Kahnawake Election Law Amendments: Passed
Written by Jeremy Zafran on 22 February 2024
The amendments to the Kahnawake election law were passed last night at the Moose Lodge. Only 1 law remains on the backburner, that’s the Blood Quantum” 50% law. With roughly 15 community members present for the meeting, AJ Rice, the MCK’s Executive Operations Officer was a guest on Tetewatharen the Party Line talk show on K1037 today on the election law:
“What happens, it goes through the KLC and they accept any amendments for any law, it’s open for them, for community members for proponents of the law. So that ‘s what happened yesterday, a lot of the recommendations had come from the actual people who are carrying out the process of the elections. Whether that be the Office of the Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake Law (KKR), the Executive Offices, the owner of the law, because it can’t be owned by the Council. We took all of the proposed amendments, I believe there were 42, a lot of them were changes to language or changes to allow for more time to have the election run smoother, but some of the major changes that we had and we spoke about at the election law, one of the main ones was actually changing the terminology from English words to Kanien’kéha.”
On what AJ appreciated from the meeting:
“Something that I took from last night’s (Wednesday) meeting, is the benefit of hearing from other community members about the different parts of the law that they would like to see changed, even if it wasn’t within the scope of doing last night, it’s the project that’s going to be on-going and it shows that we do need to have our laws go through a thorough process.”
