HAMILTON — During the lawless native occupation around David Brown's house in Caledonia, Ont., he found himself sitting in his underwear at his kitchen table with a shotgun held between his knees, keeping watch in the dark.

And on one occasion, his hand slipped down the gun's barrel and hit the trigger. A blistering explosion roused him, court heard here Monday.

"During this time I was afraid to go to sleep," he said. "I dozed off for a second," he said. "I blew a hole through my kitchen ceiling."

Brown was the first witness in a $7-million lawsuit filed by himself, his wife, Dana Chatwell, and her teenage son, Dax, against Ontario Provincial Police and the province for not protecting them during an ongoing native occupation.

The often violent confrontations started in earnest on April 20, 2006, when the OPP raided a 70-acre site, that was being developed into a residential subdivision, to eject natives two months after they first occupied the site to protest land-claim grievances.

Hundreds of natives from a nearby reserve returned to the site that day, many of them masked and armed with bats, axes and hockey sticks. They repelled the police, reclaimed the site and set up roadblocks along the access street, trapping the Brown house, the only home on the native side of the barricade.

Court heard earlier that OPP officers would not breach the native's barricade, even in the face of frantic 911 phone calls.

Justice Thomas Bielby watched Monday as Brown broke down on the witness stand.

With his face growing red, his eyes welling with tears and his hand yanking at his collar to loosen his tie, he paused several times to compose himself.

"Our life just turned around," he said. "We had to move our son out of the house to live with another family for six weeks."

The native protesters decided when he could come and go from his own home, even issuing him a "passport," he said.

His description of seeing his wife, who had started an in-home hair salon business that was now in ruins, with her "head bent over, rocking back and forth asking God why her son could not live with her," prompted several spectators to leave the courtroom in tears.

At the height of the reclamation by the natives, the area around his home resembled a war zone, he said.

Hundreds of tires were dropped across the highway, doused with gasoline and lit; a wooden bridge over railway tracks was set ablaze and allowed to burn to the ground because the fire chief did not feel the OPP could protect his men if they turned their hoses on against native orders.

"You could see smoke in every direction."

Brown testified he was repeatedly threatened, his property stolen, his free passage halted, his family subjected to loud intimidation and harassment throughout the nights. Rocks and mud were thrown at them and their home, he said.

None of it provoked any response by the OPP, he said.

Brown's description of the occupation by the natives as "a military presence" comes after Crown lawyer David Feliciant said that the case "must be understood against the backdrop of the unique character of aboriginal occupations and protests."

Caledonia is about 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto.