[IPSM] Glimmer of hope in resolving Caledonia land protest

[shelly]

Glimmer of hope in resolving Caledonia land protest
       
      Kaz Novak, the Hamilton Spectator 
      The Caledonia Douglas Creek subdivision is the site of the Six Nations land protest.
     
       
      Don Henning
     
       
      Kaz Novak, the Hamilton Spectator 
      John Henning
     
     
By John Burman, Meredith Macleod and Daniel Nolan
The Hamilton Spectator
CALEDONIA (Apr 13, 2006) 
There could be a breakthrough brewing which could lead to a peaceful resolution in the native occupation of a Caledonia housing project.

All parties involved in the dispute met for the first time yesterday and discussed compensation for Douglas Creek Estates developer Henco Industries and also the possibility of the federal and Ontario governments buying out Henco and returning the land to Six Nations.

But Haldimand County Mayor Marie Trainer -- one of 60 people in the meeting at the Best Western hotel in Brantford -- said the two senior governments did not commit to the latter suggestion.

She said no figures were mentioned -- Henco says it spent $6 million developing the Argyle Street South site -- but federal and provincial representatives indicated they would have to talk to their respective governments.

"It was mentioned," Trainer said of a buyout of Henco partners Don and John Henning.

"Both the provincial and federal governments were asked. Everybody wants to think about these things. That's quite a commitment. They said, 'We have to think about it.'"

Other items discussed included a moratorium on construction while the land claim issue is sorted out as well as the possibility Henco could drop the court injunctions ordering the natives off the land. The injunctions were obtained shortly after the protest began Feb. 28 .

There was also talk about having the Ontario Provincial Police -- who have a command post in town to monitor the situation -- dismantle the command post and about leaving the site vacant land forever.

Trainer said the two governments did agree with a proposal from Six Nations chief Dave General and the elected band council to do joint research into Six Nations land claims and to also help in an education campaign on the Haldimand Tract (the Six Miles Deep Information campaign).

Henco, Six Nations elected band council members, traditional chiefs, representatives of the protesters, Haldimand town council, the Ontario government and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada met to discuss ways to end the six-week occupation.

Senior OPP officers were also in attendance, including deputy commissioner Maurice Pilon, and two chiefs from the Union of B.C. chiefs. Trainer said the latter were in attendance to give insight into how B.C. land claims are dealt with.

In the morning, the elected band council and chiefs from the hereditary Confederacy met to discuss the standoff.

Trainer said there were 30 officials around the table, plus 30 in seats behind them. This other group also included clan mothers.

The meeting -- said to have been arranged by the band council -- is to continue at 11 a.m. today at the same hotel. Trainer said she was asked to come to it by the OPP.

Trainer couldn't say the discussions will immediately lead to the end of the occupation, but called it a positive development.

Ontario Native Affairs Minister David Ramsay said his government is contemplating whether to compensate builders and housing contractors affected by what the natives are calling a "land reclamation."

"We certainly know that the developer and the contractors that are there to build that subdivision have been financially hurt," Ramsay told reporters at Queen's Park.

"We want to work with them and find out what the financial pain is and see if there's anything we can do to help them through this."

The minister says he still believes the dispute can be settled peacefully.

Jacqueline House, who represented the protesters at the meeting, hailed the discussions as "a breakthrough."

"I feel good," she said at the protest camp late in the day. "Everyone was there, everyone was respectful of each other and listened. It was really good."

House said members of the elected band council told the meeting the Confederacy council should be the ones Ottawa deals with on land issues.

House said the meeting began with Cayuga sub-chief Leroy Hill explaining the history of the site and the treaties the protesters say were never honoured.

"He told these people things they said they did not know," said House. "He gave them a true history lesson and things started to happen after that."

Not everyone at the protest camp was convinced Ramsay's suggestion of compensating the developer and contractors is necessarily a good thing.

The important thing, said Ken Green, of Six Nations, is what will be done after that. "It is our land. What would the province do if they got it," he said.

The Henning brothers told The Spectator Tuesday they face bankruptcy if the native occupation of the Caledonia subdivision doesn't end soon.

The Hennings face mounting legal bills, which are adding up even though they can't build homes or sell lots.

"We are not rich developers," the Hennings, owners of Henco Industries, wrote in a position paper given to The Spectator Tuesday. "All the company's money is in this project. If the blockade doesn't end soon, we expect the banks will call our loans and force us into bankruptcy."

Speaking publicly for the first time to The Spectator editorial board, the brothers said they were upset with the OPP.

"It's a terrible message to everyone when the law is flouted," said John.

The Hennings say they get little information from the OPP and have been mostly frustrated in dealing with local, provincial and federal politicians.

After years spent getting approvals for the subdivision, the Hennings have invested millions in roads, waterlines and sewers. They've sold only 10 lots, mostly to small local homebuilders. Some have not paid yet. The development, planned to ultimately have 600 homes, had only been open a month when protesters arrived.

The Hennings said if the protest continues, they will seek compensation from the provincial government, including fair market purchase of the 100-acre parcel.

They can't say when they'll take that step. It will come only as a last resort.

Henco Industries lawyer Michael Bruder says he believes this to be the first native occupation of privately held land in Ontario.

Heavy history to standoff
       
      Sheryl Nadler, the Hamilton Spectator 
      Native protesters hold their ground outside a housing subdivision in Caledonia where construction has come to a halt because of the dispute.
     
     

Was the land taken by trickery, intimidation, exploitation or legal transactions?
By Meredith Macleod
The Hamilton Spectator
(Apr 13, 2006) 
There are 165 years of outrage, division, infighting and mistrust behind a six-week-long occupation of a newly begun Caledonia subdivision.

The core of the issue is disagreement over ownership of land given to Six Nations and then, piece by piece, taken back by the British Crown.

How that land was taken -- whether by trickery, intimidation, exploitation or entirely legal land transactions -- is the subject of both the current blockade and discussions between lawyers for Six Nations and the federal government about tens of thousands of acres of land surrounding the reserve.

Protesters blockading the Douglas Creek Estates back the view of the traditional hereditary chiefs, the Haudenosaunee, that 384,451 hectares running 9.6 kilometres deep on either side of the Grand River from Lake Erie 210 kilometres northwest near Dundalk was stolen by the Crown in 1841.

Local native protesters, bolstered by warrior factions and other activists from Ontario and the U.S., say they are "reclaiming" their land.

Negotiating the claim is complicated because many within Six Nations do not share the view the land was stolen. The elected band council acknowledges the hereditary chiefs signed over the land in question in Caledonia but believe there has never been fair compensation for other large land parcels.

The sharp split between the political role of the elected band council and the traditional chiefs has led to a complete breakdown in communication between the two, said Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, an aboriginal studies and history professor at the University of Toronto and Laurentian University.

"There is a power struggle. Traditional chiefs won't speak to (elected Chief Dave General) or shake his hand. It goes against our values of honour and respect, but it shows there is a very deep rift."

The federal and provincial governments recognize only the elected band council and that feeds the belief that no one is listening to what some argue are the authoritative First Nations voice.

There are 14 outstanding Six Nations land claims affecting about half of Haldimand and more than 4,000 hectares between Brantford and Onondaga, a nearby Brant County community. The Plank Road Tract in question was registered as a land claim in 1987. But that land claim did not affect third party interests.

A lawsuit launched in 1995 dragged on until the two parties agreed to sit down and explore a resolution, beginning with two of the claims. As of last month, they had agreed on the basic facts of each claim. This is not one of them.

"That's a huge step towards working out an agreement," said Jo-Anne Greene, director of Six Nations Lands and Resources.

This claim had been put aside while the sides worked on the other two.

The issue across the Haldimand tract is that in some cases, land was taken against the wishes of Six Nations. In others, land was never paid for. Six Nations also alleges there was fraud, misappropriation of funds and poor investments and that natural resources were extracted without any native compensation.

A current trust account held by the federal government holds less than $3 million.

Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments point fingers at each other over who is responsible. Legal arguments have been made that the Canadian government can't be held accountable for actions of the British Crown before Canada was formed in 1867.

Hagersville real estate lawyer Ed McCarthy says the lands upon which the Douglas Creek subdivision is being built was clearly and legally sold by Six Nations in 1841. If the money was not properly cared for by the federal government, that is an accounting issue with the federal government, not a land claim against a private landowner, said McCarthy.

mmacleod at thespec.com

905-526-3408

Six Nations land reward chronology

* Oct. 25, 1784: Six Nations rewarded with a tract of land for its loyalty to the British Crown during the American Revolution. It's referred to as the Haldimand Proclamation after Frederick Haldimand, general and commander of the British forces. It gave to Six Nations six miles on either side of the Grand River from Lake Erie to its source, about 385,000 hectares.

* 1792: Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe reduces the Six Nations grant to 111,000 hectares.

* 1796: Six Nations grants its chief, Joseph Brant, the power of attorney to sell off some of the land and invest proceeds. The Crown opposes the sales but eventually concedes to grant Brant the patents required.

* 1830-1840: Members of Six Nations dispose of land to white settlers without approval of chiefs or the Crown. Squatters become a major problem.

* 1835: Crown approaches Six Nations about development of Plank Road (now Highway 6) and lands around it. Six Nations agrees to lease half a mile of land on each side for road, but does not surrender land. Lieutenant-Governor John Colborne agrees to lease but his successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, does not. After 1845, despite protests of Six Nations, Plank Road and surrounding lands were sold to third parties.

* 1840: Government recommends a reserve of 8,000 hectares be established on the south side of the Grand River and the rest sold or leased.

* Jan. 18, 1841: Six Nations council agrees to surrender for sale all lands outside those set aside for a reserve. A faction of Six Nations petitioned the surrender, saying the chiefs had been deceived and intimidated.

* June 1843: A petition to the Crown said Six Nations needed a 22,000 hectare reserve and wanted to keep and lease a tier of lots on each side of Plank Road and several other tracts of land in the Haldimand area.

* Dec. 18, 1844: Document signed by 47 Six Nations chiefs appears to authorize sale of land to build Plank Road.

* May 15, 1848: Crown deed issued to George Marlot Ryckman for Lot B, west of Plank Road in Oneida Township, about 23 hectares. That land is now Douglas Creek Estates.

* 1850: Crown passes proclamation setting out extent of reserve lands, about 19,000 hectares agreed to by Six Nations chiefs.

* 1924: Under the Indian Act, the Canadian government establishes an elected government on the reserve.

Glossary

Six Nations: A confederacy of Iroquois tribes including originally the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca (the Five Nations). After 1722, they were joined by the Tuscarora to form the Six Nations Confederacy. The tribes were based in Ontario, Quebec, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Haudenosaunee: Used by those who reject the term Iroquois, which is said to be a derogatory French word meaning "black snakes."

Haudenosaunee means "People building a longhouse," referring to native nationalities coming to live together in peace under one common law.

Six Nations Reserve: Located west of Highway 6 between the Grand River to the north and Indian Line or Regional Road 20 that runs through Hagersville. Six Nations is the most populous reserve in Canada with a population of about 22,000. Roughly half live on the 46,500-acre reserve. That's less than 5 per cent of the land originally granted to the Six Nations.

Grand Council: The assembly of 50 chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy who represent all of the clans of the member nations. The Grand Council was once united at the Onondaga Nation near Syracuse, N.Y.

But when nearly half of the Haudenosaunee moved north after the American Revolution, the Grand Council split. Onondaga is still regarded as the capital of the Confederacy and is home to the central fire.

Compensation the right move
     

By Robert Howard
The Hamilton Spectator
(Apr 13, 2006) 
The province's acknowledgment that compensation is owed to people caught in the middle of the native land claim dispute in Caledonia is good news and, frankly, unexpected given that the protest is just six weeks (a mere heartbeat by government standards) old.

Regular, working people have lost their entire source of income because of the standoff between native protesters on one side and the courts and police on the other. Upwards of 200 people -- tradespeople such as carpenters, plumbers, roofers and bricklayers -- have lost their paycheques. The developers and homebuilders -- self-described small-town guys without deep pockets -- see their life savings and investments being held hostage indefinitely.

Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Ramsay says the province is willing to consider compensation and that government officials and affected developers and contractors were meeting yesterday to consider a specific proposal. When the minister is quoted on that, it's safe to assume that cabinet has agreed that compensation will be offered, and now it's just a matter of working out numbers.

A compensation offer is absolutely the right thing to do. The quarrel here is not between the protesters and people working on the subdivision project, but between larger bodies: the federal and provincial governments on one side and a loosely-formed alliance of First Nations representatives (most of them opposed in varying degrees to the elected band councils) on the other.

What compensation will do is lower the pressure on a tense situation.

The shadow of Ipperwash Provincial Park -- where a 1995 native land rights occupation in the off-season turned deadly for protester Dudley George -- has hung over the Caledonia protest since it began.

It is in no one's interest to force a confrontation between natives and police. The protest has created some tension and hard feelings in the small town, but there has been no violence and little damage. That's better, in every way, than broken heads or gunshots.

If the OPP has a strategy for ending the occupation, beyond waiting the protesters out, they are not talking about it. Despite criticism that the police service is not enforcing a court order, there is some soundness in their refusal, so far, to initiate a clash with the protesters.

The frustration of the developers and others that police are not enforcing a court order is understandable.

So are complaints that the OPP recalcitrance gives rise to disrespect for the law, and the police themselves.

But the need for a peaceful resolution to this standoff, and the potentially abhorrent consequences, locally and nationally, of a bloody confrontation, overarches everything else. Patience is the key virtue here.

Timeline

1992: Henco buys a company that owns 100 acres south of Caledonia.

July 2005: Subdivision is registered.

Feb. 28, 2006: Native protest blocks site.

March 2 to 9: Injunctions ordering protesters to leave are granted.

March 16 & 28: Contempt of court orders granted.

March 27: Federal mediator leaves.

April 5: Local residents at rally call for governments, police to end protest.
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