Angry in the Great White North

From April 2006, when the Caledonia land dispute was three months old:

There's no end in sight to the aboriginal occupation of a housing development south of Hamilton, but the Mohawks are already claiming a major victory.

Representatives from the traditional longhouse government are sitting at the negotiating table in ongoing talks with provincial and federal officials, a fact that thrills their spokeswoman, Hazel Hill.

"It's monumental," Hill says. "It's big. I can't even explain the enormity of what's happening."

While Hill can't contain her excitement, she can explain it.

She notes that the traditional longhouse form of government was declared illegal in 1924, when the federal Indian Act was imposed.

Now, it's at the centre of talks with the two levels of government, and elected Chief David General of the Six Nations Council has deferred to the longhouse government as having the lead role at the table.

I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of native power politics, but it has been clear that there are several different groups claiming leadership: Chief David General and his elected council, the Longhouse and the Clan Mothers, the Mohawk Warriors, and of course, every individual occupier who has claimed a half-built house on the Douglas Creek Estates housing project.

In any case, it was claimed that David General has given the exclusive authority to negotiate to the Longhouse:

It's amid this atmosphere that the Six Nations Confederacy will resume talks with the federal and provincial governments today. But it's unclear where those talks will lead.

The federal government has said the dispute is a provincial issue. And yesterday Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Ramsay called on his federal counterpart Jim Prentice to appoint a personal envoy to take part in the talks with the Confederacy, which has been delegated to deal exclusively with land claims by Six Nations Chief David General and the elected band council.

It's now September, and Hazel Hill is less thrilled, since it appears that the authority was less than exclusive. But worse than that, the band council would have had no authority to grant that exclusivity, since it is an illegal entity:

It does not take a genious to figure out that our Confederacy representatives are at the table because of our reclamation. It also doesn't take a genious to figure out that all the while they are negotiating with our Chiefs and delegated representatives of the people, that behind closed doors they are making simulataneous [sic] deals with individuals of the illegal entity known as the band council and are strategizing on how to get our people off the land so that they can go back to working with the party they created as an arm of the federal government. [emphasis added]

To be totally accurate, Hazel Hill and other Clan Mothers spokespersons have called the council illegitimate or illegal before. This from April:

As the land is held by the Indigenous Women, they need our permission to do anything. We must be consulted on everything that’s going to be done on all of the Haldimand Tract.

Ontario and Canada can’t do anything without consulting us, the Confederacy. They can’t go running to their illegal band council puppets.

Most of Six Nations people are opposed to the band council.

Their point man, Dave ‘Colonial’ General, did not vote in favor of this resolution. Instead he read out his, Canada and Ontario’s schemes on how to resolve the occupation. They want an extension to the current Douglas Creek Estates’ injunction to May 24th 2006 [rather than disposing of it because it’s illegal]. They want a poll to be conducted of all members 18 years of age and older on whom should oversee the land issue. Will it be the traditional Confederacy, the band council or a jointly appointed committee? The band council is supporting the Confederacy and Dave General is still pushing the colonial agenda. Hey, Dave, whose payroll are you on anyway?

I wouldn't ask about payrolls, since it would raise embarassing questions about whether the only two sources of money are massive transfers of taxpayers money from the federal government, or legal, semi-legal, and clearly illegal cash coming from cigarettes, gambling, and smuggling.

But the really interesting point is that it appears that the Band Council is still a player, and that the Six Nations have not resolved their leadership problem. They haven't even gotten to the point of moderating their language, much less taken the far more complex step of forming a temporary coalition government to negotiate the issue of the land. Instead there are monumental breakthroughs in April, and then the same old recriminatons in September.

Does't provide much hope for the negotiations. Meanwhile, winter continues to approach.