Christie Blatchford - Helpless: Caledonias Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Blatchford, Christie
Helpless : Caledonias nightmare of fear and anarchy, and how the law
failed all of us / Christie Blatchford.
Issued also in electronic format.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67041-8
1. Caledonia Land Claim Dispute, Ont., 2006. 2. Iroquois IndiansOntarioCaledoniaClaims. 3. Six Nations Indian Reserve No. 40 (Ont.).
I. Title.
FC3099.C34B63 2010 971.33705 C2010-905555-1

Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited

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v3.1

This is in memory of Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Srt du
Qubec, a 31-year-old father and husband who was shot and killed in
a standoff with Mohawk Warriors at Oka, Quebec, on July 11, 1990.
No one has ever been arrested in Corporal Lemays death .

Contents

Authors Note

T HE NIGHT BEFORE I sat down to write this sucker, I was at the National Newspaper Awards dinner in Toronto and ran into a dear colleague I hadnt seen in years. Photographer Len Fortune and I had worked together at The Toronto Sun . I asked what he was doing, and with little preamble he announced he was producing a book for teens about Aboriginal assimilation, that he was part native and that his family had relatively recently decided to acknowledge their heritage. Towards the end of a passionate soliloquy about all this, he raised the subject of the Caledonia occupation.

The previous fall, Id covered the civil lawsuit of a couple from the town, and Len had read some of that in The Globe and Mail . I let him talk a while more before I mentioned I was working on a book on the same subject.

What I told him that night is what I say to the reader now.

This book is not about Aboriginal land claims. It is not about the disputed one in this particular casedisputed because the Canadian government doesnt recognize that there even is a valid claimwhich takes in Douglas Creek Estates in that lovely small town, or, more generally, about any of the more than six hundred other claims pending across this country. Academics, government officials and native Canadians have devoted entire careers to the study of those issues, and they havent begun to figure it out. Besides, I am old enough already that I dont have a careers worth of life left to devote, even if I wanted to do so.

The book is also not about the wholesale removal of seven generations of Indigenous youngsters from their reserves and familiesthis was by dint of federal government policyor the abuse dished out to many of them at the residential schools into which they were arbitrarily placed, or the devastating effects that haunt so many today.

Neither is it about the dubious merits of the reserve system, or the dysfunction and infantilization it arguably engenders, all of which may better serve those who wish to see native people fail than those who want desperately for them to succeed.

I do not in any way make light of these issues, and they are, in one way or another, in the background of everything that occurred in Caledonia. But Helpless is about what happened to the rule of lawthe dry legal term for the noble arrangement a civilized society makes with its citizens, rendering us all equal before and bound by the same lawsin that town and environs.

It officially began on February 28, 2006, when a handful of protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve walked onto Douglas Creek Estates, which was then a residential subdivision under construction, and blocked workers from entering it.

Over the ensuing four yearsand then some, as the occupation continues to this daythe rule of law was utterly decimated. The citizens of Caledonia were, for more than a monthduring which period the site was barricaded by occupiers, major roads were closed and lawlessness ran rampantheld hostage. Those who lived adjacent to DCE, and there are about 450 such households, were outright terrorized. Those who lived on Six Nations, just a stones throw away, were less affected, but still subjected to intimidating forces within and without their community.

Despite frenetic activitymeetings, negotiations at main tables and side tables, talks, reviews, and reports involving various actors from both federal and provincial governmentsthe town was, for all practical purposes, abandoned by the state.

It was an echo of the truth that Indians have seen for too many years at negotiating tablesthat it is when the state seems to be at its very busiest that it may be achieving the very least, and that this may even be part of the plan.

So, what the book is really about is the failure of government to govern and to protect all its citizens equally.

In many instances, documented in the pages to follow, the officers of the Ontario Provincial Police, the force under contract to Haldimand County, stood by while occupiers broke the law, often violently, right under their noses. Arrests, when they were made, were not made contemporaneously, as is the normal course, but weeks or months later.

As it turns out, the front-line officers of the OPP were sold down the river too, by their senior ranks, in particular by two commissioners of the force, Gwen Boniface and Julian Fantino, who either subjugated themselves to government will, held their tongues or respectively dreamed up the disastrous operational plan for Caledonia and then stubbornly held onto it for dear life.

I dont claim to be able to prove which way it happened. But there is considerable evidence that, both at Queens Park, the seat of the Ontario government, and at OPP headquarters in Orillia, there was the stink of fear in the air, and that what everyone was afraid of were the native occupiers. This, after all, was not the first time in OPP history that such a thing had happened.

Eleven years before Caledonia, a native man named Dudley George was shot and killed by the OPP at what was then Ipperwash Provincial Park, on the shores of Lake Huron. The provincial Conservative government of the day, led by Premier Mike Harris, was for monthsif not yearsbattered by questions from the opposition Liberals, led since late 1996 by Dalton McGuinty. McGuinty promised a full-blown inquiry into Ipperwash if elected, and made good on his word when, after an unsuccessful try in 1999, he led his party to victory in 2003.

By the spring of 2006, with McGuinty in his fourth year as premier, that expensive inquiry was finally winding to a close in Forest, Ontario, just 200 kilometres west of Caledonia.

The shadow thrown by Ipperwash reached the halls of power within the OPP and government and informed every action the state and police tookor, as accurately, every action the state and police didnt take.

This is the story of how all these factors came to a boil in Caledonia.

Friday, June 9, 2006

If youre telling us we have to take the law into our own handsthats happened at various times in historylet us know. Send us the memo. But I think the preferable thing to do is uphold the law and apply it equally to everybody. PAT WOOLLEY , C ALEDONIA RESIDENTNext page