AW@L Activist Arrested in Brantford Supporting 6 Nations Land Protection

It’s been just over twenty-four hours since I got back to Waterloo from Brantford. I had planned to spend last night camped in the tepee that sits on Power Line Road across from the main gate of King & Benton’s Oak Park Road $500 million industrial/commercial development site. However, on a run to Tim Horton’s yesterday around noon, Brantford police pulled over the car I was riding in and arrested me.

The tepee is the same one that Boots Powless has been camping in for almost two months now. It was moved recently to its current location from the camp which still stands on Fen Ridge Road by the would-be Hampton Inn hotel. The NYM-6 Nations “Fort” is also still standing, blocking the entrance to the development site there. The tepee itself was moved on Tuesday when Boots was released from jail. I’d be back there now, but my conditions state that I am “not to attend at any land development site within the City of Brantford, in which a land claim protest is taking place.” I was charged with mischief and disobeying a court order—the same injunction that 10 people from 6 Nations have already been charged in relation to.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“People cannot continue to lead healthy lives without sufficient farmland to produce local food, forests to help purify the air, and protected watersheds to provide safe drinking water. Neither of these complementary goals - protecting environmental systems and protecting human health - can be accomplished, however, without curbing urban sprawl”
- Ontario College of Family Physicians, Report on Public Health and Urban Sprawl in Ontario