Hopkins, James --- "Book Review - One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police and the Ipperwash Crisis" [2003] IndigLawB 21; (2003) 5(23) Indigenous Law Bulletin 22

Book Review

One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police and the Ipperwash Crisis

by Peter Edwards

Stoddart Publishing 2001

267p

RRP CAD$34.95

reviewed by James Hopkins

The popular view of Canadian history is one of a vast colonial outback, jettisoned into the modern global economy through massive resource extraction. All the while, development of this kind shapes a national identity that continues to maintain its quaint, rustic and charmed colonial heritage. ‘Land oh my friend’, my relatives told me as a child, ‘there is plenty here’.

It not surprising therefore, that the assertion of Aboriginal title is met with great resistance, for it contradicts the country’s national identity as being both generous and blessed by Mother Nature’s abundance. Further, it brings into question notions of pre-European contact property rights that are difficult to reconcile in a pluralistic democracy.

Peter Edwards in his book, One Dead Indian, offers a grim reminder of the consequences surrounding the failure of governments to develop legal regimes that provide effective and peaceful resolution to these conflicts. Indeed, the Canadian vision of a multicultural society is brought into question when one considers the subject matter of the book: the Ipperwash crisis that occurred between 4 and 8 September 1995, and resulted in the police shooting death of Chippewa activist Dudley George.

Edwards, a journalist by profession, adopts a narrative approach that takes the reader to the scene of the crisis moments before Dudley George was shot by an Ontario Provincial Police officer, who was using a submachine gun during the night-time protest. Edwards reconstructs the event using all available resources, having covered the subsequent trial of the officer, interviewing participants, and exhausting federal and provincial freedom of information legislation.

Edwards goes on to provide an important historical analysis leading up to the Ipperwash crisis that was seldom discussed in the national media. To be sure, the history is as relevant to the conflict as it is cruel. The Kettle Point Indian Reserve sits less than five kilometres from the Ipperwash Provincial Park. Both are located on the southeastern shore of Lake Huron, all within 200 kilometres of Toronto, Canada’s largest city and home to the Ontario provincial legislature. The reader learns that Ipperwash Provincial Park is into its third incarnation. During World War Two, land abutting the Park’s current boundary served as an infantry training facility. Prior to the establishment of the facility the Chippewas lived throughout the entire area.

The Canadian Federal Government, in need of training space for World War Two, expropriated the land base of the Stoney Point Chippewas and forced their relocation into the neighbouring band of Kettle Point Chippewas. Edwards documents how several Stoney Point Chippewas enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces, and were fighting in Europe when they learned of the Federal Government’s forcible removal of their families and the demolition of their homes. The expropriation desecrated well-marked Chippewa gravesites and thus began a long legal battle by the Stoney Point Chippewas to return to their traditional land.

Edwards does an excellent job in demonstrating how the Chippewas served a key role in establishing Canadian security shortly after the American Revolution. They, like many of the southern First Nations, were looked upon as a buffer zone against an American invasion.

Edwards then adopts a more investigative tone and turns his attention to Dudley George in an effort to personalise and document the man’s life. There is a touching frailty to what is, on the surface, a life committed to civil disobedience. By the time you get to the fourth generation of the Stoney Point struggle, the larger ills against Aboriginal Canadians have taken hold. For example, the grandparents of Dudley George who returned from World War Two were met with systemic racial prejudice, including the denial of veteran pensions on the basis of their First Nation status. Easy if you were healthy and had a life ahead to work, but not so easy if you took shrapnel in France and were less mobile.

Dudley became disaffected early on, drifting through the early years of his life. His awakening as an activist came during a 1993 occupation of the Ipperwash military base. The occupation solidified the formation of a group whose friendship centred on their role as protesters over the Chippewas’ unceded title to the Ipperwash base and the Provincial Park.

An accomplished journalist, Edwards succeeds in taking the reader to the locale of Ipperwash and does an excellent job characterising its contemporary features. The author introduces new and equally important actors to the struggle: local cottagers. If Canadians largely accept Aboriginal title as a matter of being out of sight, out of mind, then cottagers with their heavy capital investments on expensive lakeshore property are the agitating agents that demand adherence to the larger Canadian identity of colonial tranquility. It was on this basis that relations between cottagers and Aboriginals deteriorated in the summer of 1995, when as a political gesture Dudley George and the Stoney Point protestors set up tolls along roads and beach fronts, and displayed placards laying claim to white property.

Edwards explains how by 1995 the federal land claims process had become mired in bureaucratic delay and stagnated. As a consequence, the Stoney Point protesters upped the ante and the situation became more volatile. Concurrent to this event was the election of the progressive conservative government under Ontario’s Premiere Mike Harris. Facing heavy debt and large social welfare programs, his party’s ‘Common Sense Revolution’ was an election triumph, but dictated a hard line against Aboriginal land claims in Ontario - all negotiations would be stayed and protesting would not be tolerated.

Edwards reveals his investigative talents in a number of ways. Among them, Edwards uncovered an Aboriginal spy within the Stoney Point protesters who reported directly to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (‘CSIS’). This feature serves to heighten the complex, albeit disconnected overlay between federal and provincial interests in the Ipperwash area. Edwards further reveals that the protest leading to Dudley George’s death saw the Ontario Provincial Police (‘OPP’) and Canadian Armed Forces consider military deployment if the OPP’s paramilitary unit was incapable of controlling the situation and making arrests.

Clearly the greatest controversy that emerges is whether the Premiere of Ontario ordered the OPP to enter the occupied base with a view to ending the protest altogether. Memos from high-level meetings amongst his aides, the Ontario Solicitor-General and the Commissioner of the OPP raise this very real concern, which subsequently became the subject matter of a lawsuit by the George family. In these chapters, Edwards proves that minutes taken from these meetings were destroyed through technical error and at the very least raises the spectre of a cover up. The matter is still ongoing, however the trial of the OPP officer accused of shooting Dudley George ended with a verdict of guilty to the charge of involuntary manslaughter.

I would recommend One Dead Indian for those interested in Canadian Aboriginal history and as a reminder for those who fail to see the costs, both human and otherwise, in the unresolved area of Aboriginal title. Canada has proven to have a short memory on this issue as the 1990 Oka crisis demonstrates.[1] The breadth of detail makes One Dead Indian a fascinating study into the federal and provincial governments’ odd ability to document how its officials refuse to act in the face of imminent danger. Edwards should be commended for the depth of research that the national media could never delve into and the reader is left with a sense of resigned history and public accountability.

James Hopkins is the Director and Associate Clinical Professor of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the James E Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona.

[1] Loreen Pindera and Geoffrey York, People of the pines: The warriors and the legacy of Oka (1991).