[IPSM] "A monumental year" for the people of Six Nations [Dominion]

[Dru Oja Jay]

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/960

Gaining Ground
"A monumental year" for the people of Six Nations

by Hillary Bain Lindsay

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

On January 1, 2007, the people of Six Nations arrived at their  
Council House, and walked inside.

The event did not make media headlines, but the significance of the  
day was not lost on those crowded into the long line of cars, bearing  
Iroquois Confederacy and Unity flags, that lead up to the Council House.

“Even before Canada declared itself a country, we had a meeting place  
down here for traditional governance,” says Janie Jamison, one of the  
spokespeople for Six Nations. For generations, Chiefs representing  
the Confederacy Council gathered in the Council House to make  
decisions by consensus, a process often called the oldest  
participatory democracy on Earth.

In 1924, however, Canada instated the Indian Act and the RCMP raided  
the Council House, removing the traditional chiefs and clan mothers.  
In its place the band council system was set up, acting as an arm of  
the Canadian government.

For Jamison, who has never seen herself as Canadian, destroying the  
traditional government and imposing a new one was Canada’s way of  
declaring that her culture, her nation, her people “no longer existed.”

“What people don’t understand is that we weren’t defeated at that  
point,” says Jamison. “Our traditional government went underground.”  
For decades it continued to operate, unrecognized by the federal  
government. In 1959 an attempt was made to take back the Council  
House, remove the band council and reinstate the traditional  
governance system. The RCMP moved in again. “Men, women and children  
were beaten,” says Jamison. “Our people weren’t successful then.”

But on New Year’s Day, “Eighty years after being told we don’t  
exist,” says Jamison, “here we are.”

The people of Six Nations made their existence difficult to ignore  
starting February 28, 2006, when a blockade set up near Caledonia,  
Ontario, halted the construction of a subdivision that many said was  
being built on unceded Six Nations’ territory. Almost a year later,  
the people of Six Nations are holding their ground and, according to  
spokesperson Hazel Hill, making “leaps and bounds” towards the  
reinstatement of their traditional government.

The first leap came shortly after April 20, 2006, when the Ontario  
Provincial Police (OPP) performed a pre-dawn raid on the blockade  
site. The raid, meant to clear the site of protesters, backfired when  
hundreds of Six Nations’ people and their supporters peacefully took  
back the site within a few hours. The resolve and determination of  
those holding the site was strengthened, and media coverage of the  
raid ensured that people across the country and around the world knew  
about the standoff.

Shortly after the police raid, the Six Nations’ band council, which  
had previously refused to support the blockade (though it did support  
the land claim), endorsed the leadership of the Confederacy Chiefs.

The move was significant. “Eighty to eighty-five per cent of [Six  
Nations] people support the traditional government,” says Hill. For  
the first time, the leadership that had always been recognized by the  
people of Six Nations would be the leadership that government would  
be forced to negotiate with.

Another leap came when – after months of calling the standoff a  
provincial matter – the federal government came to the table. “It’s  
the first time the federal government has sat down with the  
traditional government,” Barbara MacDougal, Canada’s representative  
at negotiations, told the CBC in September 2006, adding that it was a  
“tremendous breakthrough.”

The breakthrough may have been spurred on by Six Nations  
representative Doreen Silversmith when she spoke to the United  
Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous People in Geneva, Switzerland,  
on May 1, 2006. Referring to the raid, Silversmith said, “Canada has  
clearly portrayed the message that ‘might is right.’ When a situation  
of ownership is challenged, their laws allow them to continue to reap  
the benefits of our Land, destroy our environment, and clearly ignore  
the truth of the Onkwehonweh [First People] … who hold title to the  
Land.” At the end of her speech, she called on the international  
community to intervene at Six Nations. “The Onkwehonweh require your  
assistance, with respect to our Law, our Treaties, including the Two  
Row Wampum, and in effect, the Authority with respect to our Land,  
Our Law and Our People.”

“To have the confederacy recognized at the international level for  
the traditional government that they are, that they always were, and  
always will be,” was important says Jamison. She feels that  
recognition from the United Nations forced Canadians to appreciate  
the legitimacy of their struggle. “We aren’t making these things up,”  
she says. “We are a government of people, a nation of sovereignty.”  
This, she says, is something Canada is going to have to deal with.

Jamison has been living with the legacy of Canada’s denial for too  
long, she says. “My family has had too many things stolen from them.”  
And she’s not just talking about land. “When I was three years old, I  
was home alone with my mom and she shot herself–. She was a victim of  
residential school system,” says Jamison. Her aunt was one of the  
thousands of native women in Canada who have gone missing; her raped  
and brutalized body found later. Jamison’s sister was put in an  
orphanage at birth and remained there until she was two. “She could  
have ended up on a pig farm like so many others, but somehow she made  
it back to us,” she says. And finally, a year and a half ago, her 17- 
year-old son crashed his car while he was driving drunk. “We watched  
him die a slow death after his car rolled. He died last April.”

Her family isn’t just the victim of bad luck, says Jamison, but of  
deliberate government policies that have driven so many of her people  
to despair and death. “That’s why I made that decision to take that  
stand. No more. No more to make us become something that we never  
will be” she says. “We need to learn truth, acceptance and  
understanding to be able to coexist together.”

For Jamison, that starts with “Canada finally taking responsibility  
for what they’ve done and starting to pay back some of the money they  
owe our people.” These are “not handouts” emphasizes Jamison, but  
payments that are owed to the Six Nations from lease agreements that  
were never honoured. In terms of the piece of land at the heart of  
the dispute today: it’s not for sale.

“We’ve always said we’re not selling that land,” says Jamison.

This doesn’t mean that those living on the land now will have to move  
says Hill – though she notes that her people have been forced to  
relocate many times in their history. “But we’re not going to do it  
to them,” says Hill. “There’s a lot of that land that’s undeveloped,  
unceded. There’s a mechanism for returning that.”

“To me, it’s about continuing what we’ve started,” she says. “This  
isn’t just about Six Nations or that little piece of land. This is  
about sovereignty and the unity of the Original People of the land  
that have a right to live in harmony. To have clean air and green  
grass where you don’t have to live with landfills and concrete  
everywhere you look.”

We need homes, says Hill, “but not concrete jungles. There’s a  
difference.”