Vol. 71/No. 19      May 14, 2007

The Natives were protesting the slowness of negotiations with the federal government over the 950-acre Culbertson Land Tract granted to the Six Nations in 1793. The Mohawks insist that the tract was illegally taken from them in 1832.

The protesters also condemned the failure of the Ontario provincial government to act on their demand to revoke the license of Thurlow Aggregates, which operates a massive gravel quarry on the tract near the town of Deseronto. Earlier in April the Mohawks barricaded and shut down production at the quarry, gravel from which is being used to build condominiums on the disputed land.

“People in the community see it as a company removing the very land while we have people sitting at a table and discussing it,” said protest leader Shawn Brant. “We recognize there can be no meaningful negotiations while these things are happening. We shut them down as part of the rotational economic disruption campaign we promised.”

Exactly a year ago on April 20 Mohawks from Tyendinaga blocked the tracks in the same vicinity in solidarity with a “land reclamation” occupation by members of the Six Nations at Caledonia, southwest of Toronto. At dawn on that day, the Six Nations defenders were attacked by gun-toting Ontario provincial cops attempting to enforce a court injunction ordering an end to their occupation of a housing construction site that began Feb. 28, 2006. The site is on another land tract the British colonizers conceded to the Six Nations in 1784.

The Natives beat back the cops. Since then, despite a massive police presence and provocations by local politicians and racist groups, they continue to occupy the unfinished housing estate and have forced the government to enter into negotiations.

An editorial in the April 21 Globe and Mail, Canada’s main English-language daily, expressed the outrage by Canada’s capitalist rulers at the disciplined determination of the Tyendinaga Mohawks.

The Globe accused “radical native protesters” of engaging in “criminal acts dressed up as civil disobedience.” It continued, “As has been shown at Caledonia, law-enforcement agencies and the vast Indian-affairs bureaucracies of the federal and Ontario governments have yet to divine a strategy to deal with simple acts of aboriginal hooliganism.” The editorial, published after the protesters had defied the court injunction, urged the cops to “enforce the injunction, remove the barrier and apprehend those responsible.”

“Believe it or not, this is the first soft step of the campaign,” said Shawn Brant two hours after the Mohawks had dismantled the railway barrier. “We have identified three different targets [the railway, provincial highways, and the town of Deseronto] and will escalate the degree of severity necessary.”

Unsettled Native land claims, many of them on energy- and mineral-rich land, as well as land slated for urban development, have escalated from about 250 cases in 1993 to more than 800 now.  
 
 
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