Kahnawake Grand Chief Joe Tokwiro Norton, seen here on the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal, on Sept. 18, 2018.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
One of the tensest moments during the 1990 Oka Crisis took place when troops from the Royal Canadian Regiment arrived in the Kahnawake Mohawk community in support of the provincial police.
Incensed residents threw stones and punched and kicked the soldiers, who answered with fists, rifle butts and tear gas.
For hours, Grand Chief Joe Norton tried to defuse the situation. He admonished the army officers. He pushed back the angrier protesters. “Keep our heads cool,” he told them.
For Mr. Norton, who was under challenge by more militant factions, the episode underlined his loyalty to his community, south of Montreal.
He was still in office when he died Friday after a fall at home. He was 70.
His long tenure as grand chief was marked by a revival of Mohawk identity as Kahnawake moved to assert its sovereignty, diversify its economy and control its membership.
“He wanted us to not be pushed around by outside governments, which had happened for years and years,” band councillor Lindsay Leborgne said in an interview.
Joe Norton, shown in this Feb. 8, 1994 file photo. His long tenure as grand chief was marked by a revival of Mohawk identity.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Advocates of the traditional Longhouse form of Mohawk governance paid tribute, too. “While we may have not agreed with his political path, we can never question Joe’s endless dedication and love for his people and we acknowledge his many contributions,” they said in a statement.
Mr. Norton was grand chief for 27 of the past 38 years, during some of the most tumultuous times for his people.
He embodied a principled pragmatism that used the band council, set by the federal Indian Act, to promote Mohawk nation-building, a former assistant, political consultant Taiaiake Alfred, said.
“The effort that he initiated and oversaw ... was to take that system and remake it into an instrument of self-government for Kahnawake,” Dr. Alfred said in an interview.
There were collateral victims in that push for nationhood. Scores of Kahnawake residents were, for example, evicted or lost jobs and membership rights because they married non-Indigenous people or didn’t have enough Mohawk ancestry in their lineage.
“There is no way we will allow whites to set up permanent residency on this reserve ever again. Those days are gone,” Mr. Norton told The Globe and Mail in 1982.
He was born in Kahnawake on Aug. 29, 1949, the seventh of the 12 children of Peter Norton and Hazel Hemlock.
His father was an ironworker, one of the many Mohawks who built the bridges and high-rises of New York.
One of Mr. Norton’s sisters, Esther, said in an interview that their parents were not political but valued Mohawk culture and language.
Mr. Leborgne said Mr. Norton grew up during the expropriation of Kahnawake land for the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, an episode that stoked Mohawk feelings of grievance.
Mr. Norton left school at 16 and became an ironworker, too. He told the Montreal Gazette that he worked on the construction of the World Trade Center “from the 80th floor up to the 101st – then it got too windy and cold for me.”
When he decided in 1978 to run for band council, Mohawks were in the midst of a social and cultural resurgence. That year, Kahnawake opened its own high school in protest of Quebec’s language laws. Another galvanizing moment came when a Sûreté du Québec constable fatally shot a Kahnawake man in 1979.
Then-Quebec native affairs minister Guy Chevrette laughs at a joke from then-Kahnawake chief Joe Norton (left) at a signing ceremony in Kahnawake, Que., Ton Oct. 15, 1998.RYAN REMIORZ/The Canadian Press
In 1981, the band council picked Mr. Norton to fill in for Grand Chief Andrew Delisle, who had health problems. The following year, Mr. Norton was elected as Grand Chief.
He immediately caught the attention of people outside Kahnawake when the council moved to evict non-Mohawk residents. Less controversially, he reached an accord with the Quebec government to build and run a hospital in Kahnawake, setting a template for future negotiations with the province.
Around that time, rising Mohawk nationalism led more people to support the Longhouse movement, challenging the legitimacy of Mr. Norton and the elected council.
Some of those traditionalists also promoted the sale of tax-free tobacco, a divisive issue within Mohawk communities. Mr. Norton wanted to curb the sale of cigarettes, but one of his sisters, Selma Delisle, was a prominent Longhouse figure and pioneer in the tobacco trade. Armed members of the traditionalist Warrior Society emerged in defiance of the Mohawk police and band council.
On July 11, 1990, a Sûreté raid on a barricade in the Kanesatake Mohawk settlement, near Oka, took a disastrous turn when an officer was shot dead.
In support of the people of Kanesatake, militants in Kahnawake blocked the Honoré Mercier Bridge, a major gateway to Montreal that could only be accessed through the reserve.
For the next seven weeks, Kahnawake was under siege, surrounded by police, then soldiers, while frustrated demonstrators outside threatened anyone looking Indigenous.
Mr. Norton took part in negotiations to end the stalemate, a halting process involving two divided Indigenous communities and two levels of government. At the end of August, Kahnawake Mohawks and the military agreed to dismantle the barricades at the Mercier Bridge.
Then, on Sept. 18, Canadian soldiers assisted the Sûreté on a raid at the Tekakwitha Island, in Kahnawake. Mr. Norton rushed to the scene to contain the crowd.
“It was a very brave thing to do. … The respect level for Joe went up much more after that,” Mr. Leborgne said.
Dr. Alfred said there were less-publicized moments where Mr. Norton showed fortitude. He recalled emotional public meetings where some Kahnawake members were outraged at the Warriors’ blockade of the bridge. Mr. Norton “stood up and made it very clear that if people were going to go against the Warriors they would have to come through him. He would not stand to see our community fighting among each other.”
In the years after the crisis, Mr. Norton remained a prominent figure who had the clout to negotiate accords with Quebec and Ottawa, consolidating Kahnawake’s jurisdiction on policing, membership, taxation and economic development.
He faced a setback in 1994 when residents voted against a casino project that he supported. He then shifted to Internet gambling. Kahnawake set up its own licensing board and played host to servers for online gambling sites.
In 2004, he announced his retirement from politics after a quarter of a century in office.
He registered a company that acquired two online poker websites, AbsolutePoker and UltimateBet, which became mired in controversy when players complained that the sites failed to control cheating.
Mr. Norton denied knowledge of any wrongdoing. The Kahnawake Gaming Commission said some of the problems began before he bought the companies. But his two sites had to pay $2-million in fines and refund players.
When he resigned as grand chief in 2004, he said that “the Joe Norton era is over with.” But in 2015, he ran for office again, saying that many community members had urged him to return.
He had a year left in his second term when he died.
Mr. Norton leaves his partner, Sally Patton, two children from a previous union, Aaron and Jodie, and grandchildren Sahanatie and Rayce-Barrett Leblanc.