MNN. ONONKWA [MEDICINE] MONTREAL. Oct. 23, 2025.
Our kaianerekowa great peace provides that you don’t fight until you die. You fight until you win. This is the conversation we have been having about drug abuse and suicide rising up in indigenous and mainstream communities. In our case tobacco and now vape and cannabis dispensaries are being set up in our communities because the colony of Canada has made a law, the Indian Act, and now to sell drugs. Colonial law which forbids the development of self-sustaining indigenous economies on our unceded land to care for ourselves. The people and the land are being polluted. The tobacco trade made a few rich. Now other drugs are coming into our ccommunities. It is disrupting our children, babies, people, causing break-ins, crime, violence, suicides, children being removed, and no jobs. We are surprised how big the addictions are throughout our land.
We indigenous were scared to go to the government hospitals to get help. We called them “tsi-non-ta-ion-takwa”, the place where you go to die!
In the past my grand parents and other members of my community mostly took care of each other. My grandfather was a trained bone setter. My grandmother was an expert in making very effective medicines for arthritis which she gave freely. People from Montreal came for this and she would not accept money from them. She told them that nature provides the plants she used. Onenhariio was a herbalist. I went to his place with my younger sister for medicine for her. He had a long shelf along the wall with large bottles containing a drink of a light to dark potion. After questioning us he picked one and told her to take it home and drink it until it was gone and then bring the bottle back. Then he either gave her a clean bill of health or gave her another bottle. He did not charge anything.
We need data and for the public to know about what has happened since the colonists designed a system to do away with us. 
By Mohawk Artist Star Horn
Let’s talk about some of the TRIGGERS that created some of these problems for us. Right from 5 years of age in the Indian Day Schools the teachers told us that our people will be disappearing, that there would be no more ‘onkwehonwe’! in the future. We were punished for speaking kanienkehaka, our language, so we would forget who we are and lose touch with our ancestors. They said that there would be no Indians and gave us a book called “The Vanishing American” to give to our parents to read to us. My father took that book and smashed it against the wall. Such thoughts deliberately put into our minds that we would all disappear never left our minds. Another big trigger was the Mohawk Oka crisis of 1990 when we were attacked by 5,000 super armed Canadian soldiers for stopping non-natives from building a golf course over our graves. This overwhelming military force terrified us. The bayonet thrust by a Canadian soldier into the chest of my 14 year old daughter, almost killing her still shakes me up. Another trigger is being forbidden to use our indigenous names and even trying to remove every indigenous place name of every place on our mother earth. But we did something that Canadians are learning about, that “Canada” is a Mohawk word that comes from “canajon” which means “squatters”!
Nature decides how life is going to be lived. We indigenous strive for the truth. Now the intruders are trying to decide for us how we shall live and think. We care about each other and we will stop this total deception and corruption of our people and communities.
We advise you to keep asking the questions so you will learn the truth and understand us. Like nature, we cannot give up. The plants and animals always stay on their course. That is how creation programmed us.
Our message for those trying to help us is when you see success it gives hope to everyone. Don’t let the social services take our suffering children away from us. We don’t expect miracles but we try to love and help them..
We should speak about the elephant in the room. The federal government has allowed the sale of addictive products without any support or remedies for these victims and those people who are trying to help them. The provinces provide little support. We will not give up.
ONOWAREKE TURTLE ISLAND BELONGS TO THE INDIGENOUS. We are each sovereign persons. We each have a duty to overrule every danger being carried out on any area of our land, water and air of all our entities. Should anyone try to control us, nature will back us against those who harm our mother. Creation’s order of things cannot be violated as this is built into our way. Our adversaries are trained to use artificial means such as money, government policies, diseases, mental confusion, destruction of reality and false narrative promotion on the internet and such media as AI to get their way. A destructive big lie has been created throughout the world that onowarekeh turtle island is not set aside as a special place for indigenous people, the natural caretakers. Only those who can live according to the kaianerekowa great peace can remain on turtle island to help take care of our earth mother. In our creation story we come from the sky world, which is a planet that revolves around the binery twin of our sun. On a long cycle there will be two suns in the sky. The last time this happened was when dekanawida was here. He will be back in the next cycle.
“Ononkwa” means medicine but Aerosmith got it wrong like all the other translators of Mohawk kanienkehaka, but they call it ‘hoo doo voo doo medicine man’.
#991. kahnawake Qc. Canada J0L 1B0
