Book review: Our Long Struggle for Home: The Ipperwash Story
By Maurice Switzer
There have been many stories written about the Ipperwash tragedy of 1995, but they all end the same way.
A greenhorn premier with redneck tendencies tells political aides “I want the f*****g Indians out of the park” and, within hours of Mike Harris’s tantrum, Anthony Dudley George becomes the only Indigenous person in the 20th Century killed in a Canadian land-rights dispute.
Following a two-year public inquiry, Commissioner Sidney Linden concludes that the actions of Premier Harris contributed to creating an environment that made George’s death by an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) sniper’s bullet more likely to happen.
In the 27 years since the night of Sept. 6, 1995, Canadians in general – journalists, judges, and premiers, in particular – have come to understand that treaties between their governments and First Nations confer a “colour of right” on peaceful protesters such as the couple of dozen unarmed Chippewa at Ipperwash Provincial Park. They were not “trespassers”, “terrorists”, “jerks”, or “thugs” as they were variously described by Harris caucus member Marcel Beaubien, Bosanquet Township Mayor Fred Thomas, assorted media commentators, and even councillors of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, which claimed the demonstrators as band members.
As related in, Our Long Struggle for Home: The Ipperwash Story, the Chippewa of Stoney Point– they prefer to call it “Aazhoodena”, its historic name – have seldom been treated with “kid gloves”. They are descendants of refugees from American Indian removal policies, and are proud to name ancestors like Oshawanoo, Tecumseh’s nephew, and George and Charlotte Manidoka, the Potawatomi couple at the top of the George family tree.
Stoney Point and neighbouring Wiiwkwedong (Kettle Point), are sister communities situated on the sandy shoreline of Lake Huron, northeast of present-day Sarnia. Along with Bkejwanong (Walpole Island), and Aamjiwnaang (Sarnia), they are the four settlements that the 1827 Huron Tract Treaty promised would be reserved for the Anishinaabeg as long as the sun would shine.
The horrors visited upon the Stoney Pointers that September night in 1995 remain fresh in their memories, unmitigated by government promises to return lands from which two dozen of their community’s homes were literally lifted off their foundations in 1942 to create space for a Canadian army training camp. A few decades earlier, a series of shady transactions involving a federal Indian Agent, land speculators, even an elected Ontario legislator, had disconnected them from the other prime portion of their land base, a stretch of pristine waterfront that evolved into Ipperwash Provincial Park, scene of Dudley George’s death.
They have had good reason to be suspicious of the various governments which have robbed them of their ancestral lands and burial grounds, the houses they built there, their version of their own history, even the “e” in their community’s name. Apologies and compensation payments for the incredible string of official wrongs committed against them were made to Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, the entity created when the federal government unilaterally decided to eliminate one of the four original reserves promised by treaty.
After decades of having their lands, identity, and one of their family member’s lives taken forcibly from them, the people of Aazhoodena — “the town across the way” (from Kettle Point) – decided to entrust their story to Heather Menzies, a respected author and educator who focuses on social restructuring, and who admits to her readers that “This book is the biggest responsibility that I have ever taken on as a writer.”
She acknowledges her status as a settler and confesses to feeling ashamed that her great-great-grandparents were among the settlers who benefited from the two million acres of Indian lands grabbed by colonial authorities in exchange for creating four Anishinaabe reserves.
Her book’s 170 pages travel some familiar ground, but she condenses the tragic Sept. 6 events surrounding Dudley George’s shooting death into one 20-page chapter, the text largely based on evidence that emerged during the subsequent two-year-long Ipperwash Inquiry. Its findings are a matter of public record, and references to it are scattered at pertinent places in her story.
The real strength in Menzies’ narrative is her challenging attempt to weave together dozens of recollections of Stoney Pointers, mostly gathered through interviews. Many of these accounts have either never been publicly heard, or were overshadowed by the volume of testimony presented over two years at the public inquiry that took place in the nearby town of Forest when Mike Harris became the first premier in the province’s history to be summoned to such a hearing.
At times, Menzies’ plan to make it sound like we are hearing a contemporaneous conversation with her interviewees is problematic. Framing the story as if it is being simultaneously told by a collective “we” of Stoney Pointers is awkward at times, notably when some of the most relevant words come from testimony given by Elder Clifford George at the inquiry — before his death and not directly to the author.
But we cannot help but be engaged by hearing first-hand accounts from those most closely involved in the events that led up to Dudley George’s death, an event which Amnesty International compared to an “extrajudicial execution” because of its political implications.
The decision to follow the lead of Elders like decorated war veteran Clifford George and begin “repossessing our homeland” in May of 1993 – over two years before the tragedy – results in dialogue that reads like a dark comedy at times, despite the deadly serious nature of the Stoney Pointers’ actions.
While George was wearing a Canadian uniform and winning medals for fighting Nazis in Europe, the department that issued his pay-cheques was seizing his Stoney Point homeland and turning it into Camp Ipperwash to train untested soldiers. His grandparents’ two-storey house was bulldozed down because it was brick and not suitable for lifting off its foundation and transported on a truck to Kettle Point like most of the other Stoney Point dwellings.
He was among the group of Elders who served the Department of National Defence with an eviction notice, and scurried around to set up makeshift shelter on the army camp’s rifle range. Their efforts sound harmless enough, but resulted in months of harassment, vandalism, and helicopter hovering by heavily-armed Canadian soldiers.
When the voices start recounting the events of Sept. 6, 1995, we hear Grandmothers talk about being manhandled by riot police and having shotguns pointed at their faces. It is still chilling 27 years later.
One remarkable consistency in the re-telling of Dudley George’s tragedy is that his fellow Stoney Pointers have never tried to deify him. They variously describe him as “just silly”, “a fun guy to be around”, “comical”, “someone who could always make you feel good”, but whose commitment to their treaty cause never wavered.
“He was always willing to help out,” recalls sister Caroline “Cully” George, a passenger in brother Pierre’s beat up Chevy Impala that raced the dying Dudley to Strathroy hospital.
Cully was one of the first people author Heather Menzies met when she arrived at the abandoned army base to offer her services to tell the Stoney Pointers’ story, and met a group of them in the dilapidated barracks building where Dudley George’s sister still lives.
“The tragedy of Dudley George’s death,” Anishinabek legal scholar John Borrows writes in his foreword, “is that he was acting with the understanding that the treaty relationship was real,” sentiments echoed by the Stoney Pointers and in many of Justice Linden’s 100 Ipperwash Inquiry recommendations.
Heather Menzies might not feel that her cultural background gives her the right to tell the stories of the Aazhoodenaang Enjibaajig , but treaty partners have responsibilities, and she has done well in trying to fulfill hers by giving them a voice.