We are all treaty people: Media miss the point of Commissioner Sidney Linden’s report on Ipperwash

by Kate Harries
Straight Goods
June 04, 2007

Last Thursday, during the media sessions when the Ipperwash report was released in Forest in southern Ontario, on at least two occasions, reporters pointedly asked aboriginal leaders if they consider themselves Canadian.

It appears that this is some kind of loyalty test — of the unfortunate kind that immigrants are subjected to, but one that seems very strange when the immigrants are asking the question of the original inhabitants.

“I am Ojibwe,” replied Kettle and Stoney Point Chief Tom Bressette. The blonde reporter looked triumphant. She seemed to feel she had extracted a damning admission. Later, asked the same question, Ontario Grand Chief Angus Toulouse answered in Ojibwe and gave his spirit name. It was a moving affirmation of the strength of a culture that has survived persistent and continuing attempts at eradication and assimilation. It was also dignified and restrained, as is the way with aboriginal people.

Because the question is an insult.

The story of Ipperwash and Canadians’ appalling betrayal of the peoples who were here when European settlers arrived is a gripping one. Ipperwash Commissioner Sidney Linden tells the tale in plain language and draws the uncomfortable conclusions with uncompromising rigour in the report released last week.

Everyone should read this report, which can be purchased in hard copy from Publications Ontario or downloaded from the inquiry website at www.ipperwashinquiry.ca/index.html. Volume 1 tells the story of the shooting of Dudley George, Volume 2 looks at the wider issues, starting with the unprecedented appropriation of the Stoney Point reserve in 1942 for use as an army base and never returned.

“What I find so disturbing in reviewing the evidence of this appropriation is the stark contrast between the ease with which First Nations people gave their loyalty and trust to the government and the ease with which the government of Canada betrayed that trust,” Linden writes. “At the time of the appropriation, many of the Kettle and Stoney Point men were overseas, serving in the armed forces.”

I had the privilege of meeting one of those men. Clifford George traced his ancestry back to the great Shawnee warrior and leader Tecumseh, who allied himself with the British in the War of 1812 and was killed by the Americans in 1813 on a battlefield after the British fled, leaving the Chippewas to fight alone.

Clifford was one of the last of those who grew up at Stoney Point. He remembered a time when 18 families — around 100 people — found all they needed on Aazhoodena (the Anishinabek name for the land). They farmed, they hunted, they fished from several inland lakes and gathered wild foods and medicines. “It was a very good community,” he said, “a Christian community,” with its own church beside the one-room schoolhouse.

Clifford served in most of the major engagements of Canada’s war in Europe, finally deployed to Italy with the Royal Canadian Regiment where he was taken prisoner and held for almost three months — just two days short of the 90 required to be eligible for POW benefits after the war — in appalling conditions.

When he returned, with a chest full of medals and an English wife on his arm, he found his home had been razed, the cemetery desecrated, his community shoehorned into a neighbouring reserve where they weren’t welcome. The Indian Agent fobbed him off with $400, a fraction of the $5,500 that all other returning soldiers were paid and far short of the $2,200 that First Nations veterans were entitled to.

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[See also: The Briarpatch Treaty Card for Settlers: "You can't live here without it!"]