Land Defenders from Six Nations and Tyendinaga Speak at Guelph's Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving

On October 17, 2008, Guelph's 4th Annual Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving Dinner brought together many anti-colonial allies, families, farmers, students, community organizers, and warriors. These include speakers Boots Powless and Skyler Williams from Six Nations, Jackie of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, Dan Doreen from Tyendinaga, and Sarah Dover from Toronto. These five speakers spoke very passionately about their struggles and efforts to defend their land, their families, communities, and culture.

Boots Powless is a member of Six Nations on the Grand River, who recently came into the limelight for staying in a teepee on a development site in Brantford. For almost three months he participated in shutting down a fiberglass insulation factory and a large hotel site, which now remain undeveloped and in negotiation. He talks of the need to stand up for the land, for the water, for ourselves.

Jackie is from the Mississauga nation, and talks in particular from her perspective as a mother, and the dire need to stop all the horrors of development from destroying her children's future, and the fallacies of negotiating with the system.

Dan Doreen is a Mohawk from Tyendinaga, who has been involved in numerous land disputes in nearby non-Native towns and on his reserve. He talks of how the time to fight is now, whether we are Native or not. He talks of the economic disruption his community has caused to CN rail, in actions in solidarity with Six Nations in 2006 and 2007, and how they shut down an illegal gravel quarry on their land, that remains shut down to this day. On top of that, the community of Tyendinaga is supposed to get a brand new police station, even though many people don't actually want it. While spending millions of dollars on a new police station, in the elementary school next door children still can't drink the water that comes out of the taps. The land claim for the quarry is still not revoked, negotiations for their land in Deseronto is proceeding at a snails pace, yet the band council thinks they need a new police station.

Sarah Dover eloquently and powerfully lays out why the only option that the Canadian government, law, and courts leaves to Indigenous people is to take direct action. Yet for exercising their only option available, they get thrown in jail and threatened with violence. She also talks of how taking steps towards healing from addiction and substance abuse is just as militant a step towards decolonization as is blockading.

Skyler Williams talks of his role in actions at a Stirling St. suburb in Caledonia, and why and how he became politicized and committed to taking action in defence of his land. With regards to Stirling St., where 200 riot cops moved in on a handful of Six Nations people, he tells the story of his violent arrest where cops held him down, handcuffed him, and electrocuted him four times with a Taser. As a relatively young warrior, his story is an inspiring one, and it transcends 'activism' and academia and gets to the heart of what many of us experience.

All in all, they are all powerful speakers who speak from the heart. One of the most important points that they all bring up is that these issues are not just affecting Native people, but all people. We are connected in these struggles not in a charity-based sense of solidarity, but as people who's future's are being killed off just as surely as anyone who is Native.

Websites with more information:

The Tyendinaga Support Committee has lots of updated information and offers ways to lend support: www.ocap.ca/supporttmt
Recent press release on charges laid against 30 Tyendinaga Mohawks, with background and solidarity information: mostlywater.org/charges_laid_against_30_tyendinaga_mohawk s_includes_solidarity_background_information
Six Nations resource site with lots of information, links, and interviews: http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/2012
Informative message boards and other info on Six Nations land struggles: www.reclamationinfo.com
Much more background on the Six Nations Confederacy as the oldest living participatory democracy on earth: www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations

Supplementary audio interviews:

A brief interview with Shawn Brant on his recently dropped charges: www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/29540 (5 minutes, recorded October 5)
An interview with Boots Powless on his participation in land reclamation activity: resistanceisfertile.ca/boots.html (16 minutes, recorded October 1)
An interview with Dan Doreen on his community shutting down illegal condo developments on Mohawk territory: resistanceisfertile.ca/dandoreen.html (9 minutes, recorded April 23)
A longer talk with Shawn Brant that eloquently outlines the reasons why his community takes the stands they do, and the resulting revitalization of their culture and a growing sense of militancy and empowerment: rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/healing- earth/courage-culture-and-sacrifice (35 minutes)

Listen:
Boots 4:58
Jackie 8:21
Dan 9:31
Sarah 28:44
Skyler 11:24

www.resistanceisfertile.ca

Boots: They asked me to come here tonight, and they told me what we’re talking about is colonialism and genocide. When I heard that, what came to my mind is the assimilation that they’ve attempted to put on our people. It’s widespread. We’re getting assaulted on many levels, like the media, and just living in the society that we're living in. A further assault is the development of our land, because who we are as a people, is we’re part of creation. And everything we do, we give thanks for, for what’s come from creation and to our people. And as a part of our law we’re duty-bound to protect that for coming generations.

As far as the other things and how they all come together, myself, I sat in a teepee for 86 days, I had a long time to think. What I figured out was we’re suffering, our people are suffering, we’re actually very sick, and we’re far from what we’re supposed to be, who we are as a people. We’re suffering the affects of the residential schools; in 1924, ’59, ’70, they came in and physically beat our people with the RCMP. My mother and father were a part of that. What happened was, because of this it has spread a culture of fear amongst our people. What I do myself, how I try to proceed, is I try to look at the next generation down and what’s coming, and say, what do we want them to believe, who do we want them to become?

What I want them to become, is I want them to be proud of who they are. I want them to grab a hold of their identity and be proud, and be strong. I also want them to have no fear. Because to have fear in your own land, that’s just not right. There’s no justice in that. And so each generation, my father, my mother, they fought before me, as did my grandmother and my grandfather, and my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather, right straight back. We fought to try and maintain who we are and to maintain ourselves as a people. But honestly, we don’t live in our longhouses anymore. We have lost a lot. And so my desire is that we save what we got, and protect ourselves as a people.

At the same time, I look around the room, and honestly speaking, everybody thinks, well, these people are oppressed. So are all you. You’re supporting a government that takes half of your money every time you go out to work. The classes, the way that they’re organized, your lower class struggles, maybe they educate their children so they become part of the next class up, but by the time that they get there, it’s less than the lower class that they just came from. So really all they do is try and make more levels and you’re all just screwed right from the beginning.

I think honestly that when I look at all of that, it’s not just a native issue, just a Six Nations issue, it’s a people issue. All of the things that I’ve spoken on, the land, the pollution, all these things that are coming to our people, they’re coming to yours too. And we all got to live in the same world. A good dream that I have is that we have this thing called the one-dish one-spoon. And what it is that we all eat from the same dish, so we should respect what’s going into this. if that could go global, and right across as far as Europe, if they’re doing something that’s gonna affect me over here, I have a right to say, no I don’t want that to get done. That’s where we gotta go to. As a people. As a race, as a human race.

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Jackie: I’m just a mom that has three children, I’m a mixed race, my mom is Irish, my father is Ojibway. My teachings from my elders were that you respect the things that you’re given. Now, I had a question for the people who gave me the teachings that I got, and that was, how does someone act who comes from genocide and assimilation? Is there a protocol, is there a special way I should approach the government when I ask for my land back? Is there a special way that I should go and ask my neighbour to convince them, that this was my original land? With my peoples there was 35,000 of us occupying Toronto and the islands. To date we have 1795 band members. And 3 of them are mine.

My concern is what I’m going to leave for my children. Because as a parent, I’ve been taught to want the things that my parents wanted, and the values that they have. Now as a person who’s come up in this society and seen the materialistic things and the big plastic picture that we’re all given when we’re born, when you’re a part of this white race and you’re at the top of the line, and everybody else falls to the side. I know that my elders taught me that there were things on this earth that lived forever. And you all know them, they’ve been documented since the beginning of time. I call those our medicines, the sun, the moon, the trees, the water that you all drink, the soil that you grow your food from, those things that you know for a fact, and I can tell you that these buildings that are here, they’re crumbling in front of our face. The more you take from our earth, the more you rape that, the more that’s going to repair itself and then we’ll be on that bottom of the food chain.

The thing that my good friend said to me, his analogy was that your kid looks at your car and wants to drive. So as a parent, I give my kid the car. But I tell them that the motor’s seized. And if I don’t fix that motor, then what are they going to drive? That’s like me not taking care of the water that they drink, the air that they breathe, the trees that protect us. They’re looking for a machine to break down carbon, we’ve had one since the beginning of time. It’s called a tree. You remove that, you strip the b.s. away from that story, and what it consists of is one person looking at her family, saying I’m not going to live like this for the rest of my life.

For 500 years my people have suffered. And they have made the attempts to survive, or they wouldn’t be survivors of the residential schools. And we got the answer from the government for that, we’ll put a price tag on your innocence now, $50,000 for your innocence, according to the government. These people that they repeatedly murdered and sacrificed on a daily basis. No, I think it’s my mission, and I challenge any other woman to step up the same way, and say, you know what, this is just not a Native issue. There’s four directions, and creator said to us that we can get along together. That doesn’t mean I have to go by your way, and that doesn’t mean you have to go by mine. But if your way infringes on my children’s rights, I have to step up as a parent. Because that’s the only job I know in this world that you don’t need a resume, and I got enough years experience to say I can do this.

And I don’t want to raise these kids that sit there and say I’m afraid. I’m afraid of that government, I’m afraid of that cop. Because my sons were the two youngest ones arrested on site, from stopping a developer and saying you know what, if you’re not going to allow these Native people who own a stake in this land on this land, then common sense would say that you don’t just let a developer come on that land either. Who’s in the right here?

So the way I have to approach everyone, in my perspective, is not through the government, because they’re just fascists. Who I need to approach is the people who are paying that government. And you send your money and your taxes to that government, and I’ll tell you right now, what’s that government do for us? Pretty much nothing. They do nothing. They’re collecting all that money that they told us First Nations people in the beginning, they said you let us live here, and we’ll pay you, we’ll pay you to use this land. And that’ll go back to your family, like a business venture. That’s yet to be paid, that has never ever, to this date, been paid. Any of those fees. But I’ll tell you what my reserve’s gone through, we did go through the negotiation process with the government, we tried to settle a 200 acre land claim. And I’ll tell you what that benefited my reserve with. When that land claim was first settled, I got a $543 cheque. And so did two of my children, because they were the Mississauga band members. There’s $12 million that sits in the bank while my reserve dies, while the elders are dying, the children they’re dying of AIDS and any other diseases you can think of. We negotiated a land claim which states that $12 million stays in the bank at all times and nobody gets to touch it. Our reserve gets to live off the interest. And I just told you how much that was, and that was for the last 5 years.

So I don’t understand this negotiation process, it’s as simple as saying you’re dead wrong, now make it right. So what they’re doing is taking it a step further, and saying, yep, we did do you wrong, we did. Now we’re going to go out with this money in this bank account while you die away. So who wants to negotiate? I just figure I’ll say no. Get off my land. You don’t want to pay the rightful owners of the land, then you need to leave. That’s the bottom line. And with all of that, that’s going to save all your families too. That’s going to make sure that we got tree space, waterways, all those things, simple things that we really need to live. You look at us, we’re 70% water. You can’t even go and drink out of that river out there, because there’s 35 runoff waste sites in it. And it’s still going into your home. Where do we stop it? Well, we have to step up and say no. And it’s a gathering like this that impresses me. Because all of you are going to take that back, and when you spread the word to your communities, it’s like Boots said, that media, that media still sees us as savage Indians that just want to take take take and get for free. What they forgot is we welcomed them. We taught them how to hunt these lands, we taught them how to raise their babies. We didn’t push them away. Now it’s time that they have to stop. Because if we don’t then our whole race will die.

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Dan: I’m Dan, I’m from Tyendinaga. I first want to thank some real cool people here from Guelph, they came and supported us when I got thrown in jail on April 25. That act of unity against the government is one of the very things that helped get me out. When Matt approached me about speaking, he asked me to speak about the struggles of Tyendinaga. Those struggles aren’t in Tyendinaga. Those struggles are all over this land. Those struggles are in BC, with them cutting down 70,000 trees for the Olympics. When we talk about the struggles, the very struggles that are happening in Tyendinaga, those struggles are everywhere.

We talk about land claims in Tyendinaga. In Tyendinaga there’s 923 acres that their government, or your government, or I don’t know how you want to put it, not my government – that the government recognizes as a legitimate land claim. They said it’s 100% Mohawk land – but you ain’t never gonna get it back.

In April 20, 2006, we know that Six Nations had a fight on their forefront. And we stood on the tracks between the Montreal and Toronto corridor, and it cost them $100 million a day. We did that in support of Six Nations. On April 21, 2007, we did it again. And when we blocked that money and we said, all we want you to do is revoke a license to a quarry that’s on our tract of land that you said is ours, yet you keep trucking the 100,000 tons of gravel away. We shut that quarry down on March 22, 2007, and its still shut down today.

On April 21, we sat on the tracks and said, revoke the license or you’re going to get economic disruption. June 29, 2007, our national chief, or whoever’s national chief, he ain’t my national chief, called a day of action. He called a day of action and we went out and we blocked the trains, and we went out on the overpass of the 401, and the OPP blocked the 401. We didn’t even have to – but we got charged for it. I think that time it cost them over $300 million in 24 hours.

When they called that national day of action, it wasn’t just over the land claims. There’s 175 communities in this country alone that can’t drink the water. They have no water to drink. There’s children up north who are killing themselves. Walking out of schools and hanging themselves on swing sets. And they’re worried about developing our land. When Jackie talked about the $5 million and you talk about settling land claims with money, what about the children who are hanging themselves, what about the people who can’t drink the water?

In Tyendinaga today, we have a police station coming, and the first time the government opened their wallets after June 29, after we said our children are killing themselves and they can’t drink the water, and we’re going to jail for it, the first time they open the wallets, they give us a police station. That police station is standing right beside the school, where our kids in our school still can’t drink the water! And we’re saying no police station.

And it’s not just a police station, it’s a symbol. It’s a symbol that because we’ve gone to the ends of the earth to make it a peaceful action, to make it safe, to say we don’t want the police station, we want our water in the schools fixed. We’ve gone to the ends of the earth to say, just have a community vote and see what the community says. Well last week they rescinded the motion to have a community vote. They said to hell with you, it’s coming whether you like it or not. And it’s not coming.

When we talk about the oppression of Native people, that oppression is on everybody. It’s on everybody across Canada. If you look at Walkerton, people died in Walkerton because they can’t drink the water. The water in Kasechewan, their water is 10 times worse, and what do they get? A boiling advisory. And they talk about having the 2010 Olympics and they’re killing 70,000 trees and taking more land, and taking what Jackie said, the very thing that swallows up the carbon, and they’re killing them. We talk about Guelph, and I heard about Guelph, there’s some people that were squatting on some land, they say ‘squatting on some land,’ and I don’t really get that. If it’s your land, go and get it.

We know why this police station is coming to Tyendinaga. It came to divert us away from the problems within First Nations people, so our kids still hang themselves and our kids still can’t drink the water and the land claim’s not settled, but you’re getting a police station and this will divert us away from the police station, while the land claim is still not settled. The land claim is still not settled. The license to a quarry trucking 100,000 tons of gravel away off our land – it isn’t happening anymore, by the way, since 2007 – the license has still not been revoked. In the year and a half that they haven’t trucked gravel, they still haven’t revoked the license. So if we leave that land, the government says they can still truck gravel.

So I just want to say that when it comes to quarries, and mining, and oppression of people, it’s oppression of people, it’s not oppression of Native people. It’s oppression of all people. I really want to thank you guys for having me out so I can speak and talk about the oppressions that happen to our people. We know that when someone has a legitimate concern in any town, they divert that away. Well, your time is now, to stand up and fight. Your time is now.

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Skyler: I’m Skyler Williams, I’m from Six, I’m one of the blockaders that Sarah talked about, and Dan, Boots, and Jackie talked about. I guess I just want to talk about my story and how I got politicized in land rights protection. Because I wasn’t that way my whole life. With my parents I grew up in a very typical household on the rez, my parents liked to drink a little when I was younger, it’s very normal for alcoholism and drug abuse to be going on on the rez. It’s a big problem that we have and it’s something that we’re all working very hard to try and stop.

In ’06 at the start of Douglas Creek, it was about March, and someone gave me a call, and said that we’re going to stop this development and go help these people who were physically on the land occupying this spot. And I thought, ya, why not, I ain’t got nothing better to do. So it turned out I went there for the weekend, and I got back Monday morning, about 5 in the morning, and called my boss at work; I was an iron worker, a union iron worker. I called my boss and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to come into work today, I think I quit.’

I did that for a lot of reasons. Putting up buildings just like this right on the tract, I did that for a long time, as soon as I graduated high school I had a son on the way and I had to make some money. So I started developing my territory, which I feel absolutely horrible about now.

So I moved in at the site, at Douglas Creek Estates, and I lived there for just over six months. In that time, April 20 came and went; 176 police officers came in heavily armed, swat gear and the whole bit, ARs hiding in trees, camouflage, 4 wheelers. Big swat vans rolled up and some of us got arrested, and those of us who didn’t were able to get away. And so luckily reinforcements arrived, next thing you know there’s 1500 people standing behind us, pushing these cops off our territory.

I guess that goes into what Sarah was talking about with the 5-10% of us that are in the criminal system. On June 9th there was a little incident involving a CH camera guy that allegedly I was involved in. I was charged with robbery which holds a pretty stiff penalty from what I hear. A warrant came out, and I went on the run for about a year and a half, almost two years before Stirling st. came up. I basically just stayed on the site for a lot of that time, and just tried to stay out of the light a lot. Boots and his boys and bunch of other people, really good friends of mine, started a new one at Stirling st. So I rushed home, and said, well, I’m moving in here now. So I moved in after that and again had to quit a job.

I stayed there for a week, we only had to wait a week this time for all the cops to come in. When the cops came, like Sarah said, they came in with just under 200. It wasn’t quite 200 cops. If there were 200 I might of got scared. They rolled in with this big armoured truck, it looked like a Brinks truck on steroids. It was really a big to-do, and they started clacking their shields coming down the road, and we just kinda laughed, just sitting there cracking jokes. We didn’t know what the heck to think of it or what was going to happen. So we just said we’re going to stay, and there wasn’t nothing anybody was going to tell us that was going to make us change our minds. When the cops came over, they’re walking up and Boots looks at me and says, ‘Skyler, don’t fight with them, alright.’ I started laughing right away, I said ‘Boots, come on man, you know me!’

The first comes up and grabs Boots and it’s like, ah shit, here we go. The next one grabs me, I’m doing the whacks-on whacks-off, knocking his hands away, they end up getting me down after a tussle, and I got handcuffed, and my legs held up to my butt, and this guy came up to me and tasered me four times in the back. It hurts. It looks like it hurts, and it does. I was lucky enough that there was a reporter standing right there, about 10 feet away, who got just the perfect shot as I had a mouthful of dirt with my hands handcuffed behind my back getting tasered. It ended being on the front page of our paper at home, it was really an awesome picture. My mom was really proud.

So after that I went to jail for about a month and a half. And all those charges that I was in jail for just got dropped. I don’t know how happy I am that they got dropped, I mean, all that for this, come on, give us a fight at least. When people hear this story, they’re like, you gotta sue them, you gotta take them to court. But we still have respect for that two row wampum, where we stay in our canoe and they stay in their ship, in their vessel. And we’re never supposed to interfere, those lines stay straight and parallel. I’m going to stay in my canoe. Whether or not they stay in theirs, that’s up to them. I understand that my forefathers made those treaties, expecting me to honour those treaties and all those things that they had said. So I’m going to respect them by doing that.

Right now I’m still out on bail on robbery charges, and charges with my involvement of a blockade on highway 6 that runs through Caledonia, after cops went in heavily armed again to Tyendinaga. They arrested me for my involvement in that blockade just this past summer, they said I was inside Caledonia. This is probably the funniest one. There’s this big sign when you go to Douglas Creek that says ‘Welcome to Caledonia’. Everybody in our community thinks this is where Caledonia starts. So I thought, hey, I can be right up to that sign, because, it’s part of my bail conditions that I stay out of Caledonia altogether. So I thought as long as I stay on this side of the sign, but oh no no no, it doesn’t work that way, because Caledonia doesn’t have an actual town limit. That’s sign’s really arbitrary, it doesn’t’ have any meaning at all.

So I was charged with breaching my bail because I was inside Caledonia, which doesn’t have a town limit. The cops didn’t even know that they didn’t have a town limit, so they just were all, ‘I don’t know, I think he was in Caledonia so let’s arrest him.’ And now I have to go sign in every Monday and Thursday at the police station, about 45 minutes from my home. I have to get in the car and drive 45 minutes there, 45 minutes back. No big deal, right? Only an hour and a half twice a week. So I go to sign in, and it was on my birthday, July 17 this year. Matt Watson, one of the lead detectives in the whole thing, he comes walking out and he comes to shake my hand, and says, ‘Skyler, I heard it’s your birthday.’ He shakes my hand and I say, ‘Ya, thanks man.’ ‘You’re under arrest,’ he says. ‘You fucking gotta be kidding me, fuck you, get the fuck away from me…’ and he’s like, ‘No, seriously, you gotta come with us right now.’ Ok, so I ended up spending the week in jail, before I was released on bail yet again. That’s basically where we’re at with that. And now with this Tuesday, and hopefully not just this Tuesday, hopefully the ministry can do something and I can not have to go and blockade another road, in Cayuga, which I hope to see some people at.

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Sarah: My name is Sarah and I’m a lawyer. My role as I see it tonight, what I can share with you, is sort of similar to what I do in my day-to-day life, which is really to act as a translator between the worlds. There is a wampum that many of you will know, and somebody has on their backpack, which is called the Kaswentha. It’s the two-row wampum, it’s white with two purple rows. It’s a Haudenosaunee treaty which they have established with numerous nations in order to signify two things: one is the distinctiveness between two people and two legal systems that keep them separate, but the treaty also represents a togetherness and an ongoing relationship of brotherhood and friendship. The problem is that many Haudenosaunee people are being dragged into the Canadian legal process, so that’s really where my role steps in.

For all of you who struggle, for many of us who have deep in our hearts the grief and the panic and the anxiety of our times, what do we choose to do? What is the one thing I meant to do in order to cause the catalyst effect in my life? I think most people today, if we were to sit down and have a big hand-holding conch passing session, that would be the pain that we all carry is what is thing that I am meant to do. Many visions are right but many of us struggle with the question of trying to effect change from inside an institution or inside a system, or do we go with what we perceive to be outside. That’s a struggle that I carry a lot as a lawyer. And the true answer is I don’t know why I’m a lawyer. Well, I know why, there were certain things that happened and I popped out at the end with a card that says that I can wear a funny robe. But ultimately it’s because it’s what I felt called to do. In the midst of my articling, something very therapeutic happened, and that was that a plot of land, a proposed housing development in Caledonia was blockaded, and I spent my vacation from my articling behind that blockade making apparently terrible vegetarian food. I’m always glad to be with these guys here because they need to be reminded that they are beacons of hope and militant optimism for all of us who have that craving of what do we do and where do we go.

When I go about representing people who have been charged with criminal offenses under Canadian law as a result of actions they’ve taken to protect their land, my job is not to be trying to find the soft points and dissolve the system from the inside. It’s my belief that if you’re a threat to the system it will not let you in. My job is to try to lessen the harm to the people who are being drawn into that system. In a very practical way, to try to get them out of jail so that they can do what they need to do that actually will bring about change.

But there’s a tremendously prescient trust that’s given to me as a lawyer, which sometimes I serve well and sometimes I’m still learning. That incredible trust is to hold a voice inside Canadian courts to translate an entire culture, and a history and its context of militancy, into words that the Canadian court will understand but will not assimilate fundamentally who my clients are. It’s something that I struggle with not just in the context of land claims, because the dynamic around Canadian law is not a dynamic that manifests itself only over political issues. The reality is that the Canadian legal framework as it affects Aboriginal people – so if you go to law school you go to a class called Aboriginal law, which is really the actual mechanics of contemporary colonization – how Aboriginal communities and people are deeply controlled. It is not a class that teaches you what law is to Indigenous people. It teaches you how Canadian law controls Aboriginal people. What that class will tell you is that there is no aspect of their law, either mechanically, in terms of the land as a physically divorced relationship to property, or government, and even at the level of identity – the issue of who are you – is something which is actually legislated. There is no aspect being Aboriginal that is not described in Canadian law, meaning apartheid in Canada is a contemporary reality.

We must understand that context and understand that that context follows from a history of intentional assimilation. The Canadian government approach has always been assimilation of Aboriginal people, affected primarily through the imposition of legal institutions. That approach of assimilation has followed one of two tracks: fast assimilation and slow assimilation. Those are the only options. In terms of seeing the dynamic today of how Canadian institutions are imposed upon Aboriginal people, that history combined with Canadian institutions results in Aboriginal communities that struggle on a collective level of resistance – that’s where it gets manifested on the front pages of newspapers. They struggle on a deep, personal, and intimate level, because pain metabolizes in the context of individuals and families and communities. The political struggle happens in a very real way in terms of actual blockades, but the political struggle also manifests in individuals and families and communities that are resurrecting the proper institutions that are intended to govern them and also resurrecting their individual health, often, for example, in the context of recovery from abuse or addiction. That means that the political process of decolonization happens most frequently way outside of the media.

In my job I have the immense pleasure of working with people who have been criminalized in the context of land disputes. But today for example, my day was spent in court trying to get a man out of jail so he could go home to the five kids that he is the stay at home dad for, and he’s been in jail for seventy nine days. Today there was a judge who took a risk and said, “I see who you are. I see that all of your family comes through residential schools and that you are achieving a moment of historical success in your family in healing, so good on you. Go home.” That is political.

If you’re Native in Ontario, you are five to ten times more likely to find yourself wind up in jail than if you’re non-Native. The dynamic around that is a complicated one but for those of you who are legal nerds, there’s a case called Regina v. Gladue, 1999, that said that there is a historical and systemic background that has resulted in Aboriginal people being over-incarcerated. And let me be clear: the Supreme Court said in this case, the Canadian criminal justice system is racist. That is in legislation.

So every time that an Aboriginal person’s liberty is at risk in any court, that court must consider this case, which says look at who they are through their eyes, through their family’s eyes and their community’s eyes. That decision also says that as a legal institution, look at who we are, at the historical tendency, the propensity to be over-incarcerating Aboriginal people. The reason why I mention that is because often these gatherings happen in the context of land protection and whatnot, but the message I want to leave for you is that the process of decolonization is happening in very humble settings and in very subtle yet just as militant ways. For one to take a step forward in healing and recovering from addiction, that is as militant a stand for that person as it takes to be standing on a blockade. And tangentially, when you go to Haudenosaunee gatherings – like the Peace and Friendship Gathering or blockades or whatnot – and they are dry spaces, that is a principle reason. It’s not only from a cultural and legal perspective for them that there are rules around drugs and alcohol, but because those intense, emotional environments then become safe spaces for people not only to maintain their recovery but to take a step forward in recovery. One of my young clients who was politicized in the context of Kanehstanton, which was formerly known as Douglas Creek Estates, said to me after getting off on his first set of charges, “I’m not getting arrested for any stupid shit anymore.” My point is that Canadian apartheid, contemporary efforts at assimilation that are ongoing and affect Aboriginal communities on a day-to-day basis – this incredibly brutal effort to try and get Native people to be good, little Canadians – that effort intensifies when they stand up. It is an intolerable, immoral reality that is intensified in the context of land rights issues.

In the context of law, people are aware of something called the duty to consult. Well, the duty to consult really means the duty to participate in assimilation. That’s what that translates into. So there are actual legal processes that are described in Canadian law that are supposed to deal with this problem. And the problem, as the Supreme Court has said in a case called Haida, is that there are two competing realities. One reality is that, as the Supreme Court said, they were here first. The other reality is that we’re here now. So the problem is that, under international law, in order for there to be a legitimate assertion of legal jurisdiction, the nation that has the institutions imposed upon them must have either validly surrendered or been conquered. In Haida, the Supreme Court said that the problem with these dueling realities leads to a problem with the legal legitimacy of the Canadian state being imposed upon Aboriginal people.

That all sounds really heart-warming and exciting, except that the Supreme Court says that the actual legal processes that the Supreme Court says must deal with are negotiation and consultation. The problem is that there is no good faith negotiation that is underway anywhere in Canada. Part of the benefit of being a lawyer is that I can sort interweave the political analysis with the legal reality. The legal reality is that the federal government and the Ontario government have an approach to negotiation which is called a comprehensive-claims process, as distinguished from a specific-claims process. A comprehensive-claims process is a negotiation process which means that everything is on the table. This is what resulted in the creation of Nunavut. It’s what resulted in the creation of James Bay Cree. It’s a revitalization of everything that’s on the table. In the context of the Haudenosaunee, which is a typical negotiation, the Federal Government is sitting across the table trying to figure out what rights are on the other side of the table that can be bought. Their approach is a specific-claims negotiation approach and this is the same approach that they’ve taken in Tyendinaga, where the federal government lawyers sit down and say, “Okay, if these people were to go to Canadian courts, what legitimately would they be able to be compensated for?” Because under Canadian law, they can’t get their land back. They can only be paid for what’s been taken from them. That is why litigation will never work as a route to sovereignty.

The Federal Government sat down with the Six Nations of the Grand River claim and said, “What are their valid lawsuits here?” And they sat down after Kanehstanton, where a negotiation table was created out of the political pressure that came from direct action. The Federal and Provincial Governments for the first time since they overthrew the traditional government recognized the traditional government at Six Nations.

Those were the success that came from direct action. And then the federal government put on the table only what they thought that Six Nations would win if it went to court. And the federal government guy Ron Daring went into Caledonia, and he explained better than I can, he said, ‘These are low hanging fruit. If we can’t buy them off on these easy claims, like the Welland canal, like Birch, we’re not going to be able to settle anything for them.’ But nobody told that to Six Nations. Nobody went into the community and said that this is not a revitalization of the relationship. The Indian Act’s not on the table. There’s not an overall review of the relationship here. We only had certain claims, I believe that they number in 24 or 26, that they’re prepared to pay for. The maximum success possible at the negotiation table right now for Six Nations is for them to get bought off on these piecemeal claims. And when I made this complaint the last time I had this therapeutic process, it happened to be that the provincial negotiator was in the room. And it just so happened that he spoke after me. And he stood up and he at least had the honesty to say, ‘She’s right.’ So Brantford is never on the table. Everyday that Boots spent was the only progress forward on that claim. And Douglas Creek Estates is not on that table. So the Haldimand tract and the overall dispute are not subject to negotiation.

The other legal process under Canadian law is consultation and accommodation. And what that means is that an Aboriginal group must participate in the consultation, and they can’t say no. They cannot say no. So when Bob Lovelace and the other individuals from Ardoch Algonquin, and when the six band councilors and the rest of their community from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug stood on the land and said, ‘No really, no,’ they went to jail. That’s the law I do. So the processes of negotiation and consultation are intentionally undermined by the Canadian institution, because there is no political will to truly be negotiating an agenda of sovereignty with aboriginal people. There is only a political will to quiet the voices by paying money in exchange for giving up rights. That is the only option that is open to them. And when the only option available to them, not just for cultural survival, not just for beautification of their land, but literally for the survival of their people, when the only option available to them is to take to the land, and to stand and say no, because there is no other option available to them, that’s when they go to jail.

So Stirling Woods housing division is a relatively large housing division being developed in Caledonia. It was a portion of Caledonia where people stood up and they said a gentle No. it wasn’t even a Kanehstanton ‘No seriously no,’ it was a gentle No. And by the time that the actual protest occupation evolved from September 13 to September 19 because of discussions within the community, the remaining nine people stood on land which is owned by CN Rail, adjacent to the development property. When over 200 police officers and dogs came in as riot police, they were so far away from the development that when you look at the video, the police marched in at ankle level. And those police came in with that force and arrested nine people for doing nothing. In 13 months after they had been charged, we had to go to court with applications in order to be told what they did. Now, mischief is a plague for all of us. Mischief is a criminal code offence that is a crime against capitalism. That’s what it means. But even if we were to get inside of their crossword puzzle and try to figure out what the interference to property is in that circumstance, what we got out of that court application was that their crime, literally, was being present. So what’s the problem, they are protesting while being Native. And that apparently is scary enough.

So 13 months, multiple taserings, people being in jail, and with a massive amount of effort after nine people were arrested, charges this week were withdrawn against five. But we need to take pause, because you need to understand what is happening. Because what is happening in Six Nations is evidencing that it is getting worse. And we don’t see how it’s getting worse, because the way that the state is imposing itself on Aboriginal communities that are standing up is something which is subtle, and to the media, not very interesting. What happened at Stirling is that 200 police officers were not used because nine people could possibly be a threat to them. It was intended to be a military show of force to show the community what would happen to them if they stood up. What has happened since then should be fundamentally concerning for us, because of the arrests that have happened since that time. There was an arrest of an Aboriginal man named Ken Green, which some of us know as Sleeper, at Kanehstanton, where he was staying, because of his involvement in other land protection-related activity.

The police officers came in in camouflaged clothing on ATVs and attacked him, and they took him down with such force that he had to visit the emergency room that night. He received medical treatment a number of times while in custody, and it was major heavy lifting to get him released on bail, but we did get him released on bail, but nonetheless it’s a damn good thing we did, because the injuries that were caused to his ribs caused his lungs to fill up with fluid. And this past week he was rushed to the Hamilton hospital because his lung collapsed. If he had been in jail and they had allowed his lungs to fill up with fluid, it would have collapsed on his heart and he would be dead.

The officers that came in are part of a special part of the OPP. They’re from a part of the OPP known as TRU, which is the Tactics and Rescue Unit. We have not seen them involved, to my knowledge, at Tyendinaga or at Six Nations, we have not seen them involved directly in Aboriginal protest activity since they killed Dudley George. That is the unit of the OPP that killed Dudley George. And when I cross examined the police at Ken Green’s bail hearing about how the framework document that was developed by the OPP post-Ipperwash was implemented in this circumstance to assure that what they did with Dudley George would never happen again, they had no clue how that policy framework even factored into the tactical decision to arrest him. What it means for aboriginal people, and this is what we need to know when we message, is that the brutality at the blockade front is not a policing issue. It’s a political issue. Because the government, which is one entity, is establishing the conditions that make blockades necessary. By, I would say, presenting themselves with falsehood about there being genuine negotiations tables, and of not consulting in good faith about what the genuine concerns of Aboriginal people are. And leaving them with no option, based on having to establish the survival of their people, other than to blockade, and then in those blockade contexts they are being brutalized. The policing must be understood as a political dynamic. And more than that, the overall dynamic of how the government is dealing with the outstanding disputes with Aboriginal people, be it over money, over land, over governance, needs to be understood in the overall context of the day to day life of Aboriginal people, and not only in the well-heeled media context, where we see people in the front.

So I guess what I want to leave you with, I’m always struggling with people asking, ‘Tell us the one thing to do.’ And I don’t know, it’s not write a letter here, or come here. I do have one practical idea that I’ll leave with you. I also do some work with environmental groups, and there is an environmental group called Haldimand Against Land Transfers, which is really a group of this-is-my-backyard citizens from Cayuga, that have been opposing the massive expansion of a dump on Haudenosaunee land, which is just near Cayuga. They are a group of people who have never been politicized, they are not placard-carrying, road-blocking types. But they did that. They went through two years of litigation where they got their arses kicked in divisional court as well as in a environmental review tribunal, and the dump was still intended to go ahead, despite the pesky little detail that the dump is actually leaching toxins into drinking water. That little minor detail is that there was a massive expansion allowed of the dump, and ultimately when the trash was taken in, these folks from HALT stood on the road, shoulder to shoulder with folks from Six Nations. And that dump was darn stopped. There’s also people here from Guelph that were there that stood.

So the landfill went bankrupt, and was taken over by a receiver. The receiver has a problem, which is that the only way to deal with the bankruptcy, the only income-generating thing about the bankruptcy, is the big hole. So they have arranged for garbage to come to the landfill on Tuesday (October 21). But there is a small problem. Because the landfill was actually new, the clay liner has now endured one winter where it froze, so it’s very likely that the clay liner, because it did not have the insulation of trash, has cracked. So now the clay liner is far more likely to be leaking further pollutants into the drinking water. So the Ministry of Environment has fired a letter off to the receiver saying Whoa, because the receiver has not reported to the MoE that they’re going to bring trash in, they’re just bringing it in. So we don’t know whether or not the MoE will bring their own injunction process or if they’ll intervene in some other way, but what we do know is that the receiver intends to bring in trash to the landfill on Tuesday. And Boots is your contact person in terms of following up on that.

I guess the only other thing I want to say is that I just don’t think that change is going to come from one place. It’s not like we’re going to have one big conference and we’re all going to go like, ‘Oh, here’s the one soft spot in Canadian colonization, everyone together now pull.’ Although if anybody can figure that out, I’ll pull, I may be little but I’ll pull. It will come from many places. And all of us that have the craving for change, keep going. All of us have the dark days of being uncertain whether or not the change that we’re affecting is affecting the overall picture, we all have that. We all have shit and division inside the communities that we’re trying to organize in. Be patient with one another. Unity is probably the hardest thing, to have tolerance and patience with one another. So my message to you, especially to Guelph, because Guelph shows up in force to all of this stuff. So in terms of what we should we do, the only thing I’d say is, thank you, and keep going.