Where is the real transparency?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this editorial was published on Facebook on Monday. It has since been updated to reflect subsequent events.

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake is playing a dangerous game using community members as pawns, and in this response from us, we will outline why you should be concerned about that.

To put it frankly, the recent press release from the MCK is what you call gaslighting. They needed a scapegoat, so they chose us. They might not have a strong case against Chateauguay regarding the oil spill, and they aren’t confident in it, so they made us the targets for reporting on the content of last week’s meeting – which attracted all of 12 people or so.

Spoiler alert: The content of the meeting, as read in our article, was nothing earth-shattering and sharing it did nothing to jeopardize any MCK claim. 

We report for the elders who no longer go to the meetings; we report for the traditional people who won’t go because it’s MCK; we report for the ones who aren’t on the Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake Registry (KKR), which numbers in the thousands here.

We also report on the meetings for the other people who live in Kahnawake, with children here, who have every right to ensure a brighter future for their Kahnawake kids; the parents who weren’t born here, but who coach our lacrosse teams, who contribute to our society, who have given up their former lives to build the community up together.

The MCK put out a press release last Friday castigating The Eastern Door (without naming us) for reporting on a community meeting pertaining to a lawsuit against Chateauguay to recoup cleanup costs of the fuel spill. It also banned The Eastern Door from communicating with the MCK pending this week’s community meeting, which led to the end of the blackout late Thursday.

According to the MCK’s press release, introductory statements specified the meeting a week-and-a-half ago was a closed space. However, by the end of the meeting, due to a disappointing turnout, one MCK chief urged attendees to tell two community members about the next meeting, who could then tell two more, who would tell two more, about the news.  

Mohawk Council of Kahnawake grand chief Cody Diabo said at the end, just before that, “spread the word.”

This leaves room for confusion. Exactly what were people allowed to speak about from this “closed” space?

Yet, somehow, this game of telephone was supposed to never reach Chateauguay. But nothing can be confidential and public at the same time.

This “message” of a closed space, and, thus, secret, was not reiterated throughout the meeting, and no one was reminded to keep silent as they left.

Besides, you don’t bring actual pertinent legal questions and ask for secret advice at a public meeting, even if that public is limited to KKR only – that’s thousands of people who could attend and then post about it on social media. What if that happened? MCK can’t control everyone.

The average person wouldn't know what advice to give anyway, so why ask for legal opinions from non-lawyers?

Was that reason enough for the MCK to issue a press release targeting a “local media outlet” (everyone knows it’s us) by saying we “breached” some kind of top secret something or other? 

If you take a closer look at the press release announcing last week’s meeting, nowhere does it say the matter is confidential or that the meeting is closed to the media. That would have been important to mention.

Nobody reached out to us to talk about possibly keeping the contents of this meeting a secret. MCK wants to pursue an out-of-court settlement against the ones they deem responsible? Who doesn’t? We want to see accountability, too. We live here and it affects our lives directly as well.

Here’s part of what the MCK put out, publicly, last Friday:

“…the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke will not be conducting any business with The Eastern Door until engagement on the breach of trust issue has taken place with the community at the Summer Community meeting on Wednesday, September 18, 2024, and next steps are then identified.”  

We’re a media outlet. Who do you think you’re hurting? People who get their information from us – community members, including elders, that’s who. 

We dig for information that the community has a right to know and, let’s be honest, the MCK doesn’t like that.

We’re not a branch of the MCK, and while we are open to appeals to the public interest, we never received one.

So, what do we do? We do our job - and that’s not, as some seem to think, some crass, unyielding drive to sell newspapers at two bucks a pop – such an outdated and facile way of looking at the job we do for much more important reasons.

Our job is to inform and empower a community that has the right to know what’s going on, even those who might be too busy with their jobs and families to sit through a Wednesday night meeting.

This week's Wednesday meeting revealed three things, basically: that The Eastern Door has a right to do its job, free of control from Council; that the ban on speaking to us still stands (although it was repealed late Thursday); and that sometime in the future, apparently, they want to meet with us to discuss protocol.  

Let’s be clear: the MCK wants you to believe this information is out there because The Eastern Door broke the trust of the community. This is not true.  

We never broke any trust and there was never any breach, it was just the new Council’s plan, relayed to a handful of people, that backfired. And now they are trying to make an example of us. Don’t fall for it.

We can only speculate on the MCK’s motives in accusing us – perhaps some in Council are feeling embarrassed – but what we do know is soliciting the opinions of an audience hardly the size of the Council table and asking them to tell their friends to come to the next meeting is not what community members mean when they demand greater transparency.

An oil spill. Land claims. A housing crisis on the heels of a huge scandal - with all these important issues, the MCK goes out of its way to use the media machine to produce a press release and make the very real effort to attack us for doing our job.

If you’re reading this and you still think it’s okay for the MCK to control a free and independent press, please read on.

Expecting a public meeting to be secret just doesn’t make sense. Speak behind closed doors instead of trying to disguise a public meeting as secret, or don’t invite the public. You can’t have both. And you can’t throw a tantrum when information comes out from it.

What happens if community members put details on social media, which is well within their rights? Are they hung out to dry in the same way as The Eastern Door?  

No, because it’s impossible. Control comes in many forms and trying to control what the media reports is a risky move on the Council’s part, but they can’t control us, and they can’t control the people.

Reporting

The Eastern Door shouldn’t have to hide in community meetings, we should be part of every one of them, regardless of who our reporters are. We serve the people, and continuing to shut us out of meetings, not to mention refusing to talk to us at all, means they are disrespecting your right to know.  

They are disrespecting the elders who read us, who we report to.

Our reporting reaches a much larger number of people and informs the community of the plan, instead of continuing the trend of bending to outside governments and trying to keep important issues hush-hush.

Talking about strategy at a public meeting to see what the people think means your initial strategy was weak, at best.

An attempt to tell the people what the Council’s plan is while at the same time trying to control any information that’s spread beyond that meeting will never work.

Did the grand chief think things through when he released his response on his personal Facebook page last Thursday night? No, he jumped the gun with his knee-jerk reaction while sending a letter to The Eastern Door that only he signed, which means he let his emotions get the better of him. 

That sounds familiar, and it is certainly not what good leaders do.

The dog-whistle post late last week to try to rally people against us, along with bringing this to the community meeting to see what those in attendance think, is not the kind of government master plan anyone should settle for.

You were elected to make tough decisions. Do that and bring it to the people in an open, honest and transparent way and you will gain respect. So much respect was lost because of this attack on us, a free press.

We report for the people, and we dig for the truth, and any government hates that. But even if you don’t like us or don’t support us, we will still fight for the community’s right to know, for YOUR right to know. It’s what ethical and good media do: sacrifice likability while putting aside personal aspirations and digging hard to uncover the truth.

We are the eyes and ears of the community. We serve everybody, whether they like us or read us.

We must be able to do our jobs and report back to the people at large. Besides, what big secrets were revealed during the meeting, aside from the question posed to a handful of people: should the MCK take a six-month hiatus on the lawsuit?

None.

How is the message or the Council’s musings supposed to get out there to a larger audience? Did they even want it to? Or was the meeting just a ruse as well?

The Council’s reaction is overkill, and it reeks of fear, not strength, by asking the community for direction in its dealings with a small local business, one that happens to be tasked with being an MCK watchdog.

We desperately need an independent ombudsman who will call Council out when needed, who can help the people fight the MCK when they get out of line, who can request and receive documents instead of being told no, or “come to the office to see it.”

The author of this editorial is not even allowed to attend community meetings, and neither are our non-Native reporters, yet people were talking behind our backs on Wednesday, including many of the chiefs. The right to defend yourself? Not at community meetings, apparently.

Attacking us while not allowing us to be present is cowardly. But we’re willing to be the bigger people and put this out to all the chiefs: call or message, you all know where to find us, and if we can sit down and hash things out, the community wins. This isn’t even about us. It’s always been about the community’s right to know.

But, to put it plainly, the press release last week is about MCK control and ego, make no mistake. It’s not about some strategy that Chateauguay really doesn’t care about. Sue them or not, how does that affect what they will do? If things are paused in court, or if they continue, the same lawyers will answer the same questions, file the same paperwork, and use the article as ammo for what, exactly? Because nothing was revealed in the article.

Our role as media 

The MCK sued Dean Montour (who had sued them in March). He was countersued recently because he spoke to us about the demise of Mohawk Online, which he has firsthand knowledge of after being CEO for many years.

We broke both stories because the people deserved to know. That’s what this is about.

The MCK doesn’t want to tell you about Mohawk Online coming to an end due to the ineptitude of letting it die out, but we uncovered more of the story. They still won’t answer questions directly about it, so again, they’re shutting the community out. 

They never revealed either of the Dean Montour lawsuits publicly. They never came forward and told you they were being sued by Magic Palace; that story was also broken by The Eastern Door. 

The irony is in the Dean Montour lawsuit, Cody Diabo, MCK grand chief now, who was a chief at the time, was alleged to have defamed Montour, which was then leaked to Montour by three chiefs – two of whom are no longer chiefs. A clear breach, and they were disciplined for it, but the MCK didn’t put out a press release to tell you that until our reporting forced them to put one out with weak information. 

If it weren’t for The Eastern Door, you wouldn’t know about these issues and so many more. 

Another example: We saw JFK Quarry as an item in a Council communique and asked about it for four consecutive weeks before we finally got a simple answer; the JFK’s asphalt operations are still not allowed to go ahead.

This is something people should know about, so why was that not announced?

Is that transparency? Isn’t that breaching YOUR trust as a community? Don’t you have a right to know how they are spending community money, whether they are on legal offense or defense?

Of course, you do. And you deserve to know much more about what the Council is doing, so that’s where we come in.

The Eastern Door and every other local media outlet is bound by MCK’s rules. We aren’t forced to listen to their internal policies for chiefs and employees, and we never signed an agreement with them to say so, so to assume we are going to fall in line, and then try to call us on something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t make sense. 

We are a free and independent press, and we report to the people. The MCK is now asking you to take that tool you all have away from you. Why? What else do they have to hide?

A simple phone call from the GC could have resulted in us potentially holding onto the article until things were fleshed out more, but that courtesy never came. The lines of communication are not open like they should be, with MCK Media acting as gatekeepers of how the information flows to you, the community.

But we’re still willing to talk, to sit face-to-face and do what’s best for the community at large. That’s our job.

Putting this “to the people” when the MCK knows no one shows up to the meetings is another way for them to control what happens and what information gets out.

This past Wednesday, that didn’t work out as they planned.

To attempt to silence the media is an attempt to silence the people.

This editorial was originally published in print on September 20 in issue 33.38 of The Eastern Door.