CANADA /INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY : Mohawk Unrest Tied to Self Rule : But tribal factionalism hinders quest.

A small band of Mohawk paramilitary men are still holed up on Indian land here, more than a week after the Canadian army began clearing their protest barricades from the highways and bridges around nearby Montreal.

The majority of the so-called Mohawk Warriors filtered away quietly when the army moved in, but about 50 Mohawks have stayed on to make a last stand in an alcohol-abuse treatment center in a once-peaceful pine forest. The men among them are armed with weapons ranging from AK-47 assault rifles to homemade bombs and slingshots.

The Canadian army has surrounded the center, cutting it off from the outside world with razor-wire entanglements. Mohawk supporters still fear there could be bloodshed.

However the final act of the Oka drama ends here in Quebec province, the issues underlying the dispute are likely to nag at Canada--and at America, which also has a Mohawk population--for years.

When it began, the dispute involved a plan to build nine new holes for a golf course on land the Mohawks claimed as their own. In July, a provincial policeman was killed when an attempt was made to dislodge protesters from the golf course. Mohawks at the nearby Kahnawake reservation set up a sympathy blockade on the main commuter bridge into Montreal.

By the time the government had announced that the golf course plans had been dropped, it was too late. The issue had been surpassed in Mohawk minds by the larger one of native sovereignty.

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has refused to discuss sovereignty for the Mohawks, calling the demand “bizarre.” However ludicrous it may seem to the government, the events of this summer have left Mohawks unwilling to drop it.

“We have a written agreement with Great Britain (from Colonial times) which recognizes our sovereignty and our separateness, which we feel Canada is obligated to honor,” said Mohawk journalist Brian Maracle.

Mohawks have been calling in vain for indigenous government since the World War I years, when the Canadian government banned their traditional system of chiefs and forced them to choose new rulers through elections. The Mohawks had a centuries-old, non-electoral system of government called the Iroquois Confederacy, and many of them considered the new electoral system to be alien and illegitimate.

The elections drove Mohawk traditionalists underground but not out of business. Even today, generations later, the typical Mohawk reservation in Canada has a white-sanctioned, elected government, called the “band council”--and a parallel, traditional government called the Longhouse, operating alongside. The situation is fertile ground for leadership disputes and infighting.

The Warrior Society that has been so prominent in the Oka protest is yet another ingredient in this volatile cocktail. Decades ago, Mohawk Warriors were merely a militia for the traditionalist government; they carried hunting rifles and other simple weapons, and their mission was to defend their land. But, in recent years, younger, radical Mohawks have reshaped the Warriors into a hard-line paramilitary force, with sidelines in gun-running, cigarette-smuggling and illegal gambling.

The new breed of Warrior disturbs even Mohawk moderates.

The various Mohawk factions, each with its own agenda, have made it difficult for non-Indian government officials to reach lasting agreements with the Mohawks; a settlement that satisfies one group displeases another.

And now that the Oka drama seems close to a conclusion, there are few signs that the summer’s common struggle promoted any long-term unity.

True, some elected and traditional chiefs have been seen building barricades together, joint actions that would have been unthinkable before the Oka crisis.

But, even as they faced a common enemy, the various Mohawk factions found new reasons to oppose one another. Some Mohawks who have long disagreed with the Warriors’ tactics have had to pay a high price for their pistol-packing brethren’s activities. As temperatures and tempers soared in the Montreal suburbs, white commuters took to beating up and even stoning unarmed Mohawk women, children and the elderly who ventured off their reservation.

It is difficult to imagine the victims of such scapegoating going home to unite with the Warriors and harmoniously working out the sovereignty agreement with Canada that they all want.