the standoff

unless otherwise noted

In the early hours of the morning on May 13, 1974, a convoy of Native Americans from the Kahnawake and Akwesasne Mohawk reservations in Quebec crossed the border and made their way south, more or less following the tributaries of the St. Lawrence River, into the foothills of the Adirondacks.

Accounts vary, but there were at least a few dozen cars and a school bus full of young children. At Eagle Bay, a small hamlet between Inlet and Old Forge in the central Adirondacks, the group dispatched a couple of scouts to see if anyone was present at Moss Lake, a former summer camp for girls that had recently been turned over to the state. It was still dark when they arrived. Old camp buildings, large wooden structures with stone fireplaces built in the 1920s, were visible along the shoreline. But the 612-acre property was vacant.

With little fanfare, the Mohawks moved in. They had come to reclaim a small part of their ancestral homeland, roughly nine million acres of land stretching across much of northeastern New York State into Vermont and Quebec. The Mohawks have long referred to this territory as Ganienkeh, which means “Land of the Flint,” and this was the name they gave the Moss Lake encampment. It was a provocative gesture and an indication that the occupation—or repossession, as the Mohawks called it—was about more than any single piece of land. It was, in many ways, an attempt to reckon with a past that those in the region had spent little time contemplating.

One of six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks have a long history of inhabiting parts of what is now the Adirondacks and surrounding areas. The confederacy dates back to at least the 15th century and, according to several scholars, served as a model of governance for early European colonists. Ultimately the Mohawks, who fought on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War, were pushed out of their traditional homeland—referred to as the “Mohawk Valley” to this day—and forced to settle along the US-Canadian border and farther west. Subsequent treaties, many of which the Mohawk argue were illegally brokered, turned over enormous tracts of land to the state. In 1797 Joseph Brant, a Mohawk who had served as a British military officer and whose sister was married to the British superintendent of Indian Affairs, signed a treaty giving New York State about nine million acres of land, including Moss Lake, for the paltry sum of $1,500. The Iroquois Confederacy has never formally acknowledged the agreement.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, Native American activists across the country were pressing for a reappraisal of the US government’s relationship with tribes, demanding that stolen land be returned to its original inhabitants. Ganienkeh drew on the emerging influence of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which in February 1973 had seized the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, seeking to restore sovereignty over tens of millions of acres of land. The occupation sparked a 71-day standoff that resulted in the deaths of two Native activists and the shooting of an FBI agent. Louis Hall, a member of the Kahnawake