The Oka Crisis (Crise d'Oka), also known as the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance (Résistance de Kanehsatà:ke), was a land dispute between a group of Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Quebec, Canada, which began on July 11, 1990, and lasted 78 days until September 26, 1990, with two fatalities. The dispute was the first well-publicized violent conflict between First Nations and provincial governments in the late 20th century.
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people, mainly members of the Mohawk nation (Kanien’kehà:ka), first settled in the Montreal area in the late 1660s, moving north from their homeland in the Hudson River valley. The several hundred people who migrated at the time went on to develop three distinct Mohawk communities in the region; Kahnawá:ke, Kanehsatà:ke and Ahkwesáhsne.
Around 1658, the Mohawk had displaced from the area the Wyandot people (or Hurons), with whom the Haudenosaunee (of which the Mohawk were a tribe) had long been in conflict. In the fall of 1666, hundreds of French soldiers, as well as Algonquin and Huron allies, attacked southward from Lake Champlain and devastated four Mohawk villages near Albany, then negotiated a peace between the Haudenosaunee and the French and their allies which lasted for the next 20 years. In 1673, the Jesuit mission at Saint-François-Xavier brought about forty Mohawks from the village of Kaghnuwage, on the Mohawk River, in present-day New York state. In 1680, the Jesuits were granted the seigneurie Sault-Saint-Louis, now named the village of Kahnawá:ke, with a current area of over 4000 hectares. Starting in the 1680s, there was a military conflict between the English allied to the Mohawks and the French allied with other indigenous tribes. In the early 1690s, the Mohawks were weakened through a prolonged and severe military effort by the French.
In 1676, the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice (Sulpician Fathers), a Roman Catholic order, then based in Paris, France, founded Montreal Island's first mission at the foot of Mount Royal to minister to the needs of Iroquois / Mohawk, Algonquin and Huron neophytes and to distance them from French settlers in Ville Marie.