It’s been described as the place where the landback movement began in Canada.
Fifty years ago in Anicinabe Park — a Northern Ontario site used by First Nations people for thousands of years — was once the site of an armed standoff and occupation that drew international attention in 1974.
Now, three First Nations, Anishinabe of Wauzhushk Onigum, Niisaachewan, and Obashkaandagaang (Washagamis Bay), are making a legal bid to reclaim the 14-acre park, which is currently owned and operated by the City of Kenora.
This week they filed a statement of claim in Ontario Superior Court against Canada and the neighbouring City of Kenora.
Wauzhushk Onigum Chief Chris Skead told Ricochet that he feels betrayed and disrespected by city officials.
“We’ve always handled our side of the bargain as Anishinaabe, it’s the other side that has not,” Skead said. “Fifty years later, reconciliation has failed. For three years, we have met with the City of Kenora and asked them to return the land. They have refused. Now, our only action is a legal action.”

The claim, filed by Headwaters LLP, contends that Kenora, “undertook a deliberate and systemic campaign to dispossess the Plaintiffs of their reserves,” and that Canada’s sale of the 14-acre parcel to Kenora for what is now Anicinabe Park was, “illegal and unconstitutional.”
It seeks for the court to either compel Kenora to transfer the land’s ownership to a corporation owned by the three First Nations that surround the city or impose a Constructive Trust on Kenora that would hold the land in trust for them.
The City of Kenora responded to media by declining to comment.
Skead announced the claim had been filed in a ceremony Tuesday morning at his community’s bingo hall, on the former site of St. Mary’s Residential School, barely out of view of Anicinabe Park.
After more than a century of encroachment, failed negotiations in the aftermath of the 1974 youth-camp-turned-armed-uprising, and recent negotiations with the city that began in 2021, Skead said the First Nations, collectively known as the “Rat Portage bands,” have no other choice than to take this action.
Occupation or gathering?
On July 23, 1974, between 100 and 150 young people took up arms and refused to leave Anicinabe Park until the land became “liberated Indian territory,” in the words of Ojibway Warriors Society head Louis Cameron.
The action, known as the “Anicinabe Park Occupation,” lasted 38 days. And while it garnered international attention, and inspired a broader land-based interpretation of decolonization, it ultimately didn’t change the arc of history that brought the park under colonial control in the first place.

Skead said he doesn’t accept the word “occupation” to describe one of the highest-profile Indigenous political actions in history.
“To me, it has always been a gathering. When it comes to occupation, to me personally, the settlers would be the ones who have been occupying, whereas we, as Anishinaabe people, have been here for time immemorial.”
Skead said if this court action brings control of Anicinabe Park back to the First Nations in a way the occupation didn’t do a half-century ago, he visualizes the space being used to build a place for Anishinaabe-led reconciliation.
“We’re going to share the land. We’re going to do what’s right. We want to do reconciliation from our point of view,” he said.
“We always want to do that as Anishinaabe people, even though we’ve been through all that trauma and all that stuff, we have a way we want to live and that’s being good people, utilizing those seven grandfather teachings.”
From 38D to Anicinabe Park
The three First Nations, collectively known as the “Rat Portage bands,” were a single community until the 1970s. That’s when the Crown identified their reserves as 38 A, B, and C, around Kenora’s west, east, and north, respectively. But there was also a 38 D, a landing on the southeastern edge of Kenora.
That was where Anishinaabe people visited with their children on release from residential school beginning in the late 1800s. The First Nations say they historically used that land for feasts, trade, commerce, and governance meetings. As many as 80 people who had travelled by boat or dogsled to do business with the settlers stayed there at any given time, as they were unwelcome to rent hotel rooms in the city.
“We’re going to share the land. We’re going to do what’s right. We want to do reconciliation from our point of view.”
Anicinabe Park was set aside for the First Nations’ exclusive use in 1929 and the claim alleges Canada “conspired to sell the land so the city could build a park” in the 1950s. It argues, through the correspondence of Kenora’s mayors reaching back to 1908, that the city’s leadership misled Canada as to how Anishinaabe people were using the land, in order for the city to encroach on reserve lands under the auspices that non-Indigenous people were the ones whose interests were at risk.
In 1959, Canada sold the 38D land to Kenora in exchange for the city abandoning its lease interest in Wauzhushk Onigum’s reserve lands. The city also vowed to “help establish suitable and timely accommodations for the Plaintiffs elsewhere.”
Kenora kept neither promise, continuing to hold land in Wauzhushk Onigum for another 15 years and leasing Anicinabe Park for tourism development, which continues today.

Political conversations between Canada and the “Rat Portage” community range from the First Nation requesting clarification over land transfer to protesting land expropriation and lack of consultation in both the cases of Wauzhushk Onigum and Anicinabe Park, dating back to 1918.
Ogichidaa (Grand Council Treaty #3 Grand Chief) Francis Kavanaugh issued his support for the legal campaign on Tuesday. He read from a prepared statement, saying the First Nations’ connection to land has defined its history and grants them rightful ownership to Anicinabe Park.
“I will continue to stand with the leadership of these communities as they’re forced to take legal action to address this historic wrong,” Kavanaugh said. “What the land meant to so many of our people — the hurt that was caused to so many of us — is something that can’t be forgotten.
“I know the importance this land has to these communities, to our nation. It means so much more to us than whatever it means to the people of the town of Kenora.”
Strategic reflection, 50 years later
It was 3 a.m. when Justice Nottingham showed up at Anicinabe Park, asking to meet with four of the occupation’s leaders: Louis Cameron from Wabaseeomoong (Whitedog), Ronnie Seymour from Big Island, Joe Bird from Naotkamegwanning (Whitefish Bay), and newly-elected Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) Chief Tommy Keesick.
Those occupying the park were already calling for the Crown to remove Nottingham from their case.
Keesick, now 81 years old and the last surviving among the four, recalls he was willing to hear the judge out, but the others thought it was a trap.

“I told Louis, ‘maybe there’s something he can tell us that we can use in our negotiations. I don’t know what the court has. That can change things,’” Keesick recalls.
“Louis was a straight man. He says, ‘I know what you’re trying to get at. If you want to talk to him, talk to him. But you’re not going to do it here, fuck off. If you leave to go talk to this judge, you’re going to get arrested.’”
The risk for Keesick went beyond arrest. If he showed the leaders could be drawn out, the others feared it would make them seem weak and prompt a police raid.
“I know the importance this land has to these communities, to our nation. It means so much more to us than whatever it means to the people of the town of Kenora.”
He stayed and watched the occupation continue for another month. It became increasingly clear to him that non-Indigenous Kenorites were not in solidarity with his objectives. They were also not listening.
The local newspaper, the Miner & News, was distracting from their demands by printing daily, aggresively-racist columns and editorials, which dragged every false stereotype and social grievance into the unrelated land dispute. City residents would stop by and hurl all manner of insults into the park at no one in particular. Keesick says the names didn’t hurt but he could see the action wasn’t succeeding.
The media, political, and public focus was always on what arms the occupiers were using. Keesick can still recite how they had more than 20 rifles, 16 of which were .22 calibre with a single shot in the barrel. There were 14 shotguns, four of which were sawed off. Then there were red-rubber slingshots, made to shoot partridges and hares in the park because the occupiers could barely afford essentials as the action wore on.

Keesick believes the already-suspicious, non-Indigenous public’s focus on the weaponry pushed aside the history and the legitimate political grievance from being discussed and resolved. He can still see the social and political implications of that disconnect today.
“I don’t know whether I can say I’m proud. I still feel mixed up. No one seems to have wanted to listen. A lot of our people were angered by nobody being listened to because of the ‘armed occupation.’
“It was meant that we were there to kill people, but it wasn’t so. We thought if we showed that we were serious in what we were trying to do, we’d have to do something to make them stop and listen to us,” he said.
“But using arms was a bad way of doing it because we didn’t know how to talk to the white people at the time. And the white people didn’t make any formal agreement with us to talk to our chiefs and councils. We never had chiefs and councils before, we had leaders.”
The occupation finally ended on August 18 at the request of lawyers for the First Nations, who had secured a promise from Ontario to negotiate. Those meetings produced nothing, and then-Indian Affairs Minister Judd Buchanan held a press conference on November 8 to assert that First Nations claims to the lands were not legally binding but only “a moral claim.”
As Keesick looks down at the Harbourfront from the window of the Kenora Fellowship Centre, he’s hopeful the legal action can set relationships on a new track. He still sees young, Anishinaabe people forced into dangerous, sometimes illegal work and lifestyles without choices.
He agrees with Skead and the chiefs that if the court does award the First Nations title to Anicinabe Park, that the land should serve the treaty’s promise to build relationships between Anishinaabe people and the residents of Kenora.
“They [the First Nations] should share,” he says. “I think we’ll get to know each other better. We’ll be able to help each other better.”
Jon Thompson is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based in Thunder Bay. Contact him with tips and story ideas at editor@ricochet.media. Sign up here for his newsletter and never miss a story from Northern Ontario.