[/b]
As was I but for me it was totally understandable. My family purchased land and built a lake front cottage on the land between Ipperwash Provincial Park and the Kettle Point Reservation. We made this purchase directly from The Kettle Point Band but in the 70's the purchase of this land by non natives in the area was lumped into the dispute over the Army base that was next door to Ipperwash Provincial Park. The center of the dispute between my family and the Kettle Point Band was that they felt they were forced to sell at depressed prices because of the poverty of the Band, in fact of all the the land left to the Band, Kettle Point itself had to be the most bleak.
Anyways despite a great deal of harassment, OPP involvement we stuck it out until my parents passed in the late 80's were we ended up selling the land back to the Kettle Point Band. It was interesting that while we thought the fair thing to do was to sell it back to the Band they kept insisting on paying us only .10 on the dollar of our original purchase price even though we could have kept a substantial price selling outside the community. The amount of land we had was substantial and we attracted a bid from a London developer and when we brought that bid to their attention the harassment stepped up to unbelievable levels. What we finally did was arbitrate this with the Government and settled on a price of .80 of the developers bid with the Government picking up .60 of the price.
The whole point of what I'm saying here is that there was a great deal of militant attitude brought on by not only on bad business decisions by the Band's past leadership but out and out exploitation by the past Provincial/Federal Governments. There was absolutely no reason for the Federal Government to retain the land for the Army base and Park after WW2 and it was very short sighted by the Band not to sign long term leases on the land instead of selling at depressed prices the land in between, in fact I recall my father commenting that he brought that up with the Band negotiator when he purchased the land.
Years of bad decisions, out and out exploitation, poor schools and a high level of poverty led to years of militancy from the younger members of the Band. As a result I wasn't all that surprised at the end results.
kf
