For aboriginal Canadians, the shooting of DudleyGeorge symbolizes the plight of First Nations people — swindled,betrayed, marginalized and ultimately the victim of gratuitousviolence.

Just over 10 years ago, on September 6, 1995, the unarmed 38-year-old Chippewa became thefirst aboriginal in over a century to have been killed by police in aCanadian land claim confrontation.

Frustration resulting from unresolved land claim disputes is notunusual in Canada. Most negotiations drag on for decades.Some claims date back 200 years.

For those that flare up, police have a time-tested protocol.In this case, that was discarded. Instead, in an astonishing displayof force, some 40 men from the Ontario Provincial Police riot squadand a half-dozen sharp-shooters from its paramilitary unit weredeployed against 35 unarmed men, women and children who on September 4 hadoccupied a provincial park, the site of a sacred burial ground.

The key question that arose in the aftermath of George’s deathwas whether the hardline rightwing government of the day improperlypressured police to use excessive force.

At the time, then-premier Mike Harris, the tax-cutting Tory who rode topower on the promise of a “common sense revolution,” vehemently deniedany involvement and fought off opposition demands for a public inquiryinto George’s death.

“It is not the business of the Premier, of the Premier’s staff orof any other staff,” he told the Ontario legislature in 1996 whilefighting off calls for a public inquiry. “We would not have offeredany opinion.”

Harris went down to defeat at the polls in 2003, and the newlyelected provincial Liberal government wasted no time in appointingJudge Sidney Linden to head an inquiry into George’s death, in thesmall southwestern Ontario town of Forest. (Harris is expected to testify inOctober.)

Startling evidence at Linden’s hearings not only contradicted the ex-Premier’srepeated assertions that he took a hands-off approach to policehandling of the Ipperwash park occupation, but showed that even policeofficers were shocked by the Conservatives’ desire for a showdown withthe “Indians.”

OPP Superintendent Ronald Fox testified last month that he cameunder fire at inter-ministerial meetings on September 5 and 6 as he triedto explain to his new political masters that the police are not thegovernment’s private army.

The usual tactics of containment and negotiation include anapplication for an injunction so a judge may review whether there wasany legitimacy to the land claim. In fact, documents in provincialfiles attested to agreements dating back to 1938 that the burialground would be respected.

The agreements were never honoured and no one bothered to checkthe files. Meanwhile, at the high-level meetings, then-premierHarris’s 29-year-old representative, Deb Hutton, dismissed anypossibility that the Stoney Pointers might have a legitimate grievanceand demanded immediate action. Hutton, described by Fox as attractiveand “cocky,” insisted that the occupiers should be charged andejected.

On September 6, Harris told Fox he was dissatisfied with the OPP’sfailure to act. Fox vented his frustration in a telephone call thatday to the man in charge at the scene of the park occupation, ActingSuperintendent John Carson. “We’re dealing with a real redneckgovernment,” Fox said. “They are fucking barrel-suckers. They just arein love with guns. There’s no question, they don’t give a shit about Indians.”

Testifying in July, Fox apologized for his language — he hadn’trealized the conversation was being taped — but stood by his views.“In my opinion an overemphasis was placed on the weaponry,” he said.“There was an indication that there was one way to solve problems, andthat was with force.”

Fox, like other locals in this fertile area between Lakes Huronand Ontario, Canada’s most southerly point, had heard that the popularIpperwash campground was the site of burial grounds considered sacredby the people of Stoney Point, or Aazhoodena.

Their 2,500-acre reserve was one of five parcels of landChippewas kept in 1827 under the Huron Tract Treaty. In exchange, theBritish government acquired two million acres for its settlers. TheChippewa chiefs from this area, who had fought with the British in theWar of 1812, negotiated for nine years before they signed. Theythought the unceded land would be theirs for ever.

Instead, the Stoney Pointers were unceremoniously ejected morethan half a century ago. They had already lost the prime beachfrontportion in 1928, in a fraudulent land deal. Part of that land waspurchased by the provincial government for use as a park in 1936.

Then in 1942, the federal government demanded the remaining 2,200acres of the reserve for an army training camp, promising to return itafter the war. The Stoney Point band members refused to surrendertheir land, offering instead to lease it to the Crown. The federalgovernment ignored the offer and just took it, using the War MeasuresAct. Eighteen Stoney Point families were forcibly relocated toswampland on the nearby Kettle Point reserve.

In 1993, Dudley George was among a small group of activists whooccupied the army camp. The army tolerated their presence in adesignated area, then announced it would close the base and left inJuly, 1995. But the land still hasn’t been returned.

In 1995, the Stoney Point group warned authorities they wereplanning to move into the adjacent park. To avoid interfering withcampers, they’d wait until September 4, Labour Day, when it closed to thepublic.

Carson, the OPP’s field commander, felt that he had the situationunder control when he went off duty at 7:30 p.m. on September 6. Aninjunction was to be sought the next day and he had negotiators onstandby.

But within three hours, over Carson’s initial objections, ahalf-dozen OPP tactics and rescue unit (TRU) officers were deployed inthe dark of night in support of the riot squad.

At the park, the atmosphere was festive as the Stoney Pointersgathered around campfires. Their gathering quickly took on a surrealquality as riot squad members came in sight, marching down the quietcountry road, their faces obscured by visors, beating their Plexiglassshields with their steel batons.

Cecil Bernard “Slippery” George, a distant cousin of Dudley’s anda band councillor, walked towards police to try and talk to them. Butnegotiations weren’t on the agenda. The police charged and SlipperyGeorge was brought down by eight to 10 officers wielding batons. Hewas so badly beaten that afterwards, in the ambulance, a nurse wasbriefly unable to find vital signs.

As the Stoney Pointers threw stones and burning logs at police,the TRU team opened fire. Dudley George, hit in the chest, died beforehis relatives could get him to hospital. Another occupier, a16-year-old youth, was shot and wounded.

“The only thing we had were sticks and stones, against nightvision glasses and automatic weapons,” said Stoney Point elderClifford George, who came back from Europe in 1942 with an Englishwife on his arm and a chestful of medals earned in the Battle ofBritain, in France and during one hard winter starving as a prisonerof war in Italy.

In 1945, Clifford George and his two brothers, also veterans, gotpermission to go onto the base and visit their mother’s grave. Theywere unable to find it. While they were away fighting Hitler, othershad been “playing soldier,” as George puts it, in their burialgrounds.

Trenches had been dug through the graveyard where legend has it achief was buried in a sitting position so he could always watch overhis people. Tombstones had been used for target practice. The whitepicket fence that protected the graves of chiefs and important clanmembers was gone. The three young men wept.

“Good hardened soldiers, crying our eyes out,” George, now 85,recalled in testimony to the inquiry. “It was bad for us, coming homefrom overseas after thinking that we helped the war out âe¦ I always sayto myself, I found all my enemies when I got home.”

Clifford George traces his ancestry back to the great Shawneewarrior and leader Tecumseh, who allied himself with the British inthe War of 1812 and was killed by the Americans in 1813.

Clifford George attends every day of the hearing. He hopes itwill do something for the cause in which his cousin Dudley George waskilled and return his people to their ancestral land by Lake Huron,with its small inland lakes, thickly treed woods and scrub-coveredfields.

That’s something former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien tried unsuccessfully to achieve in 1972 when, as Minister ofIndian Affairs, he urged his counterpart at Defence to transfer theland back.

“They desperately need it to improve the band’s social andeconomic position,” Chrétien wrote. “In addition there is their deeplyrooted reverence for the land and their tribal attachment to it.”

So far, the only person to have been held to account in George’skilling was the man who pulled the trigger. In 1997, Acting Sgt.Kenneth Deane was found guilty of criminal negligence causing death.The judge in the case rejected Deane’s testimony that he saw DudleyGeorge shoulder a gun, but noted that others made the decision thatsent Deane on his “ill-fated mission.”

Ten years after George’s death, a year into a public inquiry,the mystery of exactly how that decision was made remains unresolved,a matter on which former premier Mike Harris and other senior Torieswill be questioned under oath later this year.

As for the federal government’s questionable use of the WarMeasures Act in seizing the reserve in 1942, elders from Aazhoodenahave told the inquiry that not a year went by that they did not seekthe return of their land through petitions, marches and meetings withofficials in Ottawa. “Recent” negotiations started in 1994 arefocusing on how to deal with environmental contamination andunexploded ordinance. There appears to be no resolution in sight thereeither.

“We just want our land back,” says Clifford George. “Sixty years isan awful long time to wait.”