SIX NATIONS RESERVE, ONT. — When a 15-year-old boy piloting a stolen Hummer lost control and died in a high-speed police chase last October, just west of Niagara Falls, the circumstances were tragic but not unique.
Also stolen that night, by one of the boy's companions, was a Chevrolet Avalanche. And before the Chevy disappeared, it too was racing along Highway 20, back in the direction of the Six Nations territory, where both young men lived.
The twin thefts were a sign of the times. On and around Canada's most populous native reserve, the Six Nations of the Grand River, car theft has the hallmarks of a small industry, with stolen vehicles being dumped in quantities that can only be described as startling.
In 2004 to 2006, more than 1,200 vehicles with an estimated value of $33-million, were hauled away from the reserve. In 2007, at least 578 were recovered. This year's tally so far exceeds 80.
And because the 18,000-hectare reserve - an hour's drive west of Toronto and home to the protagonists in the long-running Caledonia land-claim tussle - is so thickly forested, the real numbers are probably higher still.
The Ontario Provincial Police rarely ventures on to the reserve without the approval of its 28-officer police force.
"Some cars stay buried in the woods for years," said Detective Constable Wesley Barnes of the OPP-led joint forces auto-theft team, recently joined by the Six Nations police. "If you gave me a helicopter and the time, I could find you a hundred stolen cars."
Spirited away from hotels, train stations and other spots from across Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, the stolen vehicles are most commonly dumped at night. And like the Hummer and the Avalanche, the targets of choice are high-end pickup trucks and SUVs made by General Motors.
Mostly they are stolen for their parts. Discovered the next morning - if they are discovered - they have usually been stripped of their wheels and other fixtures and sometimes torched.
Talk to police both on and off the reserve and they will tell you that, like everywhere else, a sizable proportion of the thieves are juveniles who face little or no jail time. And as also happens elsewhere, drugs appear to play a part in fuelling the trade in hot car parts - in particular, demand for the prescription painkiller Oxycontin.
Last year, the Six Nations police laid close to 100 auto-theft-related charges, said the force's liaison officer Constable Steve Montour. Of those, he said, "probably a third involve juveniles. The guys that organize this stuff, they're never going to touch a stolen car themselves with a 10-foot pole."
As for the Oxycontin abuse, "with the younger kids I'd say it's a significant factor," Constable Montour said. "It seems like these [pills] are everywhere."
Six Nations, with its 24,000 residents comprising members of the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga and Tuscarora nations, is a far cry from the squalid misery seen on many northern reserves.
Cut-price tobacco, sold at 300 or so outlets, is the biggest revenue earner. While unemployment on and off the reserve stood at around 17 per cent in 2006, Chiefswood Road, the principal street, is lined with busy stores and offices. There are eight schools, including a polytechnical college. And while there are shacks, trailers and long-abandoned clunkers along the paved and gravel roads, there are also large, modern houses.
Each generation does a little better than the previous one, said Lynda Powless, editor and publisher of the weekly Turtle Island News.
"This one is looking to things their parents didn't even dream of, didn't even think of."
But this is also a community that is wary of strangers, and from a policing perspective, the reserve's dense terrain and its location, surrounded by prosperous small towns and cities, translate into a formidable challenge.
Cars are filched for an array of reasons. Some theft involves joy rides or insurance fraud. Other vehicles are renumbered and resold domestically. Still more are shipped abroad, concealed in containers.
But of the 160,000 cars stolen nationwide in 2006, the Insurance Bureau of Canada reckons that parts from at least 25,000 were resold and recycled, invariably for a fraction of their value.
And by every estimate, the bulk of the vehicles being retrieved from Six Nations were stolen to be "chopped." Expensive wheels - sometimes worth several thousand dollars a set - head the list of the items sought by what police believe to be a loose network of crooked, off-reserve mechanics and auto-body shops.
Vehicles also get cannibalized for expensive stereo systems, global-positioning devices and air bags. On occasion, the engine or transmission is the stolen-to-order target.
"They take what they need," Det. Barnes said. "Say someone hits something and needs a new door. It gets ordered up."
Not everyone is so forthcoming about the car thefts, a reticence that perhaps reflects tensions over the divisive two-year-old land-claims standoff in nearby Caledonia, in which a group of natives has occupied a residential building site.
Among those who declined comment were OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, Six Nations chief Bill Montour and Six Nations police chief Glenn Lickers, who referred inquiries to Constable Montour.
Rick Dubin, the vice-president of investigative services at the IBC, had little to add beyond saying the bureau "has been aware over the past two or three years that there has been auto theft involving some people at Six Nations."
To Ms. Powless, who thinks the Six Nations police are badly under-resourced, the word "some" is key.
"They're coming from off the reserve, no question about it," she said of the thieves.
"I'm not saying we don't have car thieves here, we do, but not in those numbers. Dumping cars here is not unique to the reserve, they do it in any rural area. It's just that it's more noticeable in Six Nations."
Constable Montour suggests the thefts involve residents and non-residents in equal numbers.
"It's probably half and half," he said. "In reality, there is a couple of organized groups [on Six Nations] that are stealing cars and stripping them down and they have outside ties."
The 100 or so car-theft related charges laid by Six Nations police last year, involved around 75 people, one-quarter of whom, Constable Montour estimates, were non-residents.
"I have to say, quite proudly, our service has one of the highest ratios of charges with regard to possession of stolen property," he said.
"Our officers have become very good at catching these guys - catching them doing it, catching them in the cars."
Yet where juveniles are involved, Constable Montour said, the justice system often comes with a revolving door.
"They're getting into court - we're getting these kids, we're doing our job, we're putting them through the system - and they're not getting anything for it. They're walking out with nothing, or very little. They get more time for disqualified driving."
Det. Barnes concurs: "You see the same faces over and over again."
The OPP's Detective Inspector Scott Thomson, who oversees the combined forces auto theft unit, has spent many years working with the Six Nations police, who wield the same authority as police anywhere else. He praises their work.
"There's no walls up, and there's a lot of mutual respect," he said.
And he, too, perceives a serious drug issue among the reserve's criminally inclined youth.
"A lot of these kids are good kids with addiction problems and currently in that area there's no rehab facilities," he said.
Yet Insp. Thomson also worries about the wider consequences for the millions of drivers on southern Ontario highways and country roads.
And when police pursuits occur - in the summertime on the reserve, there's sometimes one a week, Constable Montour said - the price can be high.
In Mississauga last May, a Six Nations resident was arrested in an incident that saw five Peel Regional Police officers attempt to intercept a stolen SUV that was being driven at the officers, prompting the officers to open fire. The driver was wounded in the shoulder.
Then came the brief but fatal police chase of the Hummer, whose 18-year-old passenger was left badly injured when it smashed into a tree. Also hurt in that incident was a plainclothes officer, struck by the Avalanche.
In both instances, the province's Special Investigations Unit, which examines all police-related incidents of serious civilian injury, cleared the officers.
And while police across Ontario have been quietly urged to eschew car chases unless absolutely necessary, sometimes they are unavoidable.
"There's a safety issue here," Insp. Thomson said, "because the guys who are stealing the cars are not stopping."