GRE’s principals believed that none of them would be forced to pay excise tax and duties under the Indian Act. Thousands of people rely on Ken Hill’s company, Grand River Enterprises, for their livelihoods, including plant workers, farmers, and smoke shop owners and operators They opened a plant in Six Nations, manufacturing and selling their Sago-brand cigarettes on-reserve. The company operated as a partnership between Hill, Montour and eight other Indigenous men. Their backing in the Indigenous community was unequivocal and broad, with support from the office of a war chief of the Mohawk Nation, the Six Nations Band Council and the Assembly of First Nations. In 1993, Hill partnered with Jerry Montour, a fellow Mohawk from the tiny Wahta reserve, to form Grand River Enterprises. Indigenous North Americans introduced tobacco to the world, and tobacco is now a way for them to get rich off a society that tried to annihilate them. This exemption keeps costs dramatically lower than the competition’s, giving those who sell Indigenous cigarettes a huge financial advantage over every other tobacco company on earth-a business model more disruptive than Uber is to taxis. Under Section 87 of the Indian Act, goods made and sold on reserves, including cigarettes, are exempt from taxation. Cigarettes are subject to high taxes and duties as part of a government effort to reduce consumption-unless you’re Indigenous. It only costs around 24 cents to make a pack of 20 cigarettes, and that same pack sells for 50 times that amount. It’s addictive.” Tobacco is a $10-billion-a-year industry in Canada. The American billionaire Warren Buffett once said, “I like the cigarette business. In 1985, he won a by-election, becoming one of 12 councillors who, along with the elected chief, govern the nation. He spent his early adulthood in reserve politics. His mother gave him the advice a fighter needs: don’t think you’re the toughest man around, because there’s always someone tougher. He has the build of a prizefighter, as big as a heavyweight but with a flyweight’s voice-assured but gentle, unaffected, dropping his g’s.
Hill is Mohawk, and he grew up with 11 sisters and brothers in a small house in Six Nations, Canada’s most populous reserve, southwest of Hamilton. Hill isn’t crusading on Parliament Hill or creating hashtags on social media. He’s also mounting one of the most audacious fights for Indigenous sovereignty since the founding of this country. Ken Hill is the most successful man you’ve never heard of.
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