Tensions between native protesters and Ontario Provincial Police continued to escalate this week in the Southwest Ontario town of Caledonia, about an hour West of Toronto.
Last Thursday, 16 protesters were arrested after Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) staged an early morning raid to evict protesters from the housing project they were occupying. Police were reportedly armed with M16 riffles, tear gas, and tasers, and protesters claim at least one female protester was beaten by police. The OPP says three of their officers were injured during the confrontation, with one taking a blow to the head with a bag of rocks. On Monday, more skirmishes erupted during an angry rally by Caledonia residents, ending with a police car being smashed and on protester being arrested.
The Caledonia standoff, soon to be entering its eighth week, is centered around a plan to build 250 homes on what natives say is their land.
Negotiators for Six Nations members and the federal and Ontario governments agreed last Friday to each appoint principal representatives who will work to find "constructive and effective ways" to solve the land claim. Meanwhile, native protesters are expected to remain behind the barricades they've erected around the proposed construction site for at least another two weeks.
While Ontario's Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Ramsey has said he's "working to bring down the barricades as fast as possible," it wasn't enough to appease disgruntled Caledonia residents. About 3,000 non-natives attended a meeting Monday evening to air their frustration with the blockade. A police vehicle was smashed and one resident was arrested.
Meanwhile, the developer of the disputed land, Henco Industries Ltd., said in a statement that if a resolution isn't reached soon the company is in danger of going bankrupt.
Six Nations spokesperson Hazel Hill says the two-week time frame set at the talks on Saturday is just a preliminary step to work out who should be at the table and what should be addressed. The real issue of who legally owns the land will only be decided after that, so she expects the blockade could remain for a quite a while yet.
"We've stated right from the beginning that the land was never ceded or surrendered and we're staying until that's recognized," says Hill. "It's unfortunate that they take so long to figure out how to deal with it."
NDP Aboriginal Affairs critic Gilles Bisson says the government should have acted sooner to solve the dispute which has been simmering for two years. He says that although the provincial government set up a negotiating table to try to find a solution, they didn't give it a high priority, with the result that Six Nations became "frustrated things were going nowhere" and initiated the blockade.
"This has been a long-standing issue that everybody's known has existed," says Bisson. "If government would have acted earlier and put more importance on the negotiations we certainly wouldn't be where we are now."
The Six Nations protesters, who first moved to occupy the partially-completed subdivision in late February, claim the land was given to them in a land grant in 1784. The band leased it for the building of a highway in 1841, and say it was then improperly sold. The province argues the land was surrendered. Henco claims to have a clear title to the land.
The Shadow of Ipperwash
Just one day after Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said the dispute would be settled in a "peaceful manner," the OPP swooped in on a pre-dawn raid on the would-be construction site last Thursday to attempt to remove native protesters, raising fears of a repeat of the 1995 tragedy at Ipperwash Provincial Park where native protester Dudley George was shot and killed by a police sniper.
The events that unfolded at Ipperwash, Ontario, bear eerie resemblances to those now playing out in nearby Caledonia. Native land at Ipperwash was expropriated by the Canadian government in 1942 to build a military base. The native band later tried to get back their land, which they believed was sacred. Decades later and with no resolution in sight, natives began moving back onto the land in 1993. In 1995, a small group of natives moved to erect barricades near the military base in protest of the government's inaction in recognizing their land rights.
In September, 1995, OPP officers dressed in riot gear moved in to remove the protesters. The standoff ended with one protester, Dudley George, being killed by an OPP officer.
But despite the scuffles between protesters and police last Thursday, no shots were fired. In another similarity to Ipperwash, critics accused the government of ordering the police raid, a suggestion McGuinty vehemently denied.
But the raid failed to have the desired effect of clearing the land; soon after the arrests, hundreds of supporters—including activists from other native bands—took control of the site. They cut down power poles to erect a barrier across the Highway 6 bypass, and set piles of tires alight on public roads. Henco, who plans to build 250 homes on the 40-hectare lot, said in their statement that the company's on-site office has been raided and the contents removed.
Hill says two Ontario Provincial Police officers told the protesters on Monday that they will not attempt to oust them again, and that the RCMP have been pulled back. Meanwhile, an army detachment has been stationed at the airport nearby. Hill maintains Henco is also a victim in the whole affair because they were sold land that nobody had a legal right to sell. Six Nations want the government to buy out Henco and return the land to them.
"They have the 1841 surrender but we maintain those paper trails were done through fraud and through misrepresentation," says Hill. "The title-holders have never relinquished or sold any land and that's the position we're staying with."
Professor of history and political science Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, who teaches in the Aboriginal Studies Program at the University of Toronto, says Six Nations used to have land that was "three miles deep on either side of the Grand River," but very little of that land is left now.
"Six Nations lost a lot of territory, they lost a lot of land that was alienated over the course of time, and this is why they're up in arms because they're pretty much hedged down into a small corner now."
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