If you live in the UK right now you will have seen that the Liberal Democrats part of the governmental coalition doesn’t seem to be able to stick to their guns for hardly a year, let alone see it go back many years.
The vigour with which students protested against the coalition’s plans to raise fees was at times reminiscent of the miner strikes of the 80s. You can imagine that if someone tried to make drastic changes to the way of life in one small online-gambling related community in a corner of Canada, the same vigorous disproval would take place.
As a town of little over 8,000 people, the Mohawk community of Kahnawake has a media industry that is bustling enough so that cities 10 times larger would be envious of it, according to a story from Tuesday’s Globe and Mail. The media hotbed includes three radio stations, TV channels, and three print news operations, including two websites and a newspaper.
Don’t for a second think that they forget where their roots are though.
“Our nature as Mohawks is that we want to be in charge of our own devices,” said Greg Horn, a young journalist who has worked at the newspaper and started an independent news website, kahnawakenews.com told Globe and Mail “We want to hear our own music, our own language, we want to employ our own people.”
Kenneth Deer is another who, after seeing the incredibly negative coverage of the Oka confrontation in 1990, launched a paper two years later. He sold the paper two years ago to a local published, after running it until he made a profit with help from volunteers.
“Then, as now, you rarely saw a native face in the mainstream press unless it was bad news,” he said. “It was slanted. I thought our community needed a platform of information that we could depend on.”
That’s why the Mohawks will always be admired in our circles – they stick to their historical rights and won’t be swayed from them. Another reason why setting up online gambling operations in the province is a stellar idea and one that should never been criticized.
