December 4, 2009
Dana Chatwell yesterday wept and raged bitterly as she described the damage done to her family by years of living in the pressure cooker of the native occupation in Caledonia.
"I don't know if we'll be together," she said of her husband, Dave Brown. "I don't know what's going to happen." Of her 18-year-old son, Dax, she said at one point, "I just hope we haven't ruined him." Of the house she once loved, she said, "I had lots of plans on that house, but oh God, I just hate it."
Then she buried her head in her arms and sobbed.
Ms. Chatwell spent the day telling Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Bielby about what it was like to live cheek-by-jowl to the former Douglas Creek Estate development, seized by natives from the Six Nations reserve in February, 2006, and still occupied by them to this day.
The couple's house is bordered on two sides by the former DCE, and it is this family which more than any other in the small Southwestern Ontario town has borne the brunt of almost four years of native occupation.
They are suing the Ontario government and the OPP for a total of $7-million for effectively leaving them without policing or protection for much of that period.
Judge Bielby heard that even now, life on the site can turn ugly in a split second, and on the strength of a rumour alone, a minor incident, a perceived slight to natives.
A profanity-laced 15-minute video, shot from the family's deck on June 10, 2007, and played in court yesterday, offered terrible evidence of the price the three have paid for the sin of proximity.
Earlier this day, a Caledonia youth had fired a pellet gun at a sign on the railway tracks near DCE. The natives were furious and claimed children in the area could have been hurt; apparently, this youth was later charged.
Yet, though this had nothing to do with Ms. Chatwell or her family, location dictated that they would be punished for it.
The order of escalation went like this: Natives on the site began setting fires, one close to Ms. Chatwell's home; she or Mr. Brown phoned the police; OPP officers showed up; Ms. Chatwell wanted to call the fire department but was urged not to by the officers.
In the result, with Dax videotaping, as many as a dozen furious natives stood off and screamed profanities just feet from the deck where the family, some invited guests and several uniformed OPP officers were now gathered.
Among the shouts that could be distinguished from the chorus: "You're white - get over it!"; "You white mother fucker!"; and "I'm glad you think it's a fucking laughing matter; let's see how you feel when they get shot!" To the OPP, one man could be heard screaming, "You better be staying all night long!"
Some of the protesters wore bandanas over their faces.
Only after native chiefs apparently arrived did the mob disperse.
Asked by her lawyer Michael Bordin how she felt, Ms. Chatwell said, "Terrified, especially when the cops are standing there, doing nothing."
She told Judge Bielby that while things are quieter now, this sort of scene, with natives angry about one issue or another - some of which had nothing to do with her family - surrounding her house and threatening was common throughout 2007.
Many of the entries in the diaries, which she kept for the first two years of the occupation, are full of notes that read, "Natives, ATVs, masks," and "Natives in backyard" and "Natives closed highway," events which garnered nothing but local media attention, if that.
On the Labour Day weekend in 2008, she said, she got a call from her friend with a police scanner, warning her to "get the hell out because the natives are shutting down the highway. Something went on in Brantford."
She grabbed a sleepy Dax and got in the car, but was told at the site entrance, where there was now a makeshift barricade, that she wouldn't be allowed to leave.
She got out of the car to plead her case and found herself face-to-face with "a big native guy, plus two others wearing masks. He had a big 2X4 in his hands and when I said let me drive through, he said, 'No way, I own Caledonia.' " She could see an OPP officer on the other side, and two OPP cars behind her.
It was as Dax was trying to get into the driver's seat, she said, "that the two OPP officers turned around and left me. ... Soon as I see the OPPs leave me, I was scared ... I thought I'm in shit now." She raced back to the car, pushed Dax into the passenger's side and sped off via a back road to town.
The constant native scrutiny, daily indignities and helplessness wrought by the OPP's policing - the force had struck a deal not to enter DCE, but that often morphed into officers turning a blind eye to native criminality both on and off the site - took a terrible toll on them, Ms. Chatwell said, individually and as a family.
While she and Mr. Brown tried to protect Dax from the worst of it - sending him away whenever violence flared - they couldn't protect him from their private disintegration.
"I don't know how much damage we have done to him," she said once. She told the judge she is "proud of him because he is not a racist," but said, "Here I am, trying to raise my kid to have respect for the law when I don't even see the law happening in our town."
As for Mr. Brown, she offered a recent anecdote to explain his deterioration from the proud, hard-working, affable man with whom she first fell in love.
"I never realized how much psychological damage has happened to him," she said. "He is beaten.
"I saw a mouse the other day," she told the judge, "a mouse in the house." Every day since, she said, Mr. Brown has promised, "I'm going to get that mouse." But eight weeks later, the mouse is still there.
"That mouse has beaten him," she said.
"He can't even fight a mouse in our home. I don't know if he will ever be the same person again."