Land and Resistance: Oka, Ipperwash and Caledonia

Whose land is it?

In the summer of 1990, people across Canada watched television images of armed soldiers facing Mohawk protesters across barricades of logs and razor wire. The cause was not a war but a plan to expand a golf course.

To understand why a golf course could lead to a 78-day armed standoff, you need to understand a basic fact: across much of Canada, questions about who owns the land, and on what terms, were never settled fairly. Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution recognized "existing Aboriginal and treaty rights" (Lesson 1). This lesson looks at what happened when those rights met the bulldozers.

Two kinds of land claims

• Comprehensive claims cover areas where no treaty was ever signed, such as most of British Columbia, northern Quebec and the North. They are settled by modern treaties (Lesson 5).
• Specific claims say that Canada broke a historic treaty or mismanaged reserve lands or money, for example by selling reserve land without proper consent.

Both processes can take decades. While a claim waits, governments may sell or develop the land. That gap between slow claims and fast development is a major cause of the conflicts in this lesson.

The Oka Crisis, 1990

Background. The Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) community of Kanehsatà:ke lives next to the town of Oka, Quebec, west of Montreal. For more than 250 years, Mohawk people had protested that land promised to them had been taken. An area known as the Pines, which includes a Mohawk cemetery, was at the centre. The federal government had rejected Kanehsatà:ke's land claims. In 1989 the town approved a plan to expand a nine-hole golf course into the Pines and build housing.

Events.

• March 1990: Mohawk protesters set up a barricade on a small road into the Pines.
• July 11, 1990: the Quebec provincial police (Sûreté du Québec) raided the barricade. Shots were fired, and Corporal Marcel Lemay of the SQ was killed. An investigation could not determine who fired the fatal shot.
• In solidarity, Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, south of Montreal, blocked the Mercier Bridge, a major commuter route. Some angry residents of nearby communities protested violently against the Mohawks.
• August 1990: Quebec asked for the Canadian Army, which replaced the police at the barricades.
• September 26, 1990: after 78 days, the last protesters left the barricade.

Consequences.

• The golf course expansion was cancelled, and the federal government bought the disputed land. The underlying land question at Kanehsatà:ke has still not been fully resolved.
• In 1991 the federal government created the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). Its 1996 report called for a completely renewed relationship based on nation-to-nation partnership.
• Many Indigenous people saw Oka as a turning point that showed governments could no longer ignore their land rights. Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin spent the standoff behind the Mohawk barricades and made the documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993).

Ipperwash, Ontario, 1995

In 1942, during the Second World War, the federal government expropriated the Stoney Point reserve on Lake Huron to build an army training camp, promising to return the land after the war. It did not. In 1993, Stoney Point people moved back onto the army camp. On September 4, 1995, a group occupied neighbouring Ipperwash Provincial Park, which they said contained a burial ground.

Two days later, on the night of September 6, 1995, the Ontario Provincial Police moved in. Dudley George, an unarmed Stoney Point protester, was shot by an OPP officer and died. The officer was later convicted of criminal negligence causing death.

The Ipperwash Inquiry, led by Justice Sidney Linden, reported in 2007. It found that the federal government, the Ontario government and the OPP all bore some responsibility, and it confirmed that the burial ground claim had been credible. It made recommendations to improve how police handle Indigenous protests and how governments handle land claims. The provincial park was later returned to the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, and a settlement in the 2010s provided for the return of the army camp lands.

Caledonia, Ontario, 2006 and after

In 1784, after the American Revolution, the British gave the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) a strip of land along the Grand River: about six miles (10 km) on each side, from its source to Lake Erie. This is the Haldimand Tract. Over the next century, most of it passed into settlers' hands. Six Nations says many of these transfers were never properly agreed to or paid for. Today the Six Nations reserve covers less than 5% of the original tract.

In February 2006, Six Nations members occupied a housing development called Douglas Creek Estates in Caledonia. Tensions with some local residents were high for months. The Ontario government bought the land from the developer. The land claim itself remains unresolved. In 2020, another occupation, called 1492 Land Back Lane, began at a housing site near Caledonia.

Other disputes and a national pattern

• Lubicon Lake Cree, Alberta: never part of a treaty settlement while oil and gas development surrounded them. They drew world attention by calling for a boycott of an exhibit at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. A settlement was reached in 2018.
• Esgenoôpetitj (Burnt Church), New Brunswick, 1999–2000: conflict over Mi'kmaw fishing rights after the Supreme Court's Marshall decision (Lesson 5).
• Wet'suwet'en, British Columbia, 2019–2020: hereditary chiefs opposed a natural gas pipeline through their territory. Solidarity rail blockades across Canada, including by Mohawks at Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario, stopped many trains in February 2020.

The pattern shows continuity: land rights have been the main source of conflict between Indigenous nations and governments throughout this period. It also shows change: courts, inquiries and public opinion have increasingly recognized Indigenous rights.