Blockade eased at scene of Argyle St. confrontations

One lane of Argyle St. in Caledonia was opened on May 16 to provide limited access to emergency and local traffic as a sign of good faith by Six Nations protesters. It will take some of the pressure off the most dangerous focal point for angry confrontation between townsfolk and members of the Native community there.

The Argyle St. barricade is one of three erected after a police raid on members of the Six Nations community on April 20. The raid served to remove people from the site of a housing development on land the protesters say belongs to the Six Nations membership. Sixteen people were arrested, but the raid did little more than to swell the protesters numbers and stir up conflict in the scenic little town on the Grand River about a half-hour's drive from downtown Hamilton. Townspeople have gathered regularly since then to demonstrate their anger and frustration over the protest and the effect it is having on their businesses and lifestyle.

Fridays have become particularly tense affairs.

On Friday May 5, the supper-hour crowd at the St. George Arms on Argyle St., as the old Highway 6 is called within town limits, arrived to see an announcement taped to the door. The bar and restaurant would be closing at 10 o'clock that evening "for the safety of our staff and customers." The restaurant is at most a kilometre away from the Argyle St. blockade.

In the hours before darkness fell that night, the police presence became more noticeable. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) cruisers were moved to form a chain across the main street. Traffic that had been allowed all week to slowly work its way through the Six Nations' checkpoint blocking the road was stopped and diverted into the nearby Zehr's grocery store parking lot. Soon after, a row of officers formed on the town side of the chain of cars. Then the waiting began.

On both sides of the barrier, crowds began to form. Up the hill, several hundred metres away, a line of camouflage-clad Native people watched and waited. The two lines were far enough apart that one side could not hear the other. The police strategically isolated the Native checkpoint from what they feared could become an angry mob.

On the town side, the crowd of the curious and the angry began to arrive. They formed small groups and talked. Close to the police cordon, a well-dressed mother and her 20-something daughters watched the Six Nations' line through binoculars. They wondered if they saw guns up there. A look through their binoculars revealed that what they saw was someone watching them with binoculars.

There was a murmur in the crowd and a feeling of expectation. Suddenly, one man yelled up the hill over top of the police.

"Open the highway," bellowed Jim Smith, a 47-year-old millwright who works at Dofasco in Hamilton. His teenage son mimicked his words and actions. "Those people are terrorists. If George Bush was in charge, this would have been over a long time ago. He would have moved. These people are uncivilized."

If it was intended to be a rallying cry, it didn't succeed. Some murmured their support; others shook their heads. The quiet, expectant buzz resumed.

Signs appeared in the crowd. The messages they carried included the usual about welfare and paying tax and getting jobs.

There was a buffer zone of perhaps 10 to 15 metres between the crowd and the police line. Two young girls rode their bicycles in circles in that open space. After a while, a couple of young men invaded the zone and got close to the police, smirking back into the growing crowd with a "look-at-how-brave-we-are" air about them. The police stared ahead and made no response. A couple of middle-aged men wearing the colors of independent biker clubs were seen in the crowd.
Jim Smith told Windspeaker that he and many others in the town were angry at the various levels of government, with the police and with their Native neighbors. The town's economy is suffering, he said. Local realtors are telling people their property values have dropped by 30 per cent since the OPP invaded the occupation of Douglas Creek Estates.

Argyle St., a railway line running parallel, and the highway bypass around Caledonia were blocked to traffic. The latter two remain completely blocked.

As you drive into Caledonia, you see two large portable electronic signs by the side of Argyle St. warning that the road is closed ahead. Another message, also seen on signs on several lawns read "Caledonia open for business."

The first police sighting on the way into Caledonia from Hamilton occurs at the turn off for the highway bypass, which is blocked by wooden barricades. The OPP officers are there to make sure that only residents try to use the road.

Shortly after Smith's first outburst, an information sheet was passed around the crowd. Marion Rice and Katrina Forrest handed out flyers on behalf of the "Caledonia Resistance."

Entitled "A Sad State of Affairs," the pamphlet stated: "[Provincial negotiator David Peterson] makes ridiculous claims that both Caledonia and the reserve are open for business. You can't put a nice spin on this. The Native occupiers are the cause of our economic downslide. The barricade is the cause of our economic downslide. The blocked rail lines are the cause of our economic downslide. The uncertainty of government land guarantees is the cause of our economic downslide. The inability of our leaders to see this occupation for what it is adds to the economic downslide."

The pamphlet poses a number of questions: Why have water and hydro not been cut off in the occupied area? Why aren't Natives being grilled about their response to deplorable living conditions on reserves? And "How are they managing or mismanaging federal handouts to the tune of $5.6 billion?"

While the last two questions haven't much to do with the unresolved land claim, they do serve as an indication of the town's anger. Rice told reporters that Caledonia Resistance is an informal group of town residents whose members are running out of patience with the situation. Caledonia had been inconvenienced at this point for less than a month. Six Nations, on the other hand, had been waiting for resolution to its concerns since at least 1841. Anger, and the very real danger of economic catastrophe, do not allow for townspeople to entertain the irony of that comparison.
Len would not give his last name. He waved printouts of remarks made online by Kahntineta Horn and Hazel Hill. Horn, from Kahnawake, was an activist during the Oka confrontation near Montreal in 1990. She is behind the Mohawk Nation News Service (MNN), an Internet site that has no formal recognition by any Mohawk Nation government. Her releases are angry in tone and contain an "in your face" version of events from the traditional Indigenous perspective, some say from the Mohawk warrior perspective. With such a long history of delay and bureaucratic trickery that has been employed to impede the resolution of land claims, she has a lot of material to work with.

Len is angered by the tough, sovereignist tone of Horn's writing. During a long conversation with Windspeaker as the evening came to an end, he acknowledged that he and the other people in town are not knowledgeable about the history of the relationship between Six Nations and Canada. But he insisted that the angry and aggressive MNN releases are not helping.

The headline the next day in the Hamilton Spectator, the largest daily newspaper in the region, was "Townsfolk lose their cool." And yes, some did. The story focused on a confrontation between a Native woman and Smith, a non-Native man.

Tuscarora Nation citizen Diana Doxtdator, the librarian at the Six Nations' library in Ohsweken and the sister of Darrell Doxtdator, the senior political advisor of elected Chief Dave General, appeared suddenly in the crowd on the town side and engaged members of the Caledonia Resistance and the very angry and vocal Smith. She tried to make the case that the real enemy was a federal government that has dragged its feet on the settlement of outstanding land issues for generations. The townsfolk weren't interested in hearing that. They were interested only in something being done about the economic harm the blockade was doing to their town.

What was noticeably absent in that Spectator story, or in any other media coverage of the event, was another confrontation between two non-Native women a few minutes later. Nancy Shepherd was angry. She said she is an employee of the local McDonald's. Although she's been off work with an injury, she said she had heard second-hand from her co-workers that business was "very, very slow." She decided she had the right to go up the hill to the Six Nations side since Doxtdator had made an appearance on the town side.

Cheryl Green, a petite blond-haired Caledonia resident, confronted Shepherd as she tried to force her way through the police line, telling her it was not the right thing to do, nor the right time. An animated discussion ensued in which several others joined on both sides as the police stood their ground and refused to be baited by those who accused them of taking the Native side. In the end, peace prevailed and the two women were able to agree to disagree.