Helpless: Caledonia's Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us

220 Pages·2010·1.84 MB·English

by  Christie Blatchford

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IN PUBLICATION
Blatchford, Christie
Helpless : Caledonia’s 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 Indians—Ontario—Caledonia—Claims. 3. Six
Nations Indian Reserve No. 40 (Ont.).
I. Title.
FC3099.C34B63 2010 971.3′3705 C2010-905555-1
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
This is in memory of Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sûrété du
Québec, 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 Lemay’s death.
Contents
—–
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Map
PART 1: JUNE 9, 2006
PART 2: BEFORE
Photo Insert
PART 3: DURING
PART 4: AFTER
Appendix A
Appendix B
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
–—
T I sat down to write this sucker, I was at the National Newspaper
HE NIGHT BEFORE
Awards dinner in Toronto and ran into a dear colleague I hadn’t 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, I’d 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 case—disputed because the Canadian government doesn’t
recognize that there even is a valid claim—which 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 haven’t begun to figure it out. Besides, I am old enough already
that I don’t have a career’s 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 families—this was by dint of
federal government policy—or 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 law—the dry legal term for the
noble arrangement a civilized society makes with its citizens, rendering us all
equal before and bound by the same laws—in 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 years—and then some, as the occupation continues to
this day—the rule of law was utterly decimated. The citizens of Caledonia were,
for more than a month—during which period the site was barricaded by
occupiers, major roads were closed and lawlessness ran rampant—held 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 stone’s throw
away, were less affected, but still subjected to intimidating forces within and
without their community.
Despite frenetic activity—meetings, negotiations at main tables and side
tables, talks, reviews, and reports involving various actors from both federal and
provincial governments—the 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 tables—that 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 don’t claim to be able to prove which way it happened. But there is
considerable evidence that, both at Queen’s 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 months—if not years—battered 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 took—or, as
accurately, every action the state and police didn’t take.
This is the story of how all these factors came to a boil in Caledonia.

Friday, June 9, 2006
——
If you’re telling us we have to take the law into our own hands—that’s happened at various
times in history—let 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, CALEDONIA RESIDENT