Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer, founder and former editor of The Eastern Door newspaper, will be the featured speaker at the 2024 Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture, Sept. 10.

Deer’s talk, “The Eastern Door: A Newspaper Born out of Crisis,” will begin at 5 p.m. in Lewis Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, Room G76.

The newspaper was founded in 1991, in the aftermath of the Oka Crisis, a 78-day standoff between two Mohawk communities, Quebec Police and the Canadian Army. The newspaper’s mission at that time was to combat misinformation and offer factual news to the community of Kahnawake – situated on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. It grew from volunteers and a shoestring budget into a vibrant, award-winning weekly newspaper.

“The years Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer (Kanien'kehá:ka – Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake, Bear Clan) spent as editor for The Eastern Door laid the foundation for his advocacy for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy at the international level,” said Jolene K. Rickard, associate professor in the departments of History of Art and Visual Studies (College of Arts and Sciences) and Art (College of Art, Architecture and Planning) and former director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. “Today his interventions on the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; the Working Group on Indigenous Populations; and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations continues.” 

Deer was former secretary of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake and served on the board of directors for the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. In 2000, he served as the chairman/rapporteur of the United Nations Workshop on Indigenous Media and has been an active participant at the meetings of the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the U.N. Working Group on the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He received an honorary doctorate of laws from Concordia University in Montreal in 2015.

“Grounded in Haudenosaunee teaching and philosophy, Deer was instrumental in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples while navigating the pulse of Indigenous environmental and governance issues within international spaces,” Rickard said. “He continues to work at the flash points between Indigenous peoples and settler-states.”

Daniel Kops ’39, former editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun, established the Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Program in 1990. Each year, the program brings a distinguished speaker to campus through the American Studies program in the College of Arts and Sciences. The 2023 lecture featured journalist Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times. Other past speakers include Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Amjad Atallah, April Ryan, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Nadine Strossen, Jeremy Scahill and Dave Zirin.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.