Indian Country Today reports on a new film called Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis.
What's it about, you ask?
"'This is fiction in a sense, but it's more of a historical film that tries to be an honest account of the summer of 1990,' Dudemaine said.
During the summer of 1990, the nearby town of Oka wanted land to expand a golf course and build luxury apartments ...
The Pines was an area of land that had been disputed in a land claim. ... The Pines include a sacred grove of pine trees that were hand-planted by Kanehsatake ancestors. The land also contained a Mohawk burial ground, and in the movie the town of Oka had plans of building a parking lot over the top of the cemetery.
'What is interesting about this film is that the film can do something that the news could not do,'' Dudemaine said. ''They brought us behind the scenes and into boardrooms of the government and strategies of the Mohawk resistance.'
The Mohawks set up barricades to defend the land, but a police raid turned deadly when 31-year-old Cpl. Marcel Lemay, of Surete du Quebec, was shot and killed."
The film is touring the festival circuit this summer and will debut on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the fall.
Read more about it here and here.
Read more about the real life Oka Crisis here, here, and here. Not to mention here.
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