This July, the Indian Defense League of America (IDLA) and local community members will cross the border at Niagara Falls. This event is an annual celebration of the rights of all Indigenous peoples of North America to cross the border between Canada and the United States freely.
Indigenous people lived, worked, and socialized throughout the region which now includes a border established by European immigrants between the United States and Canada. When the United Kingdom and the United States were signing the Jay Treaty, article 3 included the provision, “It is agreed that it shall at all Times be free to His Majesty’s Subjects, and to the Citizens of the United States, and also to the Indians dwelling on either side of the said Boundary Line freely to pass and repass by Land, or Inland Navigation, into the respective Territories and Countries of the Two Parties on the Continent of America” [emphasis added]. Likewise, article 9 of the Treaty of Ghent guarantees a return of the privileges Indigenous peoples enjoyed prior to the War of 1812. Both treaties guaranteed the right for Indigenous people to cross the border at any time.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to cap the arrival of new immigrants to the United States. It had the unintended effect of border agents denying entry to tribal citizens crossing the border. At that time, many members of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation were crossing the border for ironworking opportunities, and several were deported for trying to enter the U.S. from Canada without visas. Once, the Mohawk ironworker Paul K. Diabo, from the Kahnawake community in Quebec, was arrested in Philadelphia for entering the U.S. illegally and ordered deported, sometime between 1924-1926. (Reid, 3.) He was told there was concern he would become a public charge, despite him making $70 per week (about $1270 today) working on the Delaware River Bridge. (Rickard and Graymont, 83.) After his final hearing, he and his wife were deported in July 1926.
Many Mohawk men came to do ironwork in the Northeast U.S., and other Mohawks had been deported as well. So members of the Six Nations in Quebec, and Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard, formed the Indian Defense League (IDLA) in December 1926. (Rickard and Graymont, 76.) Their first goal was “border crossing rights”, and they agreed that they would continue the organization after the first goal was accomplished if the members agreed to continue. (Rickard and Graymont, 77.) The Six Nations community members persuaded Diabo to create a test case for the border crossing. (Reid, 10.) He contested his deportation in December. When that failed, in 1927 Diabo’s lawyer brought him to the immigration officer in Philadelphia and then filed a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District in Philadelphia; he “argued that ‘under the Laws and treaties relating to the Indians of the six nations, he is entitled and privileged to enter the United States at will.’” (Reid, 10.) Ultimately the district court judge, Oliver B. Dickinson, found that Diabo had been unlawfully charged and detained. Dickinson noted that the key to deciding the case was article 3 of the Jay Treaty, which clearly states that “…the Indians dwelling on either side of the said Boundary Line [may] freely to pass and repass by Land…”.” In Dickinson’s words, for Indians the border did not exist, and they had a right to cross it without interference or limitation”. (Reid, 12.)
While Diabo’s case was going on, and afterward, Clinton Rickard persuaded his tribe and wrote resolutions for the Tuscarora council meetings, talked to lawyers, hired some of them to write letters on IDLA’s behalf, met with and wrote New York government officials, and continued to lobby Congress and write them letters. Finally, on April 2, 1928, a bill was signed into law allowing all Indians—not only Tuscarora, or American Indians, but all Indigenous people—Canadian and American—to cross the U.S. border without a passport, with the required blood quantum documentation.
While that requirement opened a whole new battlefront for future generations, Clinton Rickard, his Haudenosaunee community members and kin, and the IDLA members had secured an important civil rights victory (Vowel, 77). He had worked to “fight for the line” (i.e., the border crossing rules), as his friend and fellow Tuscarora Deskaheh exhorted him to do. (Rickard and Graymont, 68.) In celebration, thanksgiving, and assertion of their legal victory and their rights, they held a parade starting in Canada and ending in Niagara Falls, New York, on July 14, 1928. Rickard said that “Niagara Falls had never seen anything like it before” and that people came from hundreds of miles away, including Haudenosaunee from Canada and the United States. (Rickard and Graymont, 89.)
The parade is organized by IDLA and is still held every July.
Resources
E99.T9 R53 1973 Rickard, Clinton and Graymont, Barbara. Fighting Tuscarora: The autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
E99.I7 H63 1985 The History and culture of Iroquois diplomacy : an interdisciplinary guide to the treaties of the Six Nations and their league / Francis Jennings, editor … [et al.] for the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, the Newberry Library.
E78.C2 V67 2016 Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes : a guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit issues in Canada.
Reid, Gerald F. “Illegal Alien? The Immigration Case of Mohawk Ironworker Paul K. Diabo.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151, no. 1 (2007): 61–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4599044
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