Francine Lemay still recalls the phone call 20 years ago with the news that changed her life. Her little brother, provincial police officer Corporal Marcel Lemay, had been killed during a police raid on a native barricade near Oka, Que.
"It can't be," Ms. Lemay said to herself. Gone was the young officer who embraced life and had a toddler and pregnant wife at home.
The gunfire of that early-morning assault at Oka ushered in Canada's most dramatic aboriginal crisis, a 78-day standoff pitting armed Mohawks against police and soldiers over a land dispute. For many, the scars have yet to heal. But Ms. Lemay embarked that day on a different path: Two decades after the conflict began, she has reached across the divide to make peace.
"If you're only centred on your own pain," she says, "you can't see the pain of others."
Next Sunday, the exact anniversary of her brother's death, Francine Lemay will find herself, symbolically, on the other side of the barricade. She will be on the Mohawk territory of Kanesatake for the launch of a French-language version of a book on the community's history - a book she translated herself, as a personal gesture of reconciliation.
"We're all so full of prejudices and myths, transmitted from generation to generation," says the 58-year-old translator and former Air Canada flight attendant. "I wanted to open the minds of francophone Quebeckers who may be ignorant, like I was, and make prejudices fall."
It was a complicated journey. In 1990, Ms. Lemay was the grave-faced woman who appeared in newspaper photos marching behind the casket of her 31-year-old brother. When the Oka crisis broke out, all she knew about natives came from Hollywood westerns and stories of barbarism that she'd learned in history class, she says.
Her fears only deepened after her brother's death. At night, she had nightmares of natives ransacking her home.
Then, one day six years ago, two McGill University students tracked her down to ask her opinion about Oka. She had none. So she borrowed from a friend the book At the Woods' Edge, an English-language anthology about the history of the Mohawks at Kanesatake, 60 kilometres west of Montreal.
"What I read touched me," she said in an interview in her home in Rigaud, about an hour's drive outside Montreal. "I came to see the injustice and abuse that the people of Kanesatake suffered through the centuries."
The following week, a group of Mohawk women happened to visit Ms. Lemay's church on Montreal's West Island. By the end of the service, a shaken Ms. Lemay rose to address the congregation and identified herself as Cpl. Lemay's sister. She asked for forgiveness for native injustices. One of the Mohawk women responded in kind, seeking forgiveness and offering condolences to Ms. Lemay.
The next week, she followed up with an ecumenical gathering at the Pines, the revered area at the heart of the 1990 dispute, occupied by the Mohawks to stop the expansion of a golf course onto ancestral lands.
Still, Ms. Lemay felt she wanted to take her efforts of reconciliation further. Early last year, she contacted the Kanesatake Language and Cultural Centre: would they be interested in having her translate At the Woods' Edge into French, at no charge?
To Ms. Lemay, it was a way to span the mistrust that separates the mostly English-speaking Mohawks from French-speaking Quebeckers. Initially, her offer was met with stunned surprise.
"I was lost for words," recalled the cultural centre's Hilda Nicholas, who took Ms. Lemay's call. A board meeting was called to discuss the proposal, with two band council chiefs present.
"Here we had Francine, who lost her brother. Everybody was a little bit uncomfortable," Ms. Nicholas recalls. But the tensions lifted and the proposal for the French-language book, À l'orée des bois, was approved.
"Everybody hugged each other," Ms. Nicholas said. "Apologies were made. People got up and said, 'We are sorry for the loss of your brother.' It was quite moving."
Added Ellen Gabriel, a Mohawk traditionalist and leading figure in the Oka standoff, who was also at the meeting: "(Ms. Lemay) is an exceptional person. She's very kind, she's very strong, and she's trying to bridge the gap and create peace between our two people."
The killer of Ms. Lemay's brother has never been brought to justice. A Quebec coroner concluded the fatal bullet was fired from a Mohawk Warrior position, but the shooter has never been identified.
"The killer exists and has never been found. Someone knows who it is," Ms. Lemay says.
Ms. Lemay, who is married and the mother of two grown children, says that at times she is overcome with sadness - especially for her brother's two daughters, Catherine and Claudia, who grew up without their father. Catherine was two years old when her father was killed. Claudia was born after he died.
"Sometimes the whole thing overwhelms me," Ms. Lemay said at her dining room table, covered with documents recalling the Oka crisis, including a scrapbook brimming with newspaper clippings on a standoff that kept a nation holding its breath during the long, hot summer of 1990.
"But you have to hold out your hand. You have to move on," she says. "It's the only way to hold hope in the future."