Caledonia: The Weight of this Land

Hazel’s greying, elbow-length hair embraces the huge red ‘MOHAWK’ sloganed on her sweatshirt. Her blue eyes strongly hold my own, and her voice is mostly measured, but passion trembles some of the more important, battleground words, words like ‘sovereignty’, ‘colonialism’, and ‘hate’. Words like ‘ours’. Hazel is one of the leaders and spokespeople of the Six Nations’ reclamation of an ugly patch of scrubland and half-finished houses, a contended acreage that’s become synonymous with Caledonia, and representative of one of the most urgent challenges this country might not realise it faces.

A big guy who calls himself Whoodat steps in front of my car as I turn off from the highway to where a tarp-and-plywood shack and a maze of concrete blocks sits between the skeletal gates of the Douglas Creek Estates residences. He and a couple of others are taking their turn patrolling the entrance and stopping every new arrival, while a couple of OPP officers silently watch from a car parked across from the ‘Welcome to Caledonia’ sign. They haven’t heard I was coming, but after a few minutes of discussion on his walkie-talkie, Whoodat comes back to give me the go-ahead. “Anyone with an open mind and peace in their heart is welcome here,” he says in the same serious voice he had used to question my purpose.


“I own nothing.” One elder bluntly answers when I thank him for the wisdom he’s just finished imparting to a group of us newcomers who are here to experience first-hand what this controversy’s all about. “It ain’t mine – all things belong to the Creator, y’know?”

I think I do know, but I hold that understanding with a mind that’s also babbling with contradictory truths, facts, ways of the world. The principles at stake dwarf the few acres of would-be development that compose the occupation site. People here are struggling for a fundamentally new relationship between themselves and the Canada they feel has long oppressed them. They are also articulating a profoundly different vision of how land ought to be used by the humans who live on it. It’s attracted a curious blend of sympathisers. Sitting around a fire listening to a well-spoken white man explain, with intricate reference to centuries-old treaties and constitutional documents, how he and his friends are extricating themselves from the Canadian corporation, I have the distinct feeling that I’m perched on an outer ring of reason. So what if that ‘Name’ on that ‘Driver’s Licence’ isn’t the ‘living, flesh and blood’ person who’s standing in front of me, he’s still gonna be in a heap of trouble if he gets caught driving around without it. But the others near the fire- two black women, a converted Sundancer from Virginia, and a handful of Six Nations’ folk, seem able to accept the man’s version of reality with much more equanimity than I can muster. “It’s all assumptions and presumptions”, one of his friends says for the second time in five minutes, speaking of the ‘country’ called ‘Canada’ where I was born and raised and locate a great deal of my belonging. It’s not that they have anything wrong with people who identify themselves as proud Canadians, of course, it’s just that they reserve, and are in the midst of trying to claim, their right to be sovereign of its cloying possessiveness. A hard thing to do from the inside, to be sure.

These men are a few of the supporters who’ve come to feel the air of righteous struggle that stiffens the flags on the reclamation site, from the Mohawk banner fluttering from would-be suburban lampposts to Six Nations’ insignia crowning transplanted trees, to solidarity flags from Palestine and Lebanon. For me it’s an exhilarating, even intoxicating atmosphere, but one that many others have been breathing for a lot longer than one day, or 897 (that’s how many days the occupation has been going on as of August 11, 2008). I imagine, from the matter-of-fact way in which our hosts explain their position and schlep sacks of potatoes into the makeshift cookhouse, that any rush that comes from confronting Goliath has long since dissipated. If anything, though, this plodding tenacity seems a sign of their resolve to remain, both on this site and as a self-evident nation. For many I meet on this Sunday in Caledonia, there’s simply no other approach to take.

A sweet elder starts speaking in a gentle, tremulous voice about some of the opposition they’ve encountered from people living in the town. “They ask why can’t we just be like other normal people. Why can’t we pay taxes and live like all the rest?” “Well,” she answers herself, “that’s spoken like a person who’s never lost anything.”

There’s a consensus among those gathered here that they have lost a great deal, more than they can ever get back. “It’s not about kicking people out of their houses” Hazel tells us, “we just want to live in peace and give our grandkids a chance to claim their heritage”. Asserting this claim, in large part, is a symbolic way of saying “No more” to the continued indifference or ignorance on the part of Canadian governments and the public who elects them.

And for that afternoon, around the fire, I felt the soundness of the argument, the fundamental claim to renewed inter-national respect, even though it’s voiced across a wide and often confusing spectrum of particular perspectives. Some I spoke with didn’t consider themselves Canadian at all, while others proudly sported maple leaf tattoos alongside those of the Eagle Clan. Some want to throw down the shackles of an illegitimate state, some want to see this materialist ego-zone turned back to the nature that once stretched across traditional Aboriginal lands. Everyone understands they can’t go backwards, but all are fed up by a forward march they feel both demands what they value and excludes their belonging.

I ask Hazel why those on the site don’t leave, now that the government has committed to negotiating a resolution to the dispute. “We remember Oka,” she says, “we remember Ipperwash. Those lands were put in trust, and what happened? Still, no progress has been made. So we need to stay here until we can be sure.” Looking around the desolate acreage, Hazel turns to something that has especially troubled her and the other Six Nations’ elders. “They came in here, they bulldozed all of the topsoil, maybe three, four feet deep across all of this land. And then they took it away. When we buried our ancestors here, we didn’t dig them six-foot graves. We just covered them up. But now all that soil’s gone, and they won’t tell us where they’ve taken it.”

Who owns these treasures, who controls this mud? If the answers come back as nothing else than ‘individuals’ and ‘the democratic state’, if indeed these words translate to nothing else but ‘money’ and ‘numbers’, then there is no room here for small nations, and no ear for that which does not speak.

This is not the constitutional promise of the Canada I was born into, nor the humble trail towards its realisation that I ache for us to walk. Somewhere missed within the marching orders, the official narratives that suggest settlements are just a matter of time, the low rumble coming from south of Caledonia seems to voice a more enduring, widespread dissatisfaction with what has happened in this country, and what its path will likely be. And though I still believe in promises, it seems we face a contradictory choice of which to keep.