[R-G] Shawn Brant: Another case of Canada's political persecution of indigenous people

[Anthony Fenton]

Shawn Brant
Another case of Canada's political persecution of indigenous people
by Justin Podur
	
September 19, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=13830

On August 30, about two weeks before Canada became one of only four  
countries to vote against a UN declaration on indigenous rights,  
Tyendinaga Mohawk father and activist, Shawn Brant was released from  
Quinte Detention Centre on bail. Bail had been denied him twice  
before, when he first turned himself in on July 5th and again after a  
bail-review hearing on August 10th. The conditions of his bail were  
restrictive. $50,000 cash bond with another $50,000 surety, 30-day  
house arrest, curfew, no protests, and above all, no returning to the  
struggle for the Mohawk territory the government hoped to disrupt by  
putting him in jail in the first place. His trial will take place  
some time in 2008. He is to stand trial on 9 charges having to do  
with two blockades, one that occurred in April 2007 and the other in  
June 2007, including 6 charges of indictable mischief (for which the  
maximum penalty is 10 years in prison), and 3 charges of breach of  
bail.  His actual crime, for which he is being persecuted, is being  
an articulate and militant spokesperson for his community and  
indigenous struggles in Canada more generally.

The bail hearing also featured massive, militarized security, all for  
a community activist who had been involved in activities no more  
violent than blockades of roads and reclamations of sites, and who  
had turned himself in. It was a disgraceful display by the state, an  
attempt to generate fear of violence as a diversion from the  
substantive issues.

Exclusion and Environmental Destruction

The Mohawks of Tyendinaga, and community members from sister Mohawk  
territories Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, are no strangers  
to repression and persecution by governments. Indeed, with borders  
transecting Quebec, Canada, and the US, the Mohawks have known three  
different flavors of violence. The variations, however, are less  
striking than the similarities. In the 1990s, these communities faced  
a military occupation, with thousands of Canadian troops besieging  
the Mohawks, who were protesting that their sacred sites were slated  
to become condominium developments and golf courses. An all-out  
invasion was planned for these communities in 1994, called off at the  
last minute because of concerns that the political fallout from the  
bloodshed would be too high. More recently, Kanehsatake, for example,  
has faced tense standoffs with Canada’s federal police and Quebec’s  
provincial police, including the creation of a privatized police  
force to invade the community in 2004 (1). Before that, the Canadian  
police and military presented these sieges of communities as “law-and- 
order” activities, using force to stamp out the crimes of Canada’s  
indigenous people. But the massive, ongoing crime is one committed  
against indigenous people, and the law-and-order posturing, to which  
we will return, is intended to present an inversion of reality.

The Canadian state and corporations view the country’s economic  
development in terms of extracting resources from the land and  
selling them off, mainly to the United States, for profit. In this  
model, indigenous people, who live on the land and have their own  
ideas about how to treat it, are an obstacle, and have been treated  
that way historically. Even though rights to exploit the land were as  
often won by negotiation and treaties that included mutual  
obligations by Canada and indigenous nations as by force, Canada has  
treated indigenous people as a colonizer treats its victim,  
disrespecting agreements with them, dispossessing and excluding them,  
and using force with impunity.  “Development” on indigenous lands,  
whether of resources or, in more densely populated areas, of suburban  
housing construction projects, is a sort of development that provides  
no benefit at all to them. While indigenous people from the Six  
Nations of the Grand River Territory neighbouring Caledonia in  
Ontario watched their historic lands turned into suburban  
developments, and Mohawks in Tyendinaga watched trucks carting tons  
of gravel out of their lands, the majority of indigenous communities  
in Canada (75% in 2001) have substandard, dangerous water quality and  
inadequate housing.

Beyond merely excluding the indigenous, Canada has destroyed the very  
basis of their survival through environmental destruction. The Mohawk  
territory on the Ontario/Quebec/New York border has been thoroughly  
poisoned. Canadian authorities have been destroying Mohawk fishing  
grounds since they started manipulating the flow of the St.Lawrence  
River in the 1830s. When Canada opened the St. Lawrence Seaway in the  
1950s, it offered cheap hydro power to industrial investors, and  
heavy industry, from General Motors to Alcoa and Reynolds, responded,  
contaminating the rivers and lakes of the region and the groundwater  
table with PCBs, DDT, mercury, Mirex, and more. Poisoned water killed  
both the wildlife and the traditional economy. With no more hunting  
or fishing, there was no more traditional diet and, consequently, a  
whole set of new health problems (2).

Environmental destruction and exclusion from the economic benefits of  
their own territories has led to poverty and unemployment in  
indigenous communities. This has provided the state with another  
lever of control over the communities – small amounts of money  
distributed through the welfare system and through institutions of  
“self-government” that were imposed on indigenous communities, often  
at gunpoint. These meager and humiliating funds have an additional  
value to the state besides control: they also enable the state to sow  
racism by claiming that indigenous people are “lazy” and “don’t  
work”, living off of “handouts” from the state.

Adaptation of Tobacco

But the indigenous were never excluded quietly or easily, and the  
Mohawks found a way to adapt even to this narrowing of their options.  
Taking advantage of their position on the border, they created  
businesses selling a traditional sacred plant – tobacco cigarettes.  
Canada’s establishment treated the “native cigarette” trade as a  
major crime, alleging associations with organized crime and  
threatening brutal action. Indeed, from 2004-2006, the government  
threatened the Mohawk communities, repeatedly, on the basis of the  
tobacco trade. In an interview with the CBC in April 2006, Shawn  
Brant explained some of what the tobacco trade had meant for Tyendinaga:

“We have approximately 6 to 7 million dollars a month which comes  
into the community as new revenue from the outside, that we’ve been  
able to establish infrastructure within our community. We’ve been  
able to put forward our first institution of government, as we call  
it, the longhouse. We showed them that we were going to use the  
proceeds from tobacco in order to recreate ourselves within the  
society, that we would allow for something greater to come from it  
than just padding the pockets of a few people.

“So Tyendinaga now sits in a unique situation, where we have this  
money coming in, where the stores bring it in at retail level, where  
construction crews and workers are working, people are preparing  
their roofs and contributing in a way to, not only the local economy,  
but also to the surrounding economy in a way that we never had. We’re  
in position now where we are able to have, as a community, some  
influence in the outside world. When our people go out shopping,  
because of the availability of revenue within here, they’re not  
treated like shit anymore, they’re treated like consumers that have  
access to revenues, that are going out and making purchases. They’re  
treated in a way and a standard that we’ve never enjoyed before.” (3)

When the interviewer asked him about rumors of a Canadian military  
raid into Tyendinaga with cigarettes as a pretext, Shawn Brant answered:

“We’ve always known, and we’ve always been told to prepare for this  
time, when they would stop at nothing to remove us, to have us not  
exist. We’ve been through the assimilation process and it didn’t  
work, and now there’s one option that as a nation, a military option  
is very real. I believe the day will come, and with Kanesatake in  
1990, when the people of that community stood up and everything  
changed, we talked about the transition time.

“Kanestake has got nothing in the 16 years since 1990: they haven’t  
settled the land claims, their status within the Indian act, they  
haven’t settled their financial and fiduciary responsibilities with  
them – it’s a community where schools barely exist, their programs  
are non-existent. While everything changed in people’s minds across  
Canada, and maybe the way in which people perceive us as changed,  
nothing has changed for them and that’s their punishment for 1990. If  
Tyendinaga can take on that responsibility, and take the brunt of the  
force and the government’s wrath, and it allows for some peace to  
exist in Kanesatake, then we’ll gladly shoulder that responsibility.  
We don’t just see it as being something just around us. It’s time for  
our sisters and brothers that have fought for so long to have a break  
and let them turn their attention to us, and we’ll welcome it.” (4)

Resistance to Dispossession

The tobacco trade is not the only indigenous adaptation to legal and  
economic exclusion and dispossession. The more direct adaptation has  
been to resist dispossession, using legal arguments and, when Canada  
ignored these, resorting to the very measured and restrained use of  
reclamations and blockades.

One such reclamation began in February 2006, at the Douglas Creek  
Estates bordering the town of Caledonia and the Six Nations reserve.  
The Douglas Creek Estates were in the process of being converted to a  
suburban subdivision when members of Six Nations reclaimed it. They  
wanted the land, which, like so many other pieces of indigenous  
territory, had been taken from them in a process of very dubious  
legality, to be returned to them (5). Instead of negotiating in good  
faith, the provincial police attempted to dislodge the indigenous  
people from the reclamation site in April 2006, and succeeded for  
several hours, after which the indigenous reclaimed the site yet  
again. Six Nations called on people outside the territory to speak up  
and to mobilize on their behalf. One community that heard the call  
was Tyendinaga.

The day after the police dislodged the Six Nations reclamation on the  
Douglas Creek Estates (April 21 2006), Mohawks from Tyendinaga  
blocked a CN Rail line that runs through their territories, both the  
Culbertson Tract and Surrender 24 (discussed below) demanding that  
the government negotiate with Six Nations in good faith. Later that  
year, the government would force the Mohawks of Tyendinaga to conduct  
a reclamation on their own behalf. The Culbertson tract, like the  
Douglas Creek Estates, had been stolen from the indigenous through a  
dubious swindle (6). When, on November 15 2006, Mohawks went to the  
site of a proposed subdivision on the Culbertson tract to publicize  
their claim and their intention to stop the construction of a  
subdivision there, coincidence had a convoy of Canadian Military  
vehicles just passing through the reserve. The Mohawks blocked the  
convoy with cars and trucks and asked them what they were doing.  
Provincial police eventually escorted the military away. In January  
2007, Shawn Brant and another Mohawk activist, Mario Baptiste, were  
arrested. Shawn was charged with ‘uttering death threats’, Mario with  
‘assault’ and ‘mischief’, in conjunction with the November 15 2006  
incident (7).

On another part of Tyendinaga territory, a gravel quarry owned by  
Thurlow Aggregates, the corporation busily strived to make off with  
as much of the land as possible, while the government of Canada took  
a decade to even sit down to land claim negotiations. Strikingly, the  
Mohawks had submitted an official land claim in 1995, after the  
claims process was finally created by Canada, and in 2003, this claim  
had been acknowledged as legitimate by the Canadian government - in  
many land claim disputes, achieving this recognition of legitimacy  
from the colonial government is in and of itself a huge battle.  
Negotiations around the Mohawk’s claim did not begin for several  
years after that, during which time the Government of Ontario  
continued to renew the license to Thurlow Aggregates to ravage the  
now-recognized Mohawk land. So, on March 22, 2007, 125 members of  
Tyendinaga took control of the quarry. Shawn Brant explained the  
reclamation: “it’s very difficult to have negotiations at a time when  
they’re taking out 10,000 truckloads of our land. It’s an affront to  
our process.” (8). The Mohawks announced a campaign of blockades if  
the quarry’s license was not revoked. On April 20, 2007, they blocked  
the CN Rail line again. The Mohawks held the line for 30 hours and  
packed up, having negotiated with the police that no one would be  
charged. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Commissioner, an  
aggressive and militaristic former chief of Toronto’s police named  
Julian Fantino, ordered the arrest of Shawn Brant for mischief,  
disobeying a court order, and breach of recognizance – ignoring the  
agreement made on April 21 2007. On May 9, CN Rail announced a civil  
suit for damages for the rail stoppage – the authors of the essay  
“What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail” said the following about CN’s lawsuit:

“The civil case will likely bring to light some of the checkered  
history of railway construction in Canada, from forced expropriations  
to illegal seizures of land; CN’s lawyers may find themselves arguing  
a case that does the company more harm than good.” (9) The rail line  
CN is suing over runs through both the Culbertson Tract and what is  
called “Surrender 24”, a 33,000 acre tract that was stolen from the  
Mohawks in 1820 by force, and despite much resistance (10).

The final set of charges against Shawn Brant stem from June 29, 2007,  
which was planned as a national aboriginal day of action. Originally  
conceived and presented as a day of militant action to show that  
indigenous communities would not be shunted aside or disappeared, the  
day of action was weakened by Canada’s threats and successful  
isolation of communities from one another. Tyendinaga took the call  
to action seriously. Via Rail cancelled its rail service,  
anticipating a shut down. The Tyendinaga Mohawks blocked Highway 2.  
The OPP blocked the Highway 401 pre-emptively, and the Tyendinaga  
Mohawks moved on to the highway and the CN tracks. The blockades were  
all lifted by the end of the 29th, and no one was hurt. Shawn Brant,  
however, was charged with mischief and breach of bail, and turned  
himself in on July 5 (11).

Shawn Brant’s trial, and the civil suit by CN Rail, could indeed  
prove counterproductive to the Canadian state and corporations. At a  
public event on August 29, 2007 in support of Shawn Brant, author  
Naomi Klein suggested that part of why the Canadian establishment,  
from Ontario’s police commissioner to the mainstream media, seems to  
be so vindictive against him is because he has had some success  
raising indigenous issues not only inside, but also outside of native  
communities. Sue Collis, an activist who has been instrumental in  
building this bridge between native and non-native activists (and who  
is also Shawn Brant’s wife), noted that the colonial relationship  
between settler and indigenous in Canada could not occur without the  
participation and complicity of the citizens. Racist myths about  
native people being “lazy” or “lawless” can’t hold up to reality, and  
the indigenous actions have been about confronting Canadians with the  
reality. If the myths collapse, could the whole project of  
dispossessing the indigenous be at risk?

The colonial playbook is a limited one. In 1990 and 1994, Canada used  
the military and the police against the Mohawks. It also mobilized  
racist whites to press a counter-claim against indigenous people, and  
then presented itself as an honest broker between the two extremes,  
allowing the racists plenty of leeway and persecuting indigenous  
people whenever possible. This strategy also allowed plausible  
deniability. The same thing occurred in 2006 on Six Nations land,  
with “residents of Caledonia” rallying to demand action against the  
indigenous (12). Other standard plays include attempts to sow  
divisions in the community, arming some indigenous people against  
others, offering money in exchange for land, and presenting small  
sacrifices as immense in order to create obstacles for future  
negotiations. The repetitiveness of these standard tactics is  
frustrating, but it could also make them more transparent, for those  
who wish to see. If there were enough such people (13), Canada would  
have to back off, and perhaps actually change its relationship with  
indigenous people.


Notes

1) See my “Kanehsatake”, 2004, ZNet, for a discussion of what was  
going on at the time: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? 
ItemID=5556. See also the following leaflet: http:// 
arab.sa.utoronto.ca/preparing.for.invasion.pdf
2) See chapter 2 of Bruce E. Johansen (1993), “Life and Death in  
Mohawk Country”, North American Press, Colorado. See also the work of  
Boyce Richardson, including “The People of Terra Nullius” and  
“Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country”.
3) CBC Interview, April 23, 2006.
4) CBC Interview, April 23, 2006.
5) For an overview of the Six Nations reclamation, see my “Six  
Nations Does Not Stand Alone”, 2006, ZNet. http://www.zmag.org/ 
content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10152
6) See the excellent pamphlet, “In Support of the Mohawks of  
Tyendinaga”, from which much of this article was drawn. See  
specifically two essays: “What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail?”, and  
“Surrender 24 and the Culbertson Tract: How Tyendinaga’s Land Was  
Stolen”. The PDF of the pamphlet is here: http://www.ocap.ca/files/ 
fsb-rgb-final.pdf
7) “What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail?” - http://www.ocap.ca/files/fsb- 
rgb-final.pdf
8) “What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail?” - http://www.ocap.ca/files/fsb- 
rgb-final.pdf
9) “What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail?” - http://www.ocap.ca/files/fsb- 
rgb-final.pdf
10) “Surrender 24 and the Culbertson Tract: How Tyendinaga’s Land Was  
Stolen”. http://www.ocap.ca/files/fsb-rgb-final.pdf
11) “What Landed Shawn Brant in Jail?” - http://www.ocap.ca/files/fsb- 
rgb-final.pdf
12)  See my “In whose interests are the ‘residents’ rallies’ in  
Caledonia?” ZNet, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? 
ItemID=10313
13)  There are people working on this, and there should be many more.  
Join the Tyendinaga support committee, visit their site, sign the  
petition, work wherever you are on this. http://www.ocap.ca/ 
supporttmt.html