"Idle No More Rally Raised Awareness on Six Nations Rights"

A blip on the Idle No More radar went off Saturday June 1st with a small, peaceful rally on Cockshutt Bridge that raised awareness as it slowed down traffic in and out of Brantford for a few hours.

Organizer Dustin Vanevery, who put the rally together on social media, said over 200 pamphlets were handed out and that, despite a few middle fingers from passerby the rally was a success.

There's a lot of people happy that we are out here and that support us, he said of the constant honking.

The pamphlets detailed the Haldimand Proclamation of 1784 in which the British Crown granted the "Mohawk Nation and such others of the Six Nations Indians" a tract of land six miles on either side of the Grand River as compensation for fighting in the American Revolutionary War.

Bob Post, a Brantford area resident, was a curious passerby who stopped his car to speak with organizer Dustin VanEvery.

Post said after a lifetime of work in the mining industry and developing friendships with natives, he owed it to himself and to them to find out what was going on.

"I knew there was a treaty. I thought it was a mile from the Grand. It actually covers six miles."

He said he can't imagine how the federal government is going to settle the debt. "They should be fairly compensated," he said of the Haudenosaunee. "I think it's time after 200 years."

Post didn't mind the interruption of his Saturday morning errands. "If more people took the time to get educated it would help people all the way around," he said.

Amanda Stewart, a Hamilton resident who came to show support for the cause said she was "paying rent to the Earth."

"It's scary what's going on," she said. "We're all treaty people." Stewart was holding up a sign detailing the drastic reduction in protected Canadian waterways after the December 2012 omnibus legislation changed the Navigable Waters Protection Act from 1882.

Federal approval is no longer required to make alterations to over two million waterways - instead only 200 waterways are still protected.

Stewart said the federal government of Canada has no business altering treaties between natives and the British Crown. Meanwhile, Vanevery said the rally was in support of Idle No More.

He said elders have shown a lot of support and like that youth are taking the lead. "Idle No More is about land claims," he said, adding that Idle No More has been going on since the 1990 Oka Crisis.

"It's been Idle No More since then. There's going to be more and we want to see change."