In her new book, Helpless, Globe and Mail reporter Christie Blatchford tells an incredible story of violence, vandalism and lawlessness, a story made even more astonishing by the fact that at the time, the Toronto media just didn't want to know.

"It is outside the conventional view of aboriginal Canadians to have them photographed and interviewed while involved in acts of lawlessness and violence," Blatchford told the North Shore News from Toronto. "People in my business aren't used to having that kind of discussion. We're more comfortable dealing with natives as one-dimensional victims. They've often been victims, certainly of government in this country, but now that's the conventional view. It was noticeably stark how often the non-native residents of Caledonia were painted in this red-necky way. This wasn't a conspiracy, but the Globe and Mail, my newspaper, has a particular way of looking at native issues. So does the CBC."

The trouble in Caledonia began in February of 2006, when a handful of protestors from the Six Nations reserve occupied the nearby Douglas Creek Estates subdivision, which was still under construction. The province, the federal government, and the elected Six Nations council all agree that there is no native claim on the land. Nevertheless, police officers wouldn't move the protestors along.

"They should have acted like cops on the first day," Blatchford says firmly. "There were only a half dozen protestors who showed up that first day. I think the OPP might have done what they had often done. This kind of 'feeling of the waters' was not unheard of in that area. But the police never tried to make them move. They could had given them a couple of hours to make their point and then said 'OK folks, that's it, you've got to move on.' But we'll never know."

Looming over the entire Caledonia episode is "the shadow of Ipperwash," says Blatchford.

In 1995, members of the Stoney Point band occupied Ipperwash provincial park, arguing it had been illegally expropriated from them. During a violent confrontation, an OPP officer shot and killed protestor Dudley George. The officer was later convicted of criminal negligence but received no jail time. George's family called for an inquiry, and the then-opposition Ontario Liberals seized on the issue.

"So they get elected, they call the inquiry. The inquiry is still going on, 200 clicks down the 401, when the Caledonia occupation happens. You think those guys wanted to have anything remotely similar happen on their watch? Not a chance," Blatchford says.

While the OPP did have a large number of officers on hand in Caledonia, they were entirely passive as roads were blockaded and townspeople harassed well outside of Douglas Creek Estates. The response plan was largely a product of the Ipperwash inquiry and was overseen by Superintendent Ron George, head of the OPP's aboriginal response team -- and Dudley George's first cousin.

"So what the townspeople and the natives saw was egregious law-breaking. Take the hydro transformer being razed to the ground. The whole area's lights go out for three days -- including people on Six Nations -- and no one has yet been arrested for that. So what everyone says is 'Holy Shit! See what they did and no one's arrested.' The occupiers are emboldened and the townspeople are intimidated."

The OPP did make one attempt to evict the protestors. But even this belated effort was thrown into confusion by attempts to tread carefully.

"They have a pre-dawn raid," Blatchford says. "They don't carry all their equipment, they leave their guns in unlocked vans by the side of the road, they don't have enough people, they forget Six Nations is just a hop, skip and a jump away with hundreds of people ready to come in, they ignore their own intelligence. They completely f***d it up."

The police were forced to retreat in the face of massed protestors.

Tensions rose, as outraged townspeople vented their anger at the police.

Several officers did criticize the OPP response plan, but they quickly got the message to shut up. Some were banned from the Caledonia area. One who didn't keep quiet was unceremoniously reassigned to Toronto. He later filed a grievance and won.

What's more, townspeople who began to organize and protest themselves were quickly painted as troublemakers by the police. At one point the front-line officers were told that their mission was "to protect the natives from the non-natives."

A police union official confided to Blatchford that it will take a full generation before the OPP recovers from the humiliation and confusion of the Caledonia occupation.

There was a string of ugly incidents, including the severe beating of a man building a house as a present for his daughter, the roughing up of U.S. drug enforcement agents, and the torching of a wooden bridge. In the last case, firefighters refused to approach the blazing structure, saying they had no faith the police would protect them. But much of the residents' anger comes from a steady stream of harassment and intimidation, from presenting ad hoc "passports" in order to drive to their homes to finding their yards torn up by ATVs in the middle of the night.

Douglas Creek Estates remains in occupied limbo, and much of the confrontation has moved to the courts. The federal and provincial government are still trying -- at enormous cost to the taxpayer -- to find a negotiated settlement.

"The Ipperwash judge said himself about the aboriginal response that the OPP urged upon him and he adopted," said Blatchford. "He said 'Make no mistake, this does not mean that natives are exempt from the rule of law.' Nor are they. So why did the police and the government act like they were? The rule of law means we all agree that we all be bound by and treated equally under the law. That didn't happen. It's a very dangerous precedent."