Grand River ‘friendship walks’ aim to educate residents

As a legal showdown with Ottawa looms, Six Nations of the Grand River is looking for allies.

Six Nations Elected Council invites residents along the Grand to join band members in a series of “friendship walks” later this month.

The family-friendly walks are meant to highlight the history of the Haldimand Tract, an area six miles deep on each side of the river from source to mouth.

The British Crown gave the roughly 950,000-acre tract to their indigenous allies, the Haudenosaunee, after the American Revolutionary War.

Today, the Six Nations reserve makes up less than five per cent of the original tract land, the rest having been surrendered, sold or swindled in what Six Nations alleges were often unscrupulous transactions.

A lawsuit launched by the elected council in 1995 — and finally heading to court next year — seeks an accounting of the allegedly misappropriated land and money, and what compensation is owed to Canada’s most populous reserve.

Talk of compensation may create tension as settlers worry about being forcibly removed from their houses or encountering street protests over stolen land, said Six Nations of the Grand River CEO Darrin Jamieson.

“In fact, it’s absolutely the opposite of that,” Jamieson said at the recent Haldimand Tract Friendship Walk campaign launch in Ohsweken.

“Six Nations wants to be partners with people living in the tract. They’re our friends.”

Jamieson spoke of the Two Row Wampum agreement between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers, which saw the two peoples help each other on a nation-to-nation basis.

“And there was no expectation other than to work together — you stay in your canoe, and we’ll stay in ours,” Jamieson said.

“And that was violated over the years.”

To rekindle that spirit of partnership, Chief Mark Hill, members of elected council, and busloads of Six Nations band members will make six stops within the tract — Fergus and St. Jacobs on Sept. 22, Waterloo and Brantford on Sept. 23, and Cayuga and Port Maitland on Sept. 24.

Band members will walk together for two kilometers with local residents and political leaders before gathering to enjoy traditional food and music, theatrical presentations, and speakers discussing the cultural and historical importance of the Haudenosaunee along the Grand.

Registration for the walks is now open through bit.ly/HaldimandTract6MilesDeep.

“This is an opportunity for us to get the message out there just on who Six Nations is,” Hill said, noting many of the million-plus residents of the 38 municipalities inside the tract are unaware they live on territory granted to the Haudenosaunee.

“There’s still a lot of education that has to take place. And we think that this is an opportunity for us to do just that,” Hill said.

The walks are also a chance to invite municipal leaders to include Six Nations as equal partners in conversations about development along the river, Jamieson added.

“We’re always an afterthought. We should be the first thought,” he said.

Hill described a meeting between Six Nations elected leadership and the mayors of about a dozen cities within the tract during the recent Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference as a good step to “further strengthen our relationships up and down the tract.”

“We need to rely on each other in order to pressure governments,” Hill said, referring to continued inaction from Ottawa and Queen’s Park to resolve Indigenous land claims in Caledonia.

Emblazoned on a T-shirt that each friendship walk participant will receive is the slogan, “It’s not about land back. It’s about a path forward.”

But the band members still occupying the since-cancelled Caledonia subdivision now known as 1492 Land Back Lane — which land defenders contend is unceded Haudenosaunee territory — have been explicit about the need for land to be returned.

Hill said the friendship walk campaign strives to include all perspectives.

“There may be times when louder voices show up, but it’s about the conversation, it’s about the education,” he said.

The focus of the lawsuit between elected council and Ottawa is “mainly financial,” Jamieson said, though Hill would also like to see the return of Crown land through an accelerated “additions to reserve” process.

The campaign invites participants to write to their MP and demand “transparency and accountability in support of Six Nations.”

“Let’s not just leave it to the court system to decide. Let’s bring in the people,” Jamieson said.

“Not just our people, but everyone living inside the tract. We need everyone to be our allies.”

JP Antonacci is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based the Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.