second-largest national daily, the very conservative National Post, which lets hysteria get in the way of facts. It accuses Akwesasne protesters of blockading the bridge, which they never did; the federal government of refusing to make arrests out of fear, and the two groups, in effect, conspiring to endanger the very rule of law.

Then there’s the Mohawk Warrior Society, the name that must not be spoken by mainstream media reports, but which lurks between all the lines, nonetheless. More on them later in this blog.

Borders and Bridges: the Mohawks’ Canada Problem

AS of today, an international bridge between the U.S. and Canada has been closed for about three weeks. A stand-off between Mohawk political protesters and the Canadian feds resulted in the Canadians closing the border, stomping away in a huff, and giving the Mohawk government the silent treatment. This is actually an improvment in conflict management skills for the feds, whose usual response to Indian protesters is to bring out tanks.

This particular bridge — actually, it’s two bridges, more on that in a moment — happens to be close to my heart, because it runs through the Mohawk territory Akwesasne, and is about just a few miles from the place where I lived and reported for a couple years. I used to cross this pair of bridges nytime like I felt like having a little international get-away — even for a quick lunch during my work day. Cornwall, Onatrio, on the other side of the bridge is just an smelly old mill town on the skids, affectionately known “Ontario’s Armpit,” but it did have coal-fired pizza, a bookstore, and no one I knew of who had every purposely avoided my phone calls. For these things, it qualified as a get-away.

The first bridge connects the U.S. to Cornwall Island, in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, and the second bridge connects Cornwall Island to the city of Cornwall. Cornwall Island is above the north 45th parallel, and thus is Canadian territory. The rub is that Cornwall Island is also Mohawk territory, part of Akwesasne, whose border-spanning geography has produced so much drama over the past 233 years. Except for a few other small islands, the rest of the territory is all south of the river.

When you cross the first bridge from the U.S. to the Island, you immediately encounter the Canadian Immigration and Customs checkpoint, the land for which is leased from Mohawk authorites by the Canadian government. It is just like Canadian border checkpoints everywhere, except that there is a special lane for Mohawks, who either get waved through without a word, or strip-searched on the flimsiest of suspicions, depending on the border agent and the border crosser involved. .

The bridge has been around since 1959, and the checkpoint has never been popular. The Island is home to a few thousand people, and Akwesasne residents, who are dual citizens of the U.S. and Canada, tend to resent having to pass scrutiny, whether casual or menacing at the whim of a federal bureaucrat, when they travel from one part of their own territory to another, especially when they have to do it a few times a day, for work, school, socializing, shopping, and generally living their lives.

Nevertheless, the border-checkpoint arrangement had been politically stable for a while. Until now, that is, when Canada has decided that it is no longer acceptable for its border agents, who spend most of their time in a glass booth, to do their work unarmed. In the post-9/11 world, border agents must have guns, Canada announced three years ago, and all checkpoints will be armed by 2016.

And three years ago, the elected Akwesasne governments let Ottawa know they weren’t comfortable with that. Ottawa was silent. Plans rolled along, and the feds announced a June 1, 2009, implementation date for guns at the border on Cornwall Island. Akwesasne again voiced its concerns, and several times asked for a meeting. Still nothing. In May, a group of protesters started to gather daily near the checkpoint. By the evening of May 31, 300 protesters stood near the checkpoint with signs. At no point did they attempt to interfere with traffic at the checkpoint, but a few wore camoflauge and facemasks, serving as reminders of, if not actual representation by, the Mohawk Warriors Society, an activist group that has been at the scene of several protests in the past few decades that turned violent. The border employees were intimidated, and some say they were yelled at. The Akwesasne police force told the border staff they “couldn’t guarantee their safety” if armed federal agents came on the scene.

So at 11:45 p.m., right before deadline, the Canadian border agency just closed up shop and sent everyone home. No one from the federal administration has met with or talked to representatives of Akwesasne since. Cornwall Island residents are allowed to use the bridge over to mainland Canada, but not to the U.S., or the rest of Akwesasne. No one else is allowed to use the bridges at all. And the feds won’t even talk to reps from the city of Cornwall, which is having fits over lost cross-border economic activity.

Most press reports so far, in discussing Mohawk concerns over the guns, have emphasized the nearness of homes and residents to the checkpoint. It’s true — just a wire fence separates the lanes of cross-border traffic from a large basketball court on one edge of the checkpoint. But I don’t believe that stray bullets from shoot-outs with terrorists are folks’ main concern here. The real danger is the way that people with guns feel empowered to act, and the way that the presence of guns quickly heightens the tension in any confrontation.

Akwesasne residents know this from collective experience. A community “civil war” between two activist groups in 1990 led to weeks of nightly shootings, and eventually, two deaths. Smugglers move through the territory, and there is danger in finding yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But most of all, there is the Canadian federal government, and its dismal record of treating conflicts with native people as a hardline, winner-take-all proposition.

That goes for daily interactions at the Akwesasne border checkpoint, where some agents are accused of being abusive and combative. But it also goes for the series of Indian protests over land and resource rights in the last 20 years that started as peaceful demonstrations, but became violent stand-offs after the feds refused to talk, and instead brought in the military and dug in their heels. Most of the issues at stake in these protests were narrow, clearly defined, and had significant public opinion behind them, so it’s especially baffling why the Canadians chose big shows of force, instead of a willingness to talk. They’ve paid for their stubborness with at least three deaths over the years — two police, one protester — and more injuries.

So I can’t fault the Akwesasneron who don’t want this government to have a permanent armed presence in the middle of their community. It’s just ironic that the feds are proving the protesters’ point so well through their response to the currentprotest.