Native blockade sparks protest from group of Caledonia residents

MATTHEW CAMPBELL

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

September 1, 2008 at 10:31 PM EDT

Native protesters blocked a main road in the town of Caledonia, Ont., for much of the day yesterday after three people were arrested for mischief in nearby Brantford. Non-native residents of Caledonia staged their own counterprotest later in the day, blocking the same road.

The native protesters dragged a steel barrier across Argyle Street South yesterday morning near the Douglas Creek Estate housing development, a site some native groups argue lies on land reserved for Six Nations natives in an 18th-century treaty.

Ontario Provincial Police officers were quickly called to the scene, and spent several hours negotiating with the protesters, who removed their barricade in the early afternoon. OPP Constable Larry Plummer said the natives “got their point across.”

The Mohawk Nation News, a communications group based in Kahnawake, Que., said the blockade was a response to an earlier incident in which “a man was grabbed by the cops from his van and held incommunicado for hours,” along with his two sons.

Staff Sergeant Cheney Venn of the Brantford Police Service said the man, Steven Powless, 43, and the two young men arrested with him had been disrupting the construction site of a Hampton Inn hotel in the Southern Ontario city.

The counterprotest by non-native Caledonia residents was broken up by police by 6 p.m. One person was arrested and charged as a young offender with mischief and resisting arrest.

Yesterday's blockades brought back unpleasant memories. In 2006, native protesters occupied the Douglas Creek Estates development while it was under construction, setting off a chain of demonstrations that turned violent.

The Ontario government subsequently bought out Douglas Creek Estates' developer, Henco Industries, although relations between natives and others in the Caledonia area remain uneasy.

Constable Plummer said he was hopeful, however, that yesterday's events did not presage a return to outright confrontation. “We're hoping that everything is all done,” he said, “and that cooler heads will prevail.”