Back behind the flags and the partly finished houses, there is a community of people who have spent the last year learning who they really are and what they can do.
It's a community anxious for the end of tension and conflict that have sapped commerce and goodwill alike, tearing the fabric of relationships with their neighbours in Caledonia that took generations to build.
This is the dichotomy of Six Nations, a place where the reclamation, as it's called here, has brought equal amounts of pride and fear, of certainty and uncertainty.
The pride comes from standing together where factionalism and detachment once divided the people.
THE PAIN COMES from knowing that there are neighbours on the other side of that site who now hate them. And from not knowing whether two communities that had come to depend on one another can learn to trust again.
In the year since the reclamation began, the authority of the Iroquois Confederacy, the traditional government of the people of Six Nations -- once reduced to little more than a symbolic remnant of its former self -- has been restored, with its chiefs acting as official agents for their people.
In January, the chiefs -- with the endorsement of the elected band council that had supplanted them generations earlier -- reoccupied their traditional council house. The building, dating back to the 1840s, had been locked and vacant.
The rebirth of the confederacy is the leading edge of a broader cultural renaissance sparked by the reclamation. Generations either too young or too far removed from their culture are becoming hungry to know more about their history, their languages, their traditions and their struggles.
But in Ohsweken as in Caledonia, business has dropped off considerably since last February. Non-natives who used to shop there are either too fearful or too angry to shop there now.
Likewise, natives who shopped in Caledonia are now going to Hagersville or Brantford, for the same reasons.
Lynda Powless has kept an especially close watch on her community over the past year. She is the editor of the weekly Turtle Island News and founder of Turtle Island Publications, which produces magazines of interest to natives.
She has covered the conflict and advised community leaders on how best to communicate with outside media.
To coincide with the anniversary, she is publishing a pictorial history of the reclamation, called Six Nations at the Crossroads.
The soft cover volume -- similar to a sports program -- is filled with photographs from April 20, the day Six Nations residents pushed back the OPP as they descended on the disputed property before dawn.
"That day, both of our worlds changed," Powless says. "That's the day everybody remembers and will always remember."
The weeks that followed were especially raucous and uncertain. Would the conflict escalate, change, end? No one knew and no one knows today, either.
Powless remembers Friday and Saturday nights during the summer when Six Nations people would gather at the site just to see what the people on the other side were doing.
"We'd be on the other side, watching what was going on," she says. "Frankly, for a lot of people on our side, it was like, 'Let's go watch the Caledonia people and see what they're going to do now.' It became better than watching TV."
But TVs don't throw rocks, and TVs can be unplugged. The effects of a conflict that has run a full year are showing.
"It is tiring, and I think the government is playing on that," Powless says. "They're stretching it out, because they figure, 'Those people will just go home.' They don't understand. We are home."
* * *
The pictures of flaming tires and masked defenders that have become icons for the native and non-native news media alike are not what Diane Keye wants to symbolize her people or even the conflict itself.
For her, the anniversary is a time for reflection.
"We've got to take what's positive and what's negative and reflect on that," she says. "That's what I think the anniversary is. It's a time to take note of everything that's happened and decide how are we going to move forward."
Keye is an announcer and producer for Six Nations radio station CKRZ-FM. During the early months of the reclamation, she was filling in as executive director, a time when she and other members of the station's busy staff worked days on end without sleep, trying to bring balanced, reliable information to their people in a time of upheaval and uncertainty.
"EVERYBODY'S EMOTIONS were just tossed up in the air," she said.
The year has changed her, as it's changed her people.
"It's re-lit that fire in a lot of people that we are a strong, proud people," she says. "I think it really made people re-examine who they are and what they believe."
Last spring, there were jokes at the site that someone should plant a garden because they were probably going to be there a while. As the conflict enters its second year, it's not a joke any more.
Still, Keye, like Powless, is genuinely hopeful there will be a meaningful resolution before anyone has to consider the best way to mark the second anniversary.