Provocative demonstrations by some Caledonia residents demanding the cops move in to end the highway blockades have recently confronted the Six Nations defenders. The barricades were built in response to an April 20 provincial police raid, which failed to remove the Six Nations members from the site.

On April 24, following a rally of 3,000 organized by municipal politicians and business people, 500 marched on the main barricade. Four days later, another 500 confronted well-organized Six Nations defenders across the barricade with the police standing in between.

At one point a leaflet was circulated here purporting to announce a meeting featuring a Klu Klux Klan speaker on the “final solution” to the “Indian problem.” No such meeting took place and the cops declared it a hoax. On May 6 a new organization calling itself Caledonia Resistance brought out numbers significantly smaller than the previous anti-Native rallies. “The road has been blocked for only a week,” said Six Nations defenders Wendy Hill at an April 30 press conference at the Two Arrow Cafe on the reserve. “We have been held up over 200 years.”

The Six Nations Confederacy chiefs state that Douglas Creek Estates being built by Henco Industries is part of a massive parcel of land given to them by the British colonialists in 1784. Government officials claim the land was sold in 1841.

The Ontario government has now appointed former Ontario premier David Peterson as a negotiator. For the first time since 1924 when the traditional Confederacy chiefs were forcibly replaced by the federal government with band councils, the Native chiefs will be sitting across from government negotiators. The stance of the Six Nations is expressed in a slogan painted on the bridge into the reserve where the second blockade is located. It states, “Our Native lands are not for sale.”

Joe Young contributed to this article.  
 
 
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