Man engulfed in flames as bands celebrate lands deal

A day of celebration 73 years in the making for the people of the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point in Ontario turned into a scene of confrontation and suffering Sept. 20 at the gates of the former army camp slated to be returned to Aboriginal control by the federal government.

Band member Pierre George, brother of Dudley George, who was killed by police near the former Camp Ipperwash in 1995, was briefly engulfed in flames during a confrontation between band members. They were arguing about an agreement with Ottawa that will hand over the 1,000 ha of land, known as Stoney Point locally. He was taken to hospital in the nearby city of Sarnia.
Friends said later he was being treated for second degree burns to his neck, hands, and ears.

All photos: Colin Graf

Members of the community had been invited by the chief and council to take part in a community walk along four kms of highway between the two land bases to celebrate the band’s ratification of an agreement worth over $90 million between the band and the federal government.

The deal was supposed to return the army camp lands, taken by Ottawa during the Second World War, to Aboriginal control and bring resolution to a long-simmering dispute between band members who have been living in the camp buildings since 1993 and supporters of the established chief and council.

Instead, as the marchers, carrying signs remembering their Stoney Point ancestors and wearing t-shirts with photos of deceased family printed on them, approached the camp gates, they saw smoke rising from a small protest fire set by Pierre George and another Stoney Pointer, Jesse Oliver, in front of the former army gatehouse. 

He and George hoped to show that some of the band members don’t support the deal, and are “tired of Kettle Point making decisions for a separate reserve,” Oliver said.  The Stoney Pointers claim they were once a separate band and want to be recognized as such again.

When other band members, led by gatehouse attendant Mike Cloud, tried to extinguish the fire with small water containers, Pierre George emptied a portable gas can on the fire to re-ignite it. The can fell and flames rushed up his arms and across his neck.  Some on-lookers said he caught fire when the can was kicked back at him.

Quickly removing his shirt, Pierre was walking and talking to supporters while an ambulance was called.  He was taken to the ambulance on a stretcher.

A shouting match ensued, led by Pierre and Dudley George’s sister Carolyn, who tried to prevent band manager Lorraine George from bringing the marchers and Elders in wheelchairs from passing the gatehouse.  

The occupiers had not been told the Kettle Point members wanted to come on to the army camp lands.

“As soon as you get all that money you come here disrupting our community,” Carolyn told the manager.

The agreement hands control of the land, plus the money, to the Kettle Point council, while the Stoney Pointers argue the land should be returned solely to the Elders who lived there and their descendants.

As the marchers entered the camp, a buoyant mood was evident at the prospect of Elders seeing their old lands again.

Barbara George-Johnson, 83, was smiling even though she recalled the sad day in 1942 her family left Stoney Point, along the southern shore of Lake Huron near the resort town Grand Bend.  “Our home was uprooted.  When I came home from school that day, it (the house) was up on a moving truck.”  Many members of the 16 families removed from the land moved to the nearby Kettle Point.      
  
After the fire incident, Kettle Point Chief Tom Bressette blamed Ottawa for the dispute between the groups that led to Pierre George’s injury.

 “Go ask the federal government to come down here and straighten this mess out.  Don’t ask us. We didn’t create it,” he said in an interview.

The occupiers oppose the new agreement as it returns control of the land to the entire band.  They want it returned to the families who lived there prior to their removal in 1942 to the nearby Kettle Point lands.  Chief Bressette has promised payments to all band members, with larger amounts to the Stoney Point. 

The vote, held almost 20 years after Dudley George’s shooting death by an OPP sniper,  passed “overwhelmingly”  Sept. 18, according to a news release from  Kettle Point. The walk was supposed to echo a similar walk in May 1993 when Elders walked into the army camp, still in use at the time, and began an occupation there.

Two years later Dudley George was killed by a member of an Ontario provincial police tactical team after the police marched on First Nation’s occupiers who had moved from the army camp lands into the adjacent Ipperwash Provincial Park.

In spite of his support for the agreement, Chief Bressette told reporters the deal is inadequate.

“If people analyzed this deal…they would see how badly we’ve been treated by the government of this county,” he said, describing it as “bittersweet” for his people.

The deal is unfair because it does not include money for a “healing package,” that would pay for therapists and traditional healers to help those traumatized by the original removal and events surrounding the death of Dudley George in 1995. That kind of help would also help heal the divisions in the community, he explained.