Episode 8: On the Edge of Out of Control

But a freshly built motor is a terrible thing to waste, So Derek dropped those NASCAR V eights into old shitty beaters, put studs in the tires, and got back into a time honored mohawk tradition, ice racing on the St. Lawrence River. All right, So down the morning and we are at Hornwa Marina. We're here to race, baby, and it's it's fucking cold out here. It's negative too, but luckily there's a high of seven, so I think we'll be all right.

The whole thing is frozen over. It's gotta be a hundred cars out here, motorcycles at TVs, trucks, race cars, and yeah, we're here to see Derrick Rice. Let's gonna find him. We got a bunch of all beat up race cars, steel side and steel reinforced painted like old NASCAR cars. I'm in all, Kevin baby, we're racing. Boogie boogety boogety. What's going on, same ship, different pile. So

what's your schedule today? Well, they got they got through the bikes, the four wheelers, then the motorcycles, and then it's um, the front wheel drive studied class. Then they have rubber class of small cars, and then I think it's the outlaw class with the studs B eight and then it's the rubber after that. So I'm meeting right now. That's where we're going. We're heading now, and then uh,

then they're gonna start. That's found. I don't festival, no idea what they're talking about talking about one car, one trailer, no spectators in the pitcher, something like that. Okay, let's go race. We're here today Tebruary. We're gonna have some races going on today. This is my bar off the driver at ninety nine. Tell me what can factor race car? Drill running bolt, that's right, Baby. We're the first podcast to be painted on the side of a race car.

Eat Your Heart Out Radio Lab from Campside Media and Dan Patrick Productions. This is Running Smoke. I'm Roger Gola and this is episode eight Riding the Edge. The big irony of Derek's case is that if he'd just taken a deal from the prosecution when he was arrested, he'd probably already be out of jail by now. Like all the other guys that there was what forty forty or fifty at them, they all took deals, they all already did their time. They're own and they're just going on

with their life. And I mean it's gonna be five years now in April. I'm still fighting. This hasn't been easy, let me put it that way. It causes a lot of friction in the house. At one time we were I was, you know, going to court five days a week for it was almost two months straight. It's taking a toll. I mean, it's taken a toll on my family, my kids, you know, my wife, Hunter the same thing, his wife, you know, his kids. Everyone just wants it over,

you know. After delays caused by COVID, Derek's constitutional challenge was finally slated to be heard in the fall of The mere fact that this case had made it to the docket was extraordinary. Steve Bonspiel of the Eastern Door newspaper, I'm actually surprised that Derek's case has gotten as far as it has, because usually Canada doesn't want it to go further because they don't want to set that jurisprudence. If whether he wins or loses, especially if he wins,

it's gonna set up other cases for the future. And and they're gonna know that they can't just you know, attack and and target just because they think it's wrong. You know, he will set a jurisprudence. He will set um, you know, an example that I can go to court

and beat the government and everything. If he wins, every single tobacco case is going to use him and and and you know, every single person who is gonna argue on our side is gonna say, hey, he beat them, and here's why and here's why it applies to us. But at the same time, the risks were very high. If Derek lost, it could mean empowering law enforcement and

regulation on a big chunk of the Mohawk economy. It meant putting fundamental rights at risk of being struck down by the Canadian government, which is exactly why the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs have been trying to get Derek to drop his case for months. When that failed, the chiefs dispatched their lawyer and sent him to court with a formal request for intervention. The Mohawk Nation wanted to make sure they had a seat at the able and that they would be able to protect some of their

rights if Derek lost the case. When I talked to him about their current approach, it's it's not about supporting Derek, you know, it's about ensuring that Indigenous rights are are supported, I guess you could say, or are argued. So even within that, you know the context of having them in the trial, it's it's not exactly an ally, you know,

having an ally next to you. It could end up being because they're fighting the same fight, but they're they're kind of you know, adversarial, so you know, all that stuff like doesn't necessarily add up to a unified approach to fight for individual rights or Indigenous rights. I should say, really, I I don't know what what position there's there at right now, whether it's going to help me or if

it's going to hurt me. Um, we still don't under stand what they're what the fight is, you know, like they said, it's it's a it's the whole nation's fight. But are they still are they helping me? Are they basically throwing me out to the wolves, you know, take a deal or or nothing. So I don't know if they're hoping I'm gonna I'm gonna win this or already hoping I'm gonna lose this. It was a question I'd had for a long time. Is the Mohawk Nation standing

for or against Derek? I needed to know what the Council of Chiefs had to say, and that's coming up after the break. Well, my name is guyand with the Wolf Clan of the anordignation of the Hooded Shawnee. My name is also Paul Williams, and I practiced law working for Indigenous Nation. The Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs or m n c C has a very complicated history, and there's a few debates over the providence of its authority.

But the long and short of it is that the m n c C is the highest traditional authority among all Mohawk territories. So when you look at all treaties and documents that Mohawks signed with the French and British governments, you're essentially talking about the same political entity, and Paul

Williams now represents their interests in Derek's constitutional challenge. After the Nation Council became aware of the notice of constitutional question, it took several steps because it really didn't want to see all these rights at stake in court. It basically felt this is a matter between nations, which is to say, between the Canadian State and Mohawk governments. So the first thing that the Nation Council did is direct me to write the lawyers for Derek White and Hunter mon Tour

and say please don't make these arguments. And they wrote back and said we're going to make the arguments. The chiefs talked it over at length, because every step up to that point was an attempt to avoid becoming involved in the court case and to have the matters dealt with outside courty. There's no room for other people in the ring. Despite all the attempts that the Mohawk Nation made to stay out of the courts and keep Derek and Hunter out of the courts. In the ends, all

those efforts failed. Derek and Hunter were going to fight this thing, and the chiefs had a tough choice to make stay out and let Derek roll the dice with their rights, or do something unprecedented, enter a court system that was counter to their traditions and take a public stance. After much deliberation, they asked Paul Williams to make a formal request to intervene in the case. What is so remarkable about this case that demanded such op precedentsed action.

It's remarkable because so many rights were being put at risk all at once. And my reaction was that they had placed virtually all the hoodren of Shawny aboriginal rights and treaty rights on the line in the case without any authorization from any hoodn of Shawny government. And my reaction was, this is the wrong case to test all the rights, and because the rights are fragile, when really needs to build beginning with the most obvious and sympathetic cases,

the ones that are least threatening to Canada. Derek White and Hunter Montour were charged with six to need other people who all pleaded guilty number of them were Hell's Angels. There wasn't just tobacco involved in the case. There were firearms, they were drugs. Another mark against derek case was the fact that he had already been found guilty by a

jury of defrauding the federal government. It wasn't exactly the community's best foot forward in terms of making a Native rights case, but Paul felt that Derek was forcing his hand. He made a formal request to the judge presiding over the case asking for the Mohawk Nation to be represented in the proceedings, which would allow it to have similar privileges as the prosecutors and the defense. They could present witnesses,

cross examined, and make their case before judge. And surprisingly, the judge agreed and the Mohawk Nation was given status as a full party intervener. Now they had a seat at the table. And that's that's sort of what's remarkable that the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs was allowed to intervene at all. It's the first time in Canadian law in this case the Nation Council became a full party. And the fact is it's the first time a traditional

indigenous government has been recognized as such as well. The Nation Council's involvement in the case right from the start was damage control. It was how do we minimize the potential damage to this this court could do. I think that's the way the Nation Council continues to perceive it.

Not our court, not our judge, not our law. One has to be really careful going into court paror to what's happening is you're you're ending up with people with a large amount of money, Individuals with a large amount of money willing to risk everybody's rights to protect themselves. This was the theme that kept coming up in the course of my entire reporting, attention between the rights of

an individual and the rights of a collective. Yes, Derek has rights as a mohawk person, but does that mean he's allowed to gamble with the rights that all mohawks share to defend himself. To Paul Williams, that's a fundamental question of what it means to be mohawk in the first place. What is the relationship between individual rights and collective rights? Who beginning with your name, your name doesn't

belong to you. It belongs to your klan family. Somebody carried that name before you, somebody will be given that name after you. That is your your identity is linked to a collective group of people, and they are responsible for you and you are responsible to them. For example, in Moawk, you don't say my name is such and such, you say young Pits. They call me such and such. That is my name exists because other people use it.

So really, from from a very fundamental societal perspective, what you do as an individual constantly relates to the other people you are living with as your relatives. All this to say that there's quite a bit of daylight between Mohawk and Canadian conceptions of how society functions, and there might be better ways to square the two than a

case involving tobacco and organized crime. We need a conversation with Canada about how to deal with criminal law, and this is not this is not the way to have that conversation. Nevertheless, in September, the judge ga in the first session of Derek's constitutional challenge. It was held in a small conference room with a desk for the judge and five other desks arranged in the middle of the room for witnesses, lawyers, and court attendants. There was no jury.

The outcome of this case would rest solely on the judge. One by one, expert witnesses were brought before the court to give their thoughts on everything from Mohawk grammar to sense result treaties and archaeological records. Derek brought esteemed indigenous scholars and leaders to the stand and the government questioned them intense heavy debates. We reached out to the Crown prosecutors,

but they declined to comments on an open case. The three parties made their arguments, defended their positions, and cross examined one another, which took a larger toll on the Mohawk Nations witnesses than Paul had anticipated. I had to explain to people that cross examination is a stranger coming at you in a stiff aliens setting and challenging your credibility.

You wouldn't tolerate that if if this happened in a restaurant or on the street, and yet in court you have to It was a foreign concept in traditional Mohawk legal practice, where decisions are made by consensus among the three clans. It's a system based on convincing your neighbors of your perspective rather than proving your opponents wrong again. It's it goes to the idea that a criminal court

really isn't the place to work these things out. After weeks of hearing testimony and extremely drawn out closing arguments, the judge gabbled the constitutional challenge to a close and dismissed the room. She had heard everything she needed to make a decision, and promised to deliver a judgment within a year's time. We're just waiting now from from the uh, the judge. I look at it this way. The longer it takes, the better. I mean, if if she knew I was guilty, she would have came back the next

day and said, you're guilty. So she's really going through this, you know, with a with a comb basically. I mean, if hopefully I'm phone innocent of everything, if not, they should be probably in jail for five to seven years or something like that. But you know what, instead of me taking that deal, which I didn't, and if I did, I would have been sitting in jail right now and just thinking, you know what, maybe I could have won this, maybe I could have beat the government for everybody. But

now we're gonna find out. They know that if this case goes in any way our way, in any one little part doesn't go there away. They got a whole new story to rewrite Hunter mont Tour, who's thought this case alongside Derek every step of the way. They'll have to change everything and they can't do that. They can't do it that quickly. So they're going to be like, what the f are we gonna do? Right? Literally, I don't know what the hell is going to happen. I

don't know how big it's going to be. It seems like it's going to be pretty big. A lot of people are paying attention and understand what could happen when this is over, good or bad. I don't know what is the best case scenario for the for the Mohawk

Nation Council. Best case scenario from a Nation Council point of view is probably the court making a decision that would call upon the political entities Canada and Quebec to take steps to restore the treaty relationship, including and dealing with criminal law, to recognize a hood in a show need judicial system a criminal justice system again because the whole system itself isn't working. And what would be the worst case mm hmm I'm not even going to express

any of you on that. It would give me nightmares. Either way, it's not gonna be over because if the government loses their appealing it, if I lose, I'm appealing it. So this can go on for another ten years or twenty years. Who knows. We'll make a season two, yeah, or three or four or five. Hold on, we'll be right back. Early on in my reporting, a came across a book by a Mohawk scholar named Dr Gerald di agate Alfred. There was a line in the introduction that

really framed by thinking for this entire project. I'm paraphrasing here, but what he wrote was this, being born a Mohawk, I do not remember a time free from the impact of political conflict. And from what I could tell, just about all of that conflict could be traced back to one fundamental tension between the Mohawk Nation and a Canadian government that doesn't fully recognize their sovereignty. That disagreement is

the basis for the simple fact of being indigenous. That everything you do, whether you like it or not, is a political action. Every decision you make is a stance that you've taken. It means constantly walking a tight rope. If you're willing to follow the rules and steer clear of murky waters, you live a peaceful, uncontroversial life. But if you make one slip, things can turn hot in an instant. Derek has been walking that line his whole life and watching him turn laps out on the ice.

Last year I got to see it firsthand. Derek is in whole position starting up now, market car green, flag about to drop. Ye. Derek takes an early leading around turn one and on the inside turn and he's out of the corner one, straining it out. It might seem counterintuitive when we're talking about three thousand pound junkers hurtling around an icy circle at eighty miles, but when you get down to it, racing is a game of inches

and fractions. When you've got twenty cars all gunning for the same first place spot, every little decision to driver makes, every flick of the wheel and feather of the pedal adds up, and those split seconds mean the difference between winning or ending up in the wall. It's a delicate ballet, dancing on a razor's edge of your grit as a driver and the traction of your tires how far can I go in the corner, how early can I get

on it? Where the bump set. It's just studying a track and concentrating on it, and in each lap, you know you'd feel a car do something a little bit different. The tires is wearing out, you know, you change, you pick up points, and then you drive the racetrack so much not so much the race car. There's just some people that just have a natural ability to go, and they don't have any give an damn, you know, if h they don't care if they wrecked, they don't care

if they run over something there just after. I think it's when you go past your limits. The people that are able to save their cars and not do it, that's the difference between making them good or great. A lot of really good drivers over the years seem to have a some kind of a sense of balance. You can sort of feel that line between sliding and sliding

out of control, you know what I mean. And the guys who sort of are able to flirt with that line, uh longer than the next guy maybe are successful at it. Holding out way in front number nine nine running smoke. After decades of racing, Derek knows just how far you can drive into a corner. He knows how to feather the pedal to stay out of the wall when you get back on the gas, and how much the back

end can slide before the front starts to go. His racing style is a methodical and assertive He knows where the limits are and pushes them farther and farther until he's right up on the line between chaos and control. And in that way, racing is a pretty good metaphor for what life is like as a Mohawk, or really any indigenous person in the modern world. It means navigating a system that is built on your land but which excludes you, and weaving your way through legal loopholes and

physical boundaries. It means sitting down and gritting your teeth when you can't win, and standing up to fight when you can't take anymore. It's a fine art that forces you to constantly assess your nerve and how far you're willing to take it. And oftentimes it's those people who know exactly where the edge is and stick their toe across that line anyway that end up making a difference. We are part of a long line of people now who have refused to surrender, and that will find creative

ways to continue to survive. Dr Alfred the Mohawk scholar I mentioned earlier because resistance is this constant process and when you're born into that, it shapes your personality and it shapes your outlook on the world. And I think that as a as a mohawk person um in gotten Waga, there's there's something that is infused into your character, and that that thing is that idea of the responsibilities you carry as a Knya Cahaga or as a as a as a negative person, which is to not let them win.

You have to find a way to really breathe life into that Mohawk nationhood and push back against the people that are trying to snuff out our fire. Lap in second to last place, stretching it out, just digging through the corners, last lap right here, right here, taking it on. Derek White, looks like you picked up pretty good. That's fast running smoke is lucky chime, but yeah's running pretty good. They have their hands fully try to catch me. And

one question I've been done to ask you do you smoke? No? I don't, all right, running smokes. A production of Camp Site Media, Dan Patrick Productions and Workhouse Media. The series was written and reported by me Roger Gola. Our producers are a Leah Papes, Blaine Gerbig and Julie Dennishet. Our editors are Michelle Lands and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark McAdam, additional sound and mixing by

Ewen Lyon from Ewan. Additional reporting by Susie mccarthney. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick, Josh Dean of Camp Said Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Minella and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary Matthis and Angelia Mercado, artwork by Polly Adams, and additional thanks to Greg Horne, Johnny Kapman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van Brocklin, and Sean Flynn