Natives who routinely and sometimes violently broke the law but nonetheless played the victim; police who wouldn’t police, but dispensed private cellphone numbers and calming hugs instead; and a small town where flying the Mohawk Warrior flag was deemed perfectly fine, but doing the same thing with the Canadian flag was held to be provocative: Welcome to Caledonia, Ont., circa 2006.
The true story of the alchemy which began to occur in that small southwestern Ontario town that spring is unfolding here in the courtroom of Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Bielby.
A Caledonia family – Dave Brown, Dana Chatwell and their teenage son Dax – are suing the Ontario government and the OPP for a total of $7-million for effectively abandoning them to the lawlessness surrounding a native occupation of a former development site called Douglas Creek Estates.
The family’s home is bordered on two sides by the site, part of a simmering Six Nations land claim.
It was first seized in February of that year by natives from the nearby reserve. It remains occupied by them to this day, effectively if informally ceded to them by the province which later that summer bought out the developer for $12-million purely, it appears, to allow the occupiers to stay unmolested.
