A Six Nations leader is warning of a new round of native protests unless governments back off from taxing its cigarette industry.
"As a nation, we will resist it to the last breath," said Leroy Hill, secretary of the Six Nations Confederacy council. "As a young leader, I am concerned because I know the extent it can go to.
"Two-thirds (of our population) is my age or younger and they're ready to kick some ass," Hill said Monday after touring the tobacco auction warehouse in Delhi.
He said that tensions are running high over tobacco because the industry has become the mainstay of the reserve's economy, replacing the traditional hunting and fishing that used to support residents. "Tobacco is a big issue for our people. A good percentage (of our residents) survive on it."
Six Nations is home to a cigarette factory that employs more than 500 people, a few tobacco farms, and numerous roadside smoke shacks that sell discounted cigarettes.
Hill said government has no right to tax native industries because aboriginal territories are a nation separate from Canada.
Right now, government collects $120 million a year from the Six Nations tobacco industry, through such things as the purchase of filters and paper for the cigarette factory, and gives back $62 million in grant money that is "dictated to us how to use," he said. On Monday, Hill and a group of other Six Nations representatives toured the warehouse where Ontario's tobacco crop is sold every fall and winter.
An auction employee and members of the Norfolk-Oxford-Elgin Landowners Association, a protest group of farmers, showed the group how the crop is graded and sold.
Clyde Powless, a member of the Six Nations delegation, said natives identify with Canada's troubled farmers because government is "doing the same thing to them they are doing to us - stealing their land and stealing their livelihoods."
Native leaders said they will join the landowners group in the former Tillsonburg tobacco auction warehouse Thursday night for a rally.
"We're looking for ways and means to forge an alliance (with tobacco farmers) to strengthen our own position," Hill said.
The visit to the exchange comes at a time when the province's tobacco growing industry is on the verge of big change.
The crop has shrunk by more than three-quarters in the past decade, while the tobacco board has called for an end to the quota system and a return to some type of contract buying with cigarette companies.
Powless said natives want to educate themselves on how a tobacco exchange works.