[IPSM] NY Times: Mohawks and Others Block Trains in Ontario to Protest Land Use

[Jaggi Singh]

April 22, 2006
Mohawks and Others Block Trains in Ontario to Protest Land Use

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/world/americas/22canada.html

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
TORONTO, April 21

Native Canadian protests spread across southern Ontario on Friday over a 
land dispute dating back to the Revolution, with Mohawks stopping at least 
a dozen freight trains and interrupting passenger train service between 
Montreal and Toronto.

There were no reported arrests or injuries.

CN Rail won a court injunction ordering the removal of demonstrators 
should protests continue. Via Rail, the national passenger line, announced 
it could no longer take weekend reservations on trains linking Toronto 
with Ottawa and Montreal, the nation's busiest routes, and was obliged to 
charter buses to honor existing reservations.

The demonstrations began at the end of February, when Mohawks of the Six 
Nations, a confederacy of Native groups, occupied a road outside 
Caledonia, an Ontario farming town, contending that a developer was 
building a housing project on Native land nearby.

The protests received little attention until the Ontario provincial police 
raided the group and arrested 16 people before dawn on Thursday. A scuffle 
left three officers injured, including one who was hit on the head by a 
bag of rocks and needed stitches. A few protesters said they had been hurt 
by police Taser guns.

The police action seemed only to feed the protests, as about 200 people 
returned to the site to build makeshift barricades, heap piles of gravel 
and burn tires and an abandoned van on the road.

Native protesters wearing camouflage pants and bandanas manned the 
barricades on the same road through Friday, but the police said they had 
no immediate plans to remove them again.

"We obviously prefer to have peaceful resolutions," said Prime Minister 
Stephen Harper. "But we gather there has been some attempt at that, and 
the situation is quite complex on the ground."

Leaders from the Six Nations reserve are meeting with officials from the 
federal and provincial governments to try to settle the matter.

The dispute, involving a 100-acre plot, has its roots in a 1784 agreement 
in which Britain granted a large strip of land in what is today 
southwestern Ontario to Natives in gratitude for their support against the 
American colonial rebels. The Six Nations surrendered the land in 1841, 
but Native activists filed a lawsuit in 1995 claiming that the agreement 
was made under duress, and that in any case the authorities had failed to 
meet their commitments.

Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, a professor of aboriginal studies at the 
University of Toronto, said the Caledonia land dispute "could become a 
symbol of the broader dissatisfaction with how the government has dealt 
with land claims."

On Friday, Mohawks from the Tyendinaga reserve, near Belleville, set fires 
beside a CN Rail track and used two school buses to block traffic on a 
nearby road.

Natives of the Akwesasne reserve, near Cornwall, picketed a road near a 
busy American border crossing, and a group of Mohawks blocked the Mercier 
bridge near Montreal for nearly half an hour, interrupting commuter 
traffic.