Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

This is a story of frustration and the violation of human rights, when a country turns on its own citizens. Please stop and ask yourself what you would think if your whole town was ordered to move up the highway and combine with residents of another community. The GTA merger into one city of Toronto has created a fervor and no one was even asked to leave their land behind, just amalgamate. Can you identify with such a frustration?

To make matters worse this government, over which you have no control, promises to return your town when it is done, after using it for military training and maneuvers. And while you are away it develops a shoreline park for its friends over your grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ bones. A parcel of your town is even sold by this “benevolent” government to a developer who divides it up into valuable lakeview lots. They tell you that your town councilors have been compensated for this and not to worry, for you may one day be allowed the “privilege” of moving back to where you, your parents and grandparents were born and grew up -- until now.

Time passes. The older people in your community pass on. Your cemetery is now a park. Where will you lay your loved ones to rest? The young people become tired of empty promises and act on the injustices that they have seen their elders carry in their hearts and minds. The former town is occupied again with faith in the future of tomorrow. This place is now called Aazhoohenda.

The government has left your former home littered with buried explosives which threaten to pollute the water supply. The Department of Defence has left a mess and indeed it has been a poor tenant. They will not give you title to this land, nor will they undo the mess.

The “new” people who now live on the real estate sold from your community do not recognize your history to this place. A racist organization is imported help keep control of these lots, so afraid are these “new” people of anyone different from themselves. And it still remains for you to recover your cemetery.

If this scenario sounds vaguely familiar, it is. And worse, it is a true story, not fiction. But even scarier, it takes place here in Canada, not someplace else. Real people’s lives were impacted by a real government. Some residents, the “new” people, who replaced the original inhabitants, still refuse that the history that their homes were built on is valid.

Today we are inclined to throw the “old” away and if this includes someone else’s human rights so be it, for they are not our rights being affected. This is sad and if you look down at the ground that you are standing on you must realize that to dismiss the “old” things is folly for it foretells of our own destruction through disrespect of the very foundation of the earth.

This is the history of the frustration that led up to the occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park by the Stoney Point Nation in southern Ontario along the shores of Lake Huron during the summer of 1995.

The media coverage of Ipperwash has faded but the loss of Dudley George to his family and friends has not. The conflict at Ipperwash did not have to happen. Other pressing headlines now replace the media’s temporary interest in aboriginal affairs.

To the Ontario government’s surprise verification of an aboriginal burial site in the provincial park lay in documents housed in Ottawa. The this fact made it absurd to sustain trespassing charges by the OPP against the Stoney Pointers. But this was only researched by the government after a tactical unit, i.e. swat team, was called in and a death and other shootings occurred.

The need to protest the government’s occupation and therefore the public’s occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park reached fruition during the summer of 1995, just as the Harris government came to power. The Stoney Point Reserve had been expropriated through the War Measures Act in 1942. Part of this land was used for the military base, Camp Ipperwash. The Department of Indian Affairs mandated the removal and merger of the Stoney Pointers to the Kettle Reserve. It is then that the Stoney Point Nation lost its independent voice in dealing with the provincial and federal governments.

The provincial and federal governments could have negotiated a resolution to the land claim at Ipperwash instead of denying it. Of course the government has the faith that no one else will be interested enough to care or say anything that would support the aboriginal population.

In this attitude we are all complicit and we do not identify with the frustrations experienced by the Stoney Point community. But if your son or daughter were late coming home from your neighborhood park, where they indeed frustrated some authoritarian figures because they would not leave the park, would you expect the province to call out a swat team to remove them? Worse yet, would you expect them to be shot at and maybe killed?

This exercise in tyranny is being repeated by governments and people in power towards indigenous peoples around the world. Here in Ontario, petitions were read in the Ontario Legislature that applauded the actions of Sergeant Deane on Sept 6, 1995 which further shows the systemic racism in Canada. The Harris government and Lambton MPP Marcel Beaubien are implicated in instructing the OPP’s actions that night. The officer convicted and charged of shooting Dudley George, the first native killed in this century over a land claim, received only 180 hours of “community service”, is allowed to leave and enter the province, still receives his pay and will be allowed to carry a firearm after his “sentence” is up.

If this is not insulting enough to anyone’s sense of justice, Ontario Attorney General Charles Harnick and Premier Harris refuse to call a full public inquiry into the events leading up to and surrounding the shooting of Dudley George. The police were never held responsible for the beating of Bernard George the same night. A doctor later verified over 20 baton wounds to his body.

What would you do if your family was treated like this? How could you not be outraged? How could you give up caring? Would you not want an inquiry into why you can no longer hold your loved one in your arms? And most of all, wouldn’t expect your neighbors to be just as outraged? In this context, then, why is Ipperwash so hard for some people to understand? Could your son or daughter be next? Support for a public inquiry into Ipperwash has garnered international support. Amnesty International has called for an inquiry as well as the human rights organization KOLA from Brussels, Belgium. It would be heartening to have more Canadians, especially Ontarians, join in this concern.