Stony Point is not your usual gated community.
Explaining yourself to a gatehouse guard before visiting friends or family might be familiar in an upscale urban US neighbourhood, but it’s not your usual experience among the corn and soya bean fields of southwestern Ontario.
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But nothing about Stony Point (or Stoney Point) belongs in the category “usual.” Visitors driving by the fences along Highway 21 that leads weekend warriors and summertime sunseekers to the party town of Grand Bend just up the road wonder what exactly they’re looking at as they see the dilapidated old buildings in faded shades of military green.
No doubt the signs add confusion. Some are hand-painted, proclaiming the land belonging to the Stony Point Nation, others, more official looking, feature lurid graphics of exploding bombs and proclaim “DANGER.”
This is the land where Indigenous protester Dudley George was killed by the Ontario Provincial Police in 1995, after a group occupying the former Ipperwash army camp moved to take over a neighbouring park, sparking a conflict with heavily-armed police.
The Indigenous group had moved in months before, demanding the land be returned to the families who had been expelled in 1942 and forced to move to the nearby Kettle Point reserve. Despite a wartime promise from the government to return the land where their ancestors farmed, kept animals, and tended fruit trees and berry patches, the camp continued to be used for decades as an cadet training ground.
Since the death of Dudley George, the most accurate name for the 1,000 hectares that stretch from the old military compound to the shores of Lake Huron would surely be “no-man’s-land.” While the land doesn’t exactly separate warring armies like a traditional neutral zone, it does have deep ties to the military, its ownership is disputed, it’s full of unexploded munitions, and a life has been lost defending it.
But for Carolyn George, Dudley’s sister, it’s simply home, and has been since 1994 when she followed the activists to the site during the off-season when the former army cadet camp buildings were empty. Today, anywhere from 50 to 100 people live there.
Just before the occupation began, Carolyn, who goes by Cully, had a dream of moving to live in a building with white walls. “I told everybody at work I’m moving, but I don’t have any plans.” Sure enough, after the occupation began, “everybody was just picking a building,” and she found herself in the officers’ quarters with “Major this and Major that” posted on the doors, she recalls.
After 24 years, Cully’s children are on their own, and her life is spent cooking for family, visiting with grandkids, and quilting; but her home, like others on the site, is decaying. Electricity, drinking water, sewage disposal, heating, and snow clearance are all maintained, but repairs to the buildings are occasional and mostly a matter of construction triage. When a roof blows off, it’s put back on, but if ceilings are leaking rain water and mould could be growing, not a lot seems to happen, according to Cully and her brother Pierre. Pierre gave up on trying to live in the building he used to occupy and built his own shack outside the original building. “It took me two years to do… but at least it’s mine,” he tells VICE.
There are “well-documented health concerns” for people living in the buildings, including “the presence of asbestos, mould, and lead-based paint and piping,” according to a consultant’s report prepared for the Kettle Point band council in 2016 or 2017 and obtained recently by VICE. The problems were identified in an environmental assessment conducted “several years ago,” says the report by the firm Ishkonigan, run by former Assembly of First Nations chief Phil Fontaine.
Visiting Stony Point on a summer morning you don’t see many people out and about, even if the weather’s fine. Part of the old parade ground is covered by cars, trucks, and trailers in different states of repair—a hybrid used car lot and scrapyard.
“That guy’s been told to get those out of here, but he don’t listen,” my guide, Pierre, tells me.
Some buildings are clearly collapsing, and the Ministry of National Defence (MND) says three uninhabited structures will be demolished this year. Still, at one building at least, flower boxes are carefully tended by the doorway.
Stony Point is a place full not only of history and long memories, but also of irony. While the military was pushed out of these buildings by the Indigenous protesters back in the 90s, it’s the same government department that’s paying for their upkeep, as far as it goes, and for the utilities.
According to figures provided to VICE by the DND, the department is paying out around $1.3 million annually to provide maintenance and basic services for the occupiers in recent years. While National Defence says costs for earlier years are uncertain, if you project those numbers backwards, that could mean as much as $23 million has been spent since the army pulled out in the 90s.
And who’s doing the military-paid maintenance? Members of the nearby Kettle and Stony Point First Nation (KSP), many of whose ancestors are among the families evicted at Stony Point in the 40s. This odd, symbiotic relationship goes even deeper. Many of those descended from the evicted families have served in the Forces themselves. Others, such as Cully George, spent their teenage summers cooking and cleaning for the cadets.
DND maintenance activities focus on “due diligence to maintain health and safety responsibilities,” one government email says.
That’s news to Cully George. She remembers how the roof of her home started lifting off during a rainstorm and her son had to climb up and pull the tar paper and shingles back into place as “the rain came pouring in.” She’s even had water in the electrical boxes. Stained ceiling tiles show signs of water damage, and sections of wall are crumbling.
Over the years, Kettle Point members, paid with military money, have worked at a variety of jobs at Stony, such as project administrators, archeological technical support, and general site maintenance, according to DND.
One of those jobs is staffing the gatehouse, allowing access only to band members and their approved visitors. While the only apparent means of enforcing that prohibition is the wooden arm that’s usually in the up position anyway, Stony Point seems fairly calm. In the years following Dudley’s death, Cully says the occupiers had “an open door policy” for all Indigenous people to come to the site, but things got a little out of hand sometimes with some of the outsiders, Cully remembers.
She remembers some “young guys” tearing round and hood-surfing on cars, but her cousins (“big guys”) paid them a visit, and they calmed down or left. Even today, she thinks there are some outsiders living on site, but her attitude is laid-back. “If they’re OK, they stay.”
Contrary to rumours that pervaded the area around the camp for years, Stony Point has never been a “no-go” zone for provincial police, George says. “Even in ’95 most police got along with us. It’s the police they brought in from elsewhere that were totally against us,” she says. “We’ve always had a working relationship.”
An OPP spokesperson told VICE officers have not been refused entry at the Stony Point gatehouse. Neither do they shy away if called to respond to problems at the site. Quite simply, the official email says, the provincial police respond to calls for service and conduct investigations when they receive them.
Some occupiers make a living working at day jobs, such as Cully George’s son Glen Bressette, who’s employed at an auto plants manufacturer in the nearby town of Petrolia. He lives in the former military jail. “Yeah, my bedroom’s the cell,” he says with a laugh.
Others are just scraping by. Both Cully and Pierre George have health issues that keep them from regular employment—anxiety problems and PTSD among them.
One family living on the site has found the freedom of Stony Point and the largely deserted bush area perfect for the growing and harvesting of organically-grown and naturally-occurring plants to create a business making and selling herbal medicines.
While life is generally peaceful and quiet at Stony Point, every so often that’s momentarily transformed as windows shake with the muffled boom of an explosion, a reminder of the biggest reason for the glacial pace of change here…unexploded munitions (UXOs) from the decades of military use.
Governments have been telling reporters that clean-up of the land was about to start since at least 1999, but the actual clearing of UXOs only began in recent years. The explosions take place when the items are safely detonated by the special crew, contracted by MND, combing the area.
Although many locals remember the Ipperwash camp as a cadet camp—more of a kids or teens summer camp experience than intense military instruction—decades ago it was a place for training with pretty heavy firepower. According to DND, that included firing munitions such as grenades, rockets, mortars and pyrotechnics (flares), as well as small arms training.
The legacy of those days lives on, buried sometimes at depths as shallow as 2 cms under the soil, not only in the large wooded area, but even on the open sports field that’s being cleared this summer, according to Pam Cushing, DND’s project manager. By mid-August six UXOs had turned up, including flares, high-explosive grenades, smoke grenades, and even a high-explosive rocket nose cone.
Since work began on mapping and surveying the site in 2007, around 20 different UXOs have been found. Some definitely earn the description of unexploded, Cushing says.
Other work is being done to clean up the site, Cushing adds, such as clearing old car wrecks and junk from the site’s scrapyard. The school bus that was driven toward the OPP in 1995, sparking the confrontation that led to Dudley George’s death is still there. So is the car Pierre George drove his dying brother to hospital in, while sister Cully rode along, a forlorn wreck no one seems to know what to do with. “We’re talking to the (Kettle Point) band about it,” says Cushing, guardedly.
The clearance work already cost $29.4 million as of 2015, according to figures provided by DND, and crews have managed to map out about 40 percent of the Stony Point lands, Cushing says. However, only about 3 percent of the land has actually been cleared of UXOs in two years of work, she adds. Yet Cushing warns residents not to despair about that slow pace, as the crews are still transitioning from the mapping to clearance work. Now they have their equipment and procedures smoothed out, they should be able to pick up the pace, she told VICE.
Even so, since much of the search will have to conducted by crews walking through the woods with hand-held metal detectors, the work of cleaning the 1,000 hectare site is estimated to take another 20 years to complete.
Cully George doesn’t fancy waiting that long. Although the Kettle Point First Nation and the federal government signed an agreement in 2016 that will see the Stony Point land returned—eventually—to Indigenous control and transfer $95 million to the First Nation, George feels her fate, and that of the other residents, is still uncertain.
While the agreement provides a roadmap on how clearing of the land will proceed—and also says the government will pay the full cost of that work—it doesn’t spell out how the millions in compensation paid to the First Nation will be used. And as often happens where money’s concerned, divisions over how to spend it threatens to widen cracks that already divide the Kettle and Stony communities.
The Ishkinogan consultant’s report tells the Kettle Point band council that, in order for the proper clearing of the Stony land, “those families and individuals currently living at the site must vacate the premises and obtain alternative housing.” The report envisions the occupiers moving to “transitional housing,” though the writer cautions they could be away from the Stony lands for over 15 years.
After the judicial inquiry in 2006 into the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death, Cully says her group was told “they would give us houses, but we knew everything would be stopped by Kettle Point, like it always is,” she says, her frustration with the KSP Chief Tom Bressette and band council sounding clearly.
“I think with what we went through, they (Kettle Point) owe us better than this (current situation). They’ve gotten a lot of money and it won’t use up that much to build a few houses here,” she tells VICE. Back in ’94 when she joined the occupiers, Cully George would never have imagined she’d still be living in the army buildings 23 years later. “We all figured that in 8 or 10 years we should all be getting houses.”
Chief Bressette has an answer for her. “Those buildings are not fit for human habitation, we’ve already proven that with studies and they (occupiers) still won’t believe us,” he says.
But Cully says she’s not willing to move without conditions being met.
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