"Canada's dirty little secret", police advised to "cross the line and join them"
Four stories from Saturday's Globe and Mail provide different and yet interesting perspectives on the effects of the National Day of Action.
The marchers are frustrated, but they stay on peaceful path
MATT HARTLEY - From Saturday's Globe and Mail - June 30, 2007
KENORA — Perhaps it was fitting that among the flags leading the peaceful protest march through Kenora Friday were the yellow and white colours of Tibet.
They were carried by a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks visiting the Northwestern Ontario city from Drepung Gomang monastery in India. They joined native protesters on the long walk down Highway 17 from Tunnel Island into Kenora on the first nations National Day of Action.
Buddhists believe nothing is fixed or permanent, and that change is always possible – a sentiment shared by the natives and non-natives who turned out to fill a fittingly coloured yellow-and-white striped tent on the shores of Lake of the Woods.
Kenora is a city eager to forget a past marred by native protests, blockades and armed clashes with police. And Friday, native leaders and city officials walked side by side in a demonstration of mutual respect and solidarity in an effort to live up to the mantra of their maroon-robed guests. Mayor Len Compton marched alongside Grand Council Treaty No. 3 Ogichidaa (Chief) Arnold Gardner, who offered a peaceful message of co-operation to the community.
“It is the future that we walk, for . . . it is the theme of mutual coexistence we share with you today,” Mr. Gardner told the crowd of about 250 supporters.
Later, the leaders signed a symbolic treaty promising partnership, the rebuilding of relations and a mutual agreement to press other levels of government to resolve outstanding issues such as land claims and treaty issues.
“Failure . . . too often frustrates our ability to work co-operatively as friends and partners at the local level,” Mr. Compton said.
Mr. Gardner said his council represents 28 first nation bands spanning 88,000 square kilometres stretching from Thunder Bay to Manitoba and from Red Lake down to Buffalo Point near the U.S. border. The grand council has 80 unsettled claims before various levels of government, nearly 10 per cent of the Canadian total, according to Mr. Gardner.
There were no bitter disputes or heated confrontations near the demonstration, which occurred close to the city's harbour. The only angry words and vented frustrations were directed at faraway politicians on Parliament Hill and at Ontario's Queen's Park.
Just a block away on Main Street, shopkeepers decked their storefronts in Canada Day regalia, teenagers freshly escaped from school cruised the sidewalks on skateboards, young couples sipped coffee in cafés and no one seemed bothered by the protest.
In fact, when demonstrators from the Dalles First Nation band marched into town carrying placards and honking from slow-moving pickup trucks on their way to the local MP's office, most people waved and honked backed.
For Tania Cameron, a member of the band and an NDP candidate for the next federal election, the peaceful nature of the protest enabled everyone to bring their children. Three of Ms. Cameron's own children participated.
“I'm so proud of our people,” she said. “We're giving such a statement to the area.”
As the afternoon grew colder and the crowd down by the water thinned out, Mr. Gardner sat at the back of the big yellow-and-white tent, watching as people around him chatted and a group of children chased each other around a nearby jungle gym. Speaking softly, he reflected on the day:
“Everything was perfect today. There is a right way to deal with things, and the way is to do it together.”
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‘I'm sick and tired of the poverty, the sadness'
CAROLINE ALPHONSO - From Saturday's Globe and Mail - June 30, 2007
DESERONTO, ONT. — Ask Shawn Brant why he's out here dressed in combat fatigues, blocking highways and rail traffic, and he quickly rhymes off a host of reasons why Canadians should pay urgent attention to native needs.
But ask him what first motivated him to take on such a role, and the Ontario Mohawk falls silent.
It was 1989, and Mr. Brant's wife was late into her pregnancy with twin girls. While she was drawing water from the well because they had no running water, she had an accident. The girls died shortly after birth.
“I have three children. I should have had five,” the 43-year-old said Friday, his voice trailing off.
It was in those moments that the issue of aboriginal poverty struck him hardest, motivating him to become the figure he is today: a man not afraid to take military-style action to voice native concerns.
“I thought it was unfair that it happened at all,” he said of the death of his twins. “It certainly brought up issues like poverty and polluted water [on native reserves].”
Mr. Brant has said he has a number of heroes, including Jesus, Malcolm X and Geronimo.
“I grew up in a house with no running water and electricity,” he told the CBC. “On the wall was a poster, no pictures. Just a poster of Geronimo with a rifle in front of him, that famous picture – it says: ‘I'd rather be red than dead' – I grew up looking at that. If I could be seen to be a little bit like that, I'd be pleased – but that's hard.
“I've been told a lot about principles and philosophy. I guess I generally always took to learn when I heard about Gandhi. I never really gave much consideration because we are not people that just sit on our hands, but I actually found out that it's not what it was about. Malcolm X is a huge hero of mine. And it's kind of embarrassing to say, but I also looked as one of my heroes as Jesus. Not in a religious sense at all, but as a man, as a true great revolutionary who ran around. And they were armed – dozens or so of them – and they knocked the hell out of people, kicked tables over, booted people out and lived a life of righteousness and truth and honour, and that kind of struck me as well.”
That very much, as well, is one of my heroes, but again, not in a religious sense.”
Mr. Brant, a slight, tall man with hair just below his shoulders, has had his share of clashes, one of them resulting in him taking up temporary residence in a school bus. He has been known to trash the offices of politicians, including Jim Flaherty's Whitby constituency office in 2001, when Mr. Flaherty was Ontario's finance minister.
Over the past two days, as part of the National Day of Action, the ringleader managed to shut down Canada's busiest highway for 11 hours, as well as place blockades on a section of a secondary highway and a stretch of nearby railway track.
This comes despite Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, calling for no disruptions – and Mr. Brant's own chief distancing himself from blockade-type action.
But Mr. Brant has his own tight-knit band of supporters within the Bay of Quinte Mohawks, many of them teenagers who set up camp overnight blocking the secondary highway. He gathers them around several times to explain the situation.
, slowly puffing on his cigarette. They listen attentively to his requests.
“We just didn't see any other way ... in dealing with these issues,” said Mr. Brant, who, moments before, had brokered a deal with the Ontario Provincial Police to reopen Highway 401.
“… nothing has ever made us a priority within the government,” he said. “I'm absolutely sick and tired of having our kids committing suicide, or drinking polluted water. I'm sick and tired of the overcrowding, the poverty, the sadness.”
The protest prompted the OPP to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Brant on charges of mischief.
This is not unfamiliar territory for Mr. Brant. He is currently out on bail on mischief charges and for disobeying a court order in connection with the 30-hour blockade of the CN rail line also here in Deseronto in April.
“Getting arrested is a reality. I've been sitting in a quarry for 94 days and if I sat in the quarry for that long, then I can certainly sit in jail for that long,” he said.
Indeed, a school bus has been his temporary quarters as his group protested against a developer's plan to build condominiums using material from a quarry on land they claim is theirs.
Mr. Brant may speak a tough line, but he's also not afraid to pull the plug on his protests when he senses a violent clash.
“When we began, I promised [my group] I'd bring them all home. That may not necessarily be the same with me,” he said, referring to the arrest warrant.
Mr. Brant describes his personality as “uncompromising.”
But authorities take heed: He says he's a lot softer today than he was in the years after the death of his twin girls. “I was a nutbar back then,” he said.
With a report from Canadian Press
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How police stared down natives
MICHAEL VALPY - From Saturday's Globe and Mail - June 30, 2007
The Ontario Provincial Police decided several days ago it would best serve public safety by not using force to prevent Mohawk protesters from disrupting Canada's busiest transportation corridor during the National Day of Action.
The force was mindful of the scarred history in Southern Ontario and elsewhere of police-aboriginal friction. It was aware that one mistake by anyone involved in Friday's blockades could have led to catastrophe.
It consulted behavioural scientists across the country who specialize in advising police on dealing with social conflicts.
In the end, the police themselves closed Highway 401, the Toronto-Montreal freeway, while OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino negotiated with activists from the Tyendinaga reserve near Kingston on when it would be reopened.
It allowed the Mohawks to block the CN Rail line, resulting in the cancellation of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal passenger traffic and thwarting what CN said was the delivery of $100-million worth of cargo. CN also accused the OPP of refusing to enforce an Ontario Superior Court injunction to clear its tracks of illegal occupants.
Tens of thousands of Canadians on the move for their national holiday were inconvenienced.
But no one got hurt. No guns were fired. No violent clash at Tyendinaga triggered confrontations between aboriginals and authorities elsewhere – indeed, the National Day of Action was peaceful across the country.
There was no repeat of Oka or Ipperwash. And nothing soiled the skirts of an Ontario government four months before an election and under enormous pressure to deal differently with native protesters than previous governments.
In the end, the OPP managed to survive a day of political policing – what one academic specialist in the psychology of terrorism and social conflict called an impossible situation, where whatever the force did would be labelled wrong in trying to deal with aboriginal grievances that are a political problem, not a police problem.
Commissioner Fantino described it as meat-in-the-sandwich policing, with the OPP being the meat between governments and aboriginal activists.
Benedikt Fischer, a sociologist at the University of Victoria who specializes in policing issues, said the highway and rail blockades could have turned into a nightmare if either the police or Mohawks had made a single mistake.
“Just imagine Ipperwash repeated,” he said, referring to the 1995 land-claim dispute at Ontario's Ipperwash Provincial Park where an OPP tactical squad opened fire on Kettle and Stony Point First Nation protesters, killing one and injuring two.
With the memory of Ipperwash still fresh, Professor Fischer said, it was an easy prediction that the Ontario government and its agencies would be “pacifying and passive” during Friday's National Day of Action.
Mike Webster, a former RCMP officer and police psychologist in British Columbia consulted by the OPP, said the force had largely decided on a negotiations route by the time it called him several days ago to ask for advice on “smoothing out a few bumps in the road.”
The template for police negotiations is generic, Dr. Webster said, but there are unique dynamics in dealing with aboriginals.
“This is Canada's dirty little secret, how aboriginal people have been treated. I've told police before, ‘The best thing you can do is cross the line and stand over there with them.'”
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Police inaction over native blockade irks CN Rail
JOANNA SMITH - Globe and Mail Update - June 30, 2007
CN Rail expressed frustration with police for refusing to stop an illegal blockade in Eastern Ontario that disrupted the key train system that transports $100-million worth of goods along the crucial Montreal-Toronto corridor Friday.
For the third time in 15 months, a blockade forced CN Rail to leave 25 trains sitting idle, while transport trucks were slowed on the highway and nearly 5,000 Via Rail passengers had to change their long-weekend travel plans.
On a National Day of Action characterized by first nations members and their supporters demonstrating peacefully across the country, a rogue group of 70 fatigue-wearing Mohawk warriors ignored pleas to minimize disruption.
CN Rail spokesman Mark Hallman would not discuss revenues the company might have lost when it cancelled its freight trains for the day, but said the company operates 25 trains carrying about $100-million worth of commodities between Montreal and Toronto every day.
“This is frustrating,” said Mr. Hallman, whose company obtained a court injunction in April to stop a 30-hour blockade. The company was upset when the Ontario Provincial Police refused to enforce the order at the time.
Via Rail does not yet know how many refunds it will have to pay out after cancelling all 24 trains scheduled to run between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal Friday, as many passengers opted to exchange their tickets, spokeswoman Catherine Kaloutski said.
By last night, the protesters behind the blockade had toned down their rhetoric of economic upheaval and were measuring their success in terms of having generated discussion and debate.
“We'll take it till midnight, fulfill our mandate,” said a conciliatory Shawn Brant, the Mohawk from the Tyendinaga reserve near Deseronto, Ont., who led the action.
Mr. Brant referred to Highway 401 as his group's “bargaining chip,” but it was the OPP who first moved in and shut it down between Belleville and Napanee, Ont., to minimize a threat to public safety. The highway was open again by noon.
Elsewhere, the National Day of Action was decidedly peaceful.
In Ottawa, about a thousand people joined Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine in a march through the downtown core before settling in for speeches and music on Victoria Island near Parliament Hill.
“I truly believe in my heart Canadians want everyone to have a fair chance in life,” Chief Fontaine told the crowd.
He said he welcomed the Conservative government's recent announcement that it would speed up the land-claims process, but urged the Tories to reverse their opposition to the $5-billion Kelowna accord and support a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples currently before the United Nations.
At a demonstration outside Queen's Park in Toronto, aboriginal protester Doreen Silversmith slammed the federal government's offer of $125-million to end the 15-month standoff with native protesters in Caledonia, Ont.
“The government can goddamn shove it up their asses,” she said to the cheers of about 400 natives and University of Toronto students.
Order prevailed at the site of the occupation in Caledonia, where about a dozen protesters began the day by praying for peace and calm before holding a potluck dinner and information session.
At noon in Montreal, dozens of Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve at the heart of the 1990s Oka standoff blockaded the Mercier bridge in a peaceful protest that snarled traffic.
On Vancouver Island, police thwarted a small group's attempt to take over a house in an expensive new development in a Victoria suburb. Undeterred, the dozen or so protesters moved across the street and unfurled a banner protesting against urban sprawl.
At the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, dozens of Mi'kmaq protesters and their supporters lined the shoulders of the Trans-Canada Highway to call attention to native issues.
In Kenora, Ont., the mayor and a native leader signed an accord pledging to work together to press the provincial and federal governments to resolve outstanding land claims and treaty issues.
The OPP said motorists were easily diverted around small groups of protesters who peacefully blockaded two rural roads in Ontario's cottage country.