In the Spring of 2016, Steve Molnar, the coordinator of the Peace Brigades International-North America Project for its first four years, recalled:
“I helped to start the North American Project together with Alaine Hawkins from Canada, and other returned volunteers from the Guatemala Project.
Akwesasne
In 1990, there had been a lot of violence in a native community near where I live, Akwesasne, a Mohawk reservation that straddles the border with Quebec, Ottawa, and upstate New York.
A number of former PBI volunteers had passed through Akwesasne at this time. Out of that experience, four or five people who had gone there said it might be wise for Peace Brigades to start a North America Project to be prepared for similar situations.
For the next year, we did a lot of planning and networking within PBI and with native communities.
Kanesatake and Kahnawake
The following spring, there was violence in other Mohawk communities in Canada. In one, provincial police opened fire on a Mohawk barricade. Soon after, there was a big standoff between the military and the provincial police with Mohawks on a bridge in Montreal that lasted for 60 days.
We were still developing the project at that time and weren’t ready to respond at that point. However at the one-year anniversary of that standoff, we had a request to go into two of the Mohawk communities, Kanehsatake and Kahnawake, and the North America Project (NAP) began.
The Innu, the US Southwest
We spent a lot of time with Innu communities in Labrador and Quebec. We went out west to a number of communities in the US Southwest. There were probably about a dozen communities we worked with over about eight or nine years.
Non-traditional approaches
It opened up our thinking of nonviolent intervention and differed from PBI’s traditional model of working in other countries in the (global) South. Here we were working in communities where we had a country group (PBI-USA and PBI-Canada). There were things going on within our borders that were worthy of PBI’s attention.
We were bringing our experience from other Projects and trying to use that in the North American context. There were a lot of things that we did in Guatemala that were quite applicable and then some things that were just totally new. In Guatemala, we might see massacres or open violence.
We didn’t see as much of that in North America, but we did witness a type of genocide, a cultural genocide. A lot of our work was spent recording that. Certainly there were some guns and bullets and some deaths, but just as easily, it might be suicide, alcohol abuse, or loss of language, land, or natural resources.
We explored creative strategies. PBI worked with indigenous people in El Salvador, for example, and we brought some of these people to meet indigenous people in North America to have exchanges, so they could share their struggles with one another.
The North America Project lasted nearly ten years throughout the entire 1990’s.”
Additional reading
– Annual review: PBI-Canada’s “transformative proposition” of extending PBI’s protective accompaniment into a “Northern” territory (October 29, 2025)
–Making Space for Peace by Joan Edenburg.
