April 28, 2007
TYENDINAGA- It’s less than 48 hours since Shawn Brant shut down rail traffic on one of the busiest rail lines in the country and on this day he’s relaxing by a campfire with his ever-present personal effects — a cigarette and a cell phone.
The usual camouflage attire is nowhere to be found. Today, it’s jeans and a T-shirt for the 43-year-old Brant, the man whose resumé over the past decade includes rerouting highway traffic, blocking rail lines, trashing government offices and commandeering gravel pits and generally rubbing sand in the mix of civil discourse.
Brant is happy to explain why he has chosen a life that often sees him reviled, jailed and, now, living in a school bus in a gravel quarry.“I realized in 2001 that people didn’t care what happened to us in our (Mohawk) community,” he says. “Even on the left, the social justice left, there’s a line people can’t cross. I’m sure it’s just because people can’t comprehend the degree of suffering.”
For 17 years, Brant has rallied followers and fellow protesters to fight against what he percieves to be a litany of injustices against native people and poor people Ontario, alike, often to the chagrin of native and non-native leaders alike.Criticism of him is widespread and heated — that he’s an attention monger, a media whore, an instigator or finally just a fringe leader representing a radical minority.He’s not surprised to be asked about any of them. He’s heard them himself.
Brant’s most recent endeavours have focused on the local section of the Canadian National rail line some 15 km east of Belleville, on one of the most heavily traveled train routes in Canada. He and fellow protesters blocked it April 20, cancelling trips for scores of Via Rail passengers. When a police officer served a court injunction to clear the tracks,Brant shook the cop’s hand. Then, in plain view of television cameras, he jammed the injunction in his back pocket, ignored the order and kept the blockade until about 6 a.m. the next day. Last year, he led a blockade to demand faster progress in the Caledonia land claim negotiations.
Thurlow Aggregates has been occupied since March 22 after Brant told the owner he had 60 days to get his affairs in order before he was shut down for good. The demonstrators want the quarry’s licence revoked, saying it is an affront for gravel to continuously be trucked away on what is proven to be Mohawk land, particularly during negotiations. The protest will expand in the coming days and weeks if the licence is not revoked, Brant has warned. He named their targets: Highway 401, the CN rail line and the town of Deseronto itself.
Brant once worked in an office and even ran a somewhat successful kitchen cabinet shop that closed amid accusations by staff that Brant’s activism took over from his responsibilities as a business operator.That activism began in earnest in 1990 when he and two others traveled to the now infamous Mohawk standoff at Oka, Quebec.
They arrived July 11, the day of the armed showdown that left one person dead. Brant had never seen anything like it, but said the event sealed the deal for him.
At Oka, during a meeting of aboriginal supporters, someone said ‘the outsiders’ were causing trouble. An Akwesasne man stood and said it was no longer just an issue of their nation. “This is an issue of the Mohawk nation,” he said.The words resounded in Brant’s head. Since then, his protesting reads like a timeline of Ontario aboriginal disputes and anti-poverty protests. In 1994, he helped shut down a Revenue Canada building in Toronto. Then he led the charge to close the band office of his own community government, the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte (MBQ), over alleged financial impropriety. In 1995, he went to Ipperwash, but was not there when Dudley George was shot by OPP.
During the time of the Ipperwash standoff, however, he broke into and trashed the Ottawa office of Ovide Mercredi, then national chief for the Assembly of First Nations, for the national chief’s stated views on Ipperwash. Brant did six months in jail for that.In 1996, it was the Shannonville Turton Penn land claim protest — an encampment to protest dawdling talks on that claim. He spent some of 1997 in prison on a variety of offences largely related to ignoring court orders. In 1998, he joined forces with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), mobilizing urban First Nations people into what he calls “a fighting force.”In 2001, he trashed the office of then Ontario finance minister Jim Flaherty as part of OCAP’s Defeat Harris campaign. Brant remembers doing a radio interview then, telling a reporter via telephone that the Flaherty event was sparked by three suicides in four days by mothers in a northern native community. When the reporter suggested that would be “too hard to sell” in a short sound bite, Brant, usually media-friendly, hung up on her.
Ironically, Brant used to work as a civil servant for Employment and Immigration, deciding how much people should get for employment insurance.To Brant, his attention-grabbing antics are necessary whether people agree with them or not.
He grew up on the Tyendinaga reserve in a home with no running water. It wasn’t that his family was poorer than most — his mother was a teacher and his father a former General Motors employee — but “no one had it,” he said.The way Brant recalls it, Tyendinaga was a poverty-ridden community that worked on a system of bartering and friendly charity. His mother did paperwork for a fisherman with poor literacy skills. In exchange, Brant would go down to the fisherman’s bin and fetch two fish to take home for dinner. Families with nearly nothing didn’t hesitate to share with each other.
The territory today still experiences poverty in many forms, but prosperity is seen in places where enterprising residents take advantage of sales in a tax-free environment.As a teenager, Brant said he watched what he described as a little-seen reel in his family living room of an officer urinating on an old Mik-maq man during the 1981 police raid of Restigouche. He can’t remember exactly how he felt at the time, but the impact was profound.Brant is now a married father of three and studying the Mohawk language. He uses self-taught legal knowledge to represent other Mohawks in court. He will be before the courts again soon, himself, as he is currently charged with uttering threats in connection to a November, 2006, demonstration that included a clash with Canadian Forces soldiers — who happened upon a protest while on vehicle exercises — on Highway 2 outside the Mohawk territory
.Issues that become a crisis tend to be basic in nature, such as a community’s desire for clean water or the return of stolen land, he said. The fact that they are so difficult baffles him. Walkerton was a crisis, he said, and “we have 250 Walkertons.”“How in 1990 did a person die (at Oka) when people were defending a place where their ancestors are buried?” he said. “We support the negotiating process. All we’re asking is to stop taking our land while we’re talking about it. How does that turn into an issue?”
To many in aboriginal politics, Brant’s name is well-known, whether his tactics are endorsed or reviled.“Of course,” responded an Assembly of First Nations official when asked if he knew who Brant was. Some Internet message boards call him a terrorist. Another compares him to Gandhi.To OCAP, Brant is a “sensible and effective organizer,” said OCAP spokesman John Clarke.“We consider Shawn to be a remarkable person who we admire and respect, and we certainly stand in support of the Mohawk nation,” he said. “We consider Shawn Brant to be a friend and an ally.”Not everyone thinks he is so remarkable. Chief R. Donald Maracle of the MBQ has said council does not formally support the protest, nor do band councillors support Brant’s tactics.After all, Brant called Maracle and his council crooks and occupied the band council headquarters for four days back in the 1990s. It ended when Brant was dragged out and charged after OPP tactical team officers were called in by band officials.
Deseronto Mayor Norm Clark sighs when the name Shawn Brant is mentioned. At a recent public meeting in Deseronto, tempers boiled over and residents loudly let Clark and OPP officials know about the headaches they said Brant has caused. His real loves, they said, are instigation and headlines. And he has been generating too much of both.“Shawn Brant feeds off media exposure and confrontation,” Clark said at the meeting. “If we confront Shawn, that’s feeding right into his trap. I honestly believe the railway block was done because things were too quiet, and it hadn’t been in the paper for a while.”But the mayor bemoans the fact Brant’s protests have led to divisions between the long-standing peaceful relationship between natives and non-natives who live in Deseronto and at Tyendinaga.
The occupation of the quarry has a touch of irony, Clark said in an interview. Brant and his followers are protesting the theft of their land, then taking over a privately-owned quarry. With negotiations ongoing, any further action is counterproductive.“I believe the negotiating team has been appointed by the government, so let the Mohawks and the federal government negotiate,” he said.Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, a University of Toronto instructor and expert in land claims and aboriginal community development, doesn’t advocate the approach.“Shawn Brant is not helping us by alienating the Canadian population,” she said. “I think he has a role to play...Someone has to kick out the jams to get (communication) started, but it doesn’t have to be violent.”She has a lighter look at Canada-First Nations relations. If Canadians understand the issues, they will use that understanding when voting. But that requires better public relations, not making enemies, she said.“We’ve seen that violence begets violence. We’ve seen frustration beget frustration,” she said. “It ends up getting people inflamed in the wrong direction...There are 1.3 million aboriginal people in Canada and 31 million others. It’s to our advantage to bring them on side and get them to understand.”
But, Brant doesn’t plan to quit kicking out the jams any time soon. He said for First Nations communities, 2007 is the year of fighting back, and a day of protest is planned for June 21 — one that national native leaders have urged to be non-violent.“This is the year we redefine and reshape who we are within this society,” he said. “Watch how many suicides there won’t be this year. Things like this are giving people hope.”