Mohawks and Others Block Trains in Ontario to Protest Land Use

Native Canadian protests spread across southern Ontario on Friday over a land dispute dating back to the Revolution, with Mohawks stopping at least a dozen freight trains and interrupting passenger train service between Montreal and Toronto.

There were no reported arrests or injuries.

The demonstrations began at the end of February, when Mohawks of the Six Nations, a confederacy of Native groups, occupied a road outside Caledonia, an Ontario farming town, contending that a developer was building a housing project on Native land nearby.

The dispute, involving a 100-acre plot, has its roots in a 1784 agreement in which Britain granted a large strip of land in what is today southwestern Ontario to Natives in gratitude for their support against the American colonial rebels. The Six Nations surrendered the land in 1841, but Native activists filed a lawsuit in 1995 claiming that the agreement was made under duress, and that in any case the authorities had failed to meet their commitments.

Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, a professor of aboriginal studies at the University of Toronto, said the Caledonia land dispute "could become a symbol of the broader dissatisfaction with how the government has dealt with land claims."