verbena-19

Six Nations Update About Friday Night's Rally (May 5)

hey folks,

I just wanted to send out a brief report from the Caledonia townspeople demo today. The good news is that it was a lot smaller, about half the size of the gathering last Friday. The gathering was also a lot more subdued, with no fire barrel, and very little in the way of chanting, air horns and public drunkenness. There was one ugly incident when a native woman crossed from the Six Nations side and was verbally attacked by a crowd of white people as she was escorted through by police. Following this incident, a few townspeople marched to the front of the police line and had a verbal confrontation with the cops demanding to be similarly let through the native lines but this just ended up being an argument with the police (as well as a few non-native Caledonians who were trying to talk some sense into the racists).

The media were filming both of these events, so they may well be reported in the news. There was no sign of any overt and organized neo-Nazi presence at the rally and many of the townspeople protesting tried to make the argument that they weren't racist, but just wanted the road open. One protester pointed out that since there were a half-dozen people of color in the protest, the demonstration was multicultural and not racist. I think that it is safe to assume that because of the publicization of the KKK leaflets, a fair number of local residents did not come to the protest. At the height of the protest at around 8:30 p.m. there were about 350 townspeople. That declined to about 200 people at 9:30 p.m. and less than 100 people at 10:30 p.m.

While there were some of the regulars who had been consistently going to these protests, there were also a lot of people who had been present before and very vocal, who weren't there this time. I went expecting it to be extremely tense and that townspeople would confront "outsiders" but it was really quite subdued. There was a major OPP presence of at least 100 officers on the line blocking highways six and a few dozen more in uniform sprinkled throughout the crowd.

There were a number of pro native white supporters that were present including a group of people from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers who showed up with union flags and then apparently left when they were heckled. This happened before I arrived so I can't really report on it and wasn't able to get their contact info.

One interesting thing that was overheard by observers and was also stated to a global news reporter (so this might be on the news) is that some Caledonian residents are apparently planning to set up roadblocks surrounding Caledonia and to only allow white people into town. This person said that the roadblocks would go up on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. I have no idea if they are actually capable of doing this or if
this is just talk, but their line of argument is that since the native people can put up a roadblock and decide who can get through without interference from the OPP, they want to be able to do the same thing at the entrances to their town. I don't know if they can get enough people to do this, and what the OPP response will be, but it is something to keep an eye on. I imagine that if it happens, it will be on the news
tommorrow.

Take care,

[name edited out at the request of the sender]

posted by Annamarie at 3:02 PM