"Tucked away at the end of a narrow driveway, the factory is easy to miss, an anonymous blue metal box ringed by a towering green fence.

Inside, however, a handful of workers are producing the controversial new lifeblood of Kahnawake Mohawk territory and, arguably, posing a dire threat to Canadian public health.

At one end, a single worker feeds pungent, raw tobacco into a noisy machine that prepares it for final assembly. Another labyrinthine apparatus takes the processed leaf and churns out thousands of cigarettes: what outside authorities call contraband, what locals consider a product of their inherent right to sovereignty.

And just behind the plant is a sign of the growing self-sufficiency of the native cigarette industry: the first field of tobacco actually grown at Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. How much will it produce? “I don’t know, but if I did, I probably wouldn’t tell you,” grins a plant employee, before calling his boss to see if he should say anything at all.

Almost 700 kilometres away at Six Nations territory in southern Ontario, another fenced compound — just down the road from the site of a new tribal police headquarters — harbours more unmarked tobacco factory buildings. A security guard heads off an uninvited visitor and moments later another plant employee roars up in a pickup truck, politely making it clear the interloper is not welcome.

Such secretive plants are dotted throughout these and two other Mohawk communities in Ontario and Quebec, as many as 50 all told, according to estimates from police and tobacco-business insiders.

Their tax-free, dirt-cheap product is decried by anti-smoking advocates, non-native politicians and the mainstream tobacco industry; accounting for an estimated 30% of cigarettes smoked in Canada, they have dragged to a halt the steady, decades-long decline in smoking rates, critics say. They also represent $2-billion a year in lost federal and provincial revenue."

Get the Story:
Native-made cigarettes bring wealth and disapproval to reserves (The National Post 9/18)
A different kind of 'grow op' (The National Post 9/20)
'There's nothing we've done that's illegal' (The National Post 9/21)