Canadian Indian protests lead to train disruptions

A Six Nations protester performs a sweetgrass ceremony on a barricade after they were told that police were going to raid the area near Caledonia, in Ontario, Canada, on Friday. PHOTO: AP

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

There were no reported arrests or injuries.

CN Rail won a court injunction ordering the removal of demonstrators should protests continue. Via Rail, the national passenger line, announced it could no longer take weekend reservations on trains linking Toronto with Ottawa and Montreal and was obliged to charter buses to honor existing reservations.

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

The protests received little attention until the Ontario provincial police raided the group and arrested 16 people before dawn on Thursday.

A scuffle left three officers injured, including one who was hit on the head by a bag of rocks and needed stitches. A few protesters said they had been hurt by police Taser guns.

The police action seemed only to feed the protests, as about 200 people returned to the site to build makeshift barricades, heap piles of gravel and burn tires and an abandoned van on the road.

Indian protesters manned the barricades on the same road through Friday, but the police said they had no immediate plans to remove them again.

"We obviously prefer to have peaceful resolutions," said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

"But we gather there has been some attempt at that, and the situation is quite complex on the ground," he said.