Mohawk Akwesasne, The Nation That Straddles Three Governments

The border between the United States and Canada runs through the middle of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. This is not a metaphor. The line is physical and official, surveyed, signed on maps, enforced by customs officers stationed on what the Mohawk understand to be their own land.

The Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War was signed in seventeen eighty-three. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was not at the table and was not consulted. The diplomats in Paris drew a line between the new United States and British North America, and the line went straight through Mohawk territory. Akwesasne, the community that sits at the junction of the St. Lawrence River and the borders of New York, Ontario, and Quebec, became the only Indigenous nation in the United States that simultaneously crosses state, provincial, and international lines. Mohawk residents who leave one part of the community to reach another part may pass through a customs checkpoint on their own ancestral territory.

The Mohawk Nation maintained continuous political organization, resisted termination through the twentieth century, and operates its own tribal government. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, General Motors and Reynolds Metals built industrial plants on land adjacent to the community. Operations there contaminated the St. Lawrence River with polychlorinated biphenyls and other industrial chemicals. The fishery that the Mohawk had sustained for generations collapsed. The St. Lawrence Seaway, completed in nineteen fifty-nine, had already altered the river. The industrial plants completed the damage.

Akwesasne has pursued cleanup and environmental restoration through its own environmental division for decades. The border still runs through the middle of it.