Abstract

The Mission of the Lake of Two Mountains consisted of a portion of land granted to the Sulpicians in 1717 to hold in trust for the Mohawks who were forced to relocate there from the Sault-au-Récollet Mission on the Island of Montreal. Over the course of the 270 years that followed, the land of the Mission of the Lake of Two Mountains, now known as Kanehsatake or Oka, was expropriated from the Mohawks. The conflict at Kanehsatake in 1990 showcased the competition of histories that struggle to define the land's future. This thesis proposes to examine the expropriation of the land from the Mohawks through an autoethnographic history of place. Using a plaque erected by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in commemoration of the Battle of the Lake of Two Mountains as a point of departure, this thesis raises the question of how public memory functions as a barrier in the repatriation of First Nations land and in the larger project of the decolonization of Canada.