Wednesday, September 21, 1994 - North Shore News - 25

Lasagna doesn't

good food for thou

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

Lasagna: The Man Behind the
Mask. Ronald Cross and Helene
Sevigny. Tatonbooks. $16.95

UMMER OF 1990. We

all remember it. For the

second time this century,
the endless constitutional
wrangling that passes for
government in this country
was suspended in the face of
the shocking, somehow un-
Canadian spectacle of armed
insurrection as Mohawk
“warrioss” squared off
against the Surete de
Quebec, the federal govern-
ment and the Canadian
Armed Forces:

For most of us, the face of that
rebellion was the face of
“Lasagna”: a pair of eyes glaring
from smearec blackout makeup
above a camouflage bandanna
and under a jungle hat, a belliger-
ent camo-clad commando bran-
dishing an Mié and baiting stoic
Canadian soldiers in tense nose-
to-nose confrontations.

Who was “Lasagna”? At the
time, the supposedly respectable
media had a field-day, reveling in
the kind of licence usually only
enjoyed by Aational Enquirer
staffers. Siezing on the coded
nickname Lasagna, a vast crimi-
nal conspiracy was intimated;
connections between the orga-
nized crime families deep!
embedded in American culture
and the Mohawk “warrior” soci-
eties were imputed, the motive
being the tax-free billions to be
made from using Indian reserves
to circumvent the government's
self-defeating tobacco taxes. The
Mohawk “warriors” were por-
trayed as Viet-vet Chuck
Norris/Sly Stallone clones, merce-
nary psycho-killer jungle fighters
armed with the most Jethal heavy
hardware Mob money could buy.

When the dust cleared,
“Lasagna”, supposedly one of the
hard-core ringleaders of the
Warrior/Mob cadre, surrendered
unarmed. He turned out to be
Ronald Cross, son of a Mohawk
“high-steel” worker and a
Scottish/italian mother, who, like
his father, built New York sky-
scrapers, and spent summers and
weekends at Kahnawake. Cross
had never been to Vietnam and
his only criminal conviction was
for busting up a disco near
Kahnawake under the influence
of too much beer. In this small
war, as in the big ones, Truth was
the first casualty.

Unfortunately, Cross’ telling of
his own story, abetted by
Montreal lawyer Helene Sevigny,

ulls the camo-scarf away from

is features only to reveal yet
another false face. This should
have been one of the most inipor-
tant books to come out of this
couniry in this century and it’s
nat, despite Talonbooks editor
Karl Siegler’s attempt to re-tool
the book for a less specifically
Quebec market.

Quebec's notoriously chauvin-
istic treatment of native people is
just one major issue that gets lost
in the cultural/linguistic shuffle
here. Ron “Lasagna” Cross admits
the Oka crisis was his political
baptism by fire; before it, he
hadn‘t given much thought to his
native heritage until personal
crises dove-tailed with the mayor
of Oka’s decision to expand the
local golf course onto traditional
Mohawk burial grounds and the
Surete de Quebec invaded the
reserve in force to enforce an ill-
considered municipal recreation-
al plan.

A political neophyte by his
own admission, caught up in the
escalating passions of the con-
frontation, Cross is a poor
spokesman for the Mohawks and
both Sevigny and Siegler make
the mistake of allowing him to
ramble at length, spouting one
superficial rehashed pust-
Columbian grievance after anoth-
er, not one word of which con-
tributes to our understanding of
the Oka crisis or Native affairs.

Along the way, Cross charges
that the tobacco-smuggling/Mob
connection was used by the
Surete de Quebec io “eliminate
the competition,” suggesting the
involvement of the SQ in the ille-
gal trade, yet he offers no more
proof than the SQ produced of

66 The Mohawk
“warriors” were
portrayed as Viet-vet
Chuck Norris/
Sly Stallone clones,
mercenary psycho-
killer jungle fighters
armed with the most
lethal heavy hardware
Mob money could
buy... 99

“organized crime” among the
Mohawks. His version of events is
no more verifiable than the
media's disgracefully fictional
account and we are left to choose
between the unsubstantiated testi-
mony of two sets of hostile wit-
nesses.

At one point, Cross suggests
the SQ‘s senior officers did not
inform their cigarette-busting
troops they might be received by
heavily armed and determined
opposition, thus led them into an
ambush. !f so, why then did the
SQ approach the reserve with
such overwhelming force and
respond to resistance with a vol-
ley of fire which likely killed one
of their own men?

There are just too many con-
tradictions here, not the least of
which is the fact that when Ron
Cross and his cohorts went on
trial, not one of the Mohawks
they'd been “defending” turned
up in court to support them,
Sevigny’s argument that the trials
were deliberately held in an
inconvenient venue won't wash:

re

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these trials ought to have been a
Native rights media circus.
Sevigny’s own breathless,
exclamatory style does not trans-
late well; one can easily see how
her fellow Quebecois might write
her off as a terrorist-groupie. If
you're looking for food for
thought, don't order Lasagna.

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