Ontario Provincial Police wanted blood at Ipperwash. So say Natives monitoring the standoff in which police shot two protesters on Wednesday, Sept. 6, killing one.

After looking on for a month as members of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation occupied disputed land in southern Ontario, police decided to muscle their way in.

It was 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 6, and 100 Native protesters were holed up on land the government had taken from them to build a military base during World War II. Suddenly, OPP showed up at the gate and a fistfight soon broke out with protesters.

“I guess the OPP got the worst of it,” said Kahn-Tineta Horn, president of the Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native Peoples, which is monitoring the situation.

The police retreated, but later that night returned with a SWAT team. Details are sketchy, but Horn and the protesters insist the group at the base was unarmed.

Police started firing on the protesters, among them children, with a variety of weapons that included .223 military assault rifles, said Horn.

A leader of the Chippewa protest, Dudley George, 30, apparently got into a bus to move it to shield the protesters from the incoming bullets. He was hit by two .223 rounds from a police gun and killed. Horn says it seems both rounds hit him in the back, but this has not been confirmed.

Nicholas Cottrell, 15, was hit in the back with a pistol round, according to Linda Henry, a spokeswoman for the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. His mother and sister lifted him into a car to take him to the hospital, but were stopped by police who removed the bleeding Cottrell and laid him on top of the car, thinking he was dead. They apparently wanted to charge Cottrell’s sister with manslaughter until they realized the boy was still alive and needed treatment.

A third man, Band Council member Bernard George, was at the base to calm the situation. Police beat him so badly he had to be hospitalized.

He is now on bail, facing several charges stemming from the incident Said Linda Henry, “Everybody’s very upset”

She blamed Ottawa for the violence, saying it has stalled for decades on returning the land to its rightful owners.

Now, the federal government continues to stall on negotiations to clean up the badly contaminated base, where unexploded shells pose a great danger to the public, she said. The government has yet to conduct an environment assessment of the site.

When one is conducted, the local First Nation worries it will be sidelined.

“They don’t feel we should be involved in the environmental assessment at all even though our children will be playing there,” Henry said.

Horn said the recent series of standoffs between First Nations and police across the country shows people “are starting to wake up.” She said 300 people are now camping at Ipperwash, up from 100 on Sept. 6.

“Half the Indians are underage. People my age are considered moderates by these people. You know what young people are like. They don’t listen to anybody. When they’re mad, they’re mad,” Horn said.

“And over there, boy, they’re mad!”