[NYTr] Canada Native Rights: Standoff in Ontario
 
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:15:35 -0400 (EDT)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
sent by Dale Wharton - Apr 22, 2006

Toronto Globe & Mail - Apr 21, 2006

Failing to remember the lessons of Ipperwash

by Murray Campbell

In 1784, a grateful British Crown granted a huge swath of land to Indians
who had been allies in the U.S. War of Independence as compensation for land
in New York State that had been taken from them.

On an unusually warm spring morning 222 years later, armed Ontario
Provincial Police officers swarmed on to that land to enforce a court
injunction that said nonnatives had clear title to that property and were
entitled to build a subdivision on it.

Those are the bookends of the standoff between natives and police that burst
into the headlines yesterday. This predawn OPP raid of a native encampment
near Caledonia, in Southwestern Ontario, is the type of stark drama that is
tailor-made for the 6 o'clock news. The decades that preceded it are much,
much less clear cut.

It is Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's unhappy fate that he will have to
find a way to defuse the very tense situation that developed after the OPP
attempted to evict native protesters from the construction site at Douglas
Creek Estates and then retreated when the natives regrouped. And he will
also have to withstand criticism that the government hasn't learned anything
from the incident at Ipperwash Provincial Park a decade ago when the OPP
shot dead a native protester.

But the reality is that Mr. McGuinty is simply carrying an awkward can that
politicians and bureaucrats have been lugging around for a couple of
centuries.

The roots of the Caledonia situation can be traced to the late 18th century,
when the colonial government started to strip away the original grant of
land--the so-called Haldimand Tract--that gave the Six Nations Confederacy
six miles on each side of the Grand River from Kitchener to Lake Erie. The
first move came just a decade after the grant and the Crown's takeaway was
so successful that the Six Nations reserve outside Brantford occupies only 5
per cent of the original 950,000-acre grant.

The natives have long complained that they were swindled by successive
Canadian governments. Some of the land was taken without compensation for
the Welland Canal, they claim, while money due to them helped finance the
construction of McGill University.

In 1982, Six Nations began fighting back, filing the first of 28 separate
land claims. One deals with the land along Plank Road, which the natives
claim was taken from them in 1841 and sold to third parties. That road, now
Highway 6, leads to the Douglas Creek Estates.

Developers John and Don Henning bought the land 15 years ago, and last fall
started to build a
$6-million, 71-lot subdivision. The native protest that began on Feb. 28 is
supported by the traditional Six Nations chiefs but not the elected band
council, a form of government that was imposed by Ottawa in 1924. Within
days of the initial protest, the developers won a court injunction that
ordered the occupation to end, but the OPP made no move to enforce it--until
yesterday.

The question around Queen's Park yesterday was why, after 52 days, someone
felt the need to press the case despite the cautionary example of Ipperwash.

The OPP say they moved because they were concerned about an unspecified
"escalation of activity" at the protest site. But consider, too, that the
Henning brothers, frustrated with the standoff, issued a news release on
Wednesday in which they said they were considering taking the OPP to court
to compel them to enforce their injunction.

The Premier and his ministers ran for cover, saying that they only learned
of the OPP move after it had begun. But questions of leadership remain. On
Wednesday, barely 12 hours before the police action, Mr. McGuinty told the
legislature: "We are determined to resolve this, but we will do this in a
way that results in no incident and in no compromise to public safety."

A day later, he was indicating that his government was handicapped at the
negotiations to end the occupation because the protesters "insist on being
dealt with as a nation. They want to deal with the government of Canada on a
nation-to-nation basis." It will come as no surprise to anyone who follows
the sad treatment of natives in this country that Ottawa is insisting that
Caledonia is a provincial matter.

It is fortunate that no one died yesterday at the protest. Ottawa and
Queen's Park have to move faster to ensure no one ever does.

       
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