It's correctly incorrect to call Mohawks sovereign

The guy slumping next to me at the bar perked up when he heard a television news reporter on Cornwall Island say that the Seaway International Bridge might close again because of a dispute between the Canadian government and the Akwesasne Mohawks. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090923/NEWS05/309239966

“She ish gonna get inta deep doo-doo for calling the Mohawks a slobberin' nation,” he said.

I explained to him that she had said “sovereign nation,” but his head was back down on the bar and he was snoring. Good thing, too, because he might have asked what she meant by that and the answer would have given him the spins quicker than the whiskey he was drinking.

The Mohawks are a sovereign nation except when the United States or Canada says they are not and starts bossing them around. So it is technically correct to incorrectly say that the Mohawks and the land they live on is sovereign. I warned you this could make your head spin.

Take Cornwall Island, for instance. No one disputes that it is part of the Akwesasne reservation and sovereign land of the Mohawk tribe. Except the Canadian government owns it. So when a Mohawk returns home to the island from the United States, they have to report to Canadian Customs. If they don't, Canada comes and seizes their sovereign cars.

Canadian Customs used to be on what is but isn't the sovereign Mohawk land of Cornwall Island. The Mohawks for years put up with that breach of their not-so-sovereign sovereignty. But when Canada decided to give their border guards guns this year, the Mohawks protested and the bridge was closed. During the time the bridge was closed, the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino on the American side of the Indian reservation lost an estimated $3 million worth of Canadian business. If it closes for good, as some Mohawks are calling for, it could be financially devasting to the casino. Nobody ever said pseudo-sovereignty was cheap.

The bridge reopened after the border guards were moved off the island and into the city of Cornwall. This means those folks living on Cornwall Island now can't go straight home after a night at the casino in the States. Well, they can, but like I said, then Canada takes away their car. Sovereignty gives. Sovereignty takes away.

On the gives side of the ledger, both of the North American federal governments allow the Mohawks to sell tax-free cigarettes and give them the freedom to let people smoke them inside public buildings like casinos – which were not legal to operate on sovereign Indian land until the feds figured out how lucrative sovereignty could be.

On the takes side of the ledger, when the governments figure out a way to collect taxes on the cigarettes, that strand of sovereignty will be stripped away from the Mohawks faster than you can spell Akwesasne.

The Mohawks clearly get to operate under different rules from other Americans or Canadians, but calling them sovereign is like calling a man pregnant: Saying it doesn't make it so. And it is ridiculous. Yet we do it every day in papers and on televised news reports without ever having to make a correction or clarification after the story runs.

I am sort of glad I didn't have to explain all this to my drunken friend. I doubt he would have been able to follow the story. Then again, maybe it all makes more sense if you are too drunk to think.