The heavily armed men surrounded the Sun Dancers in the pre-dawn darkness.
At 4 a.m. on Aug. 18, 1995, with camouflage, painted faces, M-16 rifles and snipers, the group crept through the foliage towards an armed First Nations encampment at Gustafsen Lake in the B.C. Interior, about 270 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
The situation was already tense as the activists occupied part of a remote, privately owned cattle ranch, where they gathered to perform a Sun Dance ceremony in July but then refused to leave, claiming the land as unsurrendered Secwepemc territory.
Alerted by spooked horses, Sun Dance faith keeper Percy Rosette was afraid racist vigilantes were attacking the camp. His concerns stemmed from a past incident where local ranchers allegedly approached the Sun Dancers, cracked a bullwhip and used a derogatory racial slur.
“Who are you?” Rosette called out in Secwepemc. No one answered, so he fired what the group always maintained was a warning shot into the air, and called the RCMP. But what Rosette didn’t know was that the armed group was the RCMP — a tactical team on a covert reconnaissance mission.
“What the RCMP decided to do was to accelerate the provocation,” said George Wool, a defence lawyer in the ensuing criminal trial, as he recounted this incident in a recent phone interview.
And thus with a risky mission and a single shot began what one Mountie described at the time as “the biggest RCMP operation ever:” the Gustafsen Lake standoff.
In the following weeks, 400 Mounties fired up to 77,000 rounds of ammunition, deployed helicopters, armoured personnel carriers and buried explosives in a $5-million paramilitary mission to dislodge about 20 activists known as the Ts’Peten Defenders.
Thirty years later, newly declassified documents reveal the country’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), had “extensive” interest in Gustafsen Lake, keeping tabs on developments in a previously secret investigation into “Native extremism.”
The heavily censored papers, obtained by CBC Indigenous during an access-to-information investigation, include part of a top secret annual report confirming CSIS “provided information and assessments” to undisclosed recipients “on the possible threat of serious violence at Gustafsen Lake” and elsewhere.
“During the summer of 1995, conflicts at Gustafsen Lake. B.C. and Ipperwash Provincial Park in Ontario demonstrated that Native extremists have embraced the MWS [Mohawk Warrior Society] model of armed standoff as a tactic to accomplish their political goals,” the report says.
Canada’s spy agency had ‘extensive interest’ in this 1995 standoff
That revelation was unsurprising for Kanahus Manuel, a Ktunaxa and Secwepemc activist who was close with one of the occupation leaders, William Jones “Wolverine” Ignace. She was with him when he died in 2016.
“For us it’s validating what we already knew: that there was extensive investigation into — and secret service-style investigations into — Indigenous land defenders, not just at Gustafsen Lake but all across Canada,” Manuel told CBC Indigenous.
According to one legal scholar, the disclosed documents suggest CSIS treated Gustafsen Lake like part of a potential terrorist insurgency brewing countrywide, elevating the conflict from local criminal matter to national security threat, though there remain more questions than answers about CSIS’s involvement due to the heavy redactions.
“I do have to wonder what they told the RCMP,” said David Milward, a law professor at the University of Victoria and member of Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation, “because we do know the RCMP basically treated Gustafsen Lake like a war zone.”
For a few years, local Secwepemc people had used part of the sprawling property controlled by American rancher Lyle James on the condition that no permanent structures be built.
In the summer of 1995, James felt this condition had been breached and delivered an eviction notice, and the site became a magnet for a broader Indigenous resistance movement.
At a news conference two days after the scouting mission, Mounties showed reporters an arms cache seized from two people linked to the Sun Dance camp.
The weapons included an AK-47 assault rifle, a Glock 9-mm semi-automatic pistol with Black Talon hollow-tipped bullets, ammunition, machetes and a garrote made from piano wire. The Aug. 18 warning shot, police added, narrowly missed an officer’s head.
“The threat is serious,” Supt. Len Olfert told the media.
“We see this as an act of terrorism.”
The force was now “on [the] warpath,” reported Vancouver-based The Province newspaper. Five days later, a memorandum marked secret was circulated at CSIS.
“The following is our most recent information regarding the Gustafsen Lake Incident,” the memo says.
“We will follow up in [censored] message, however, I understand [there] is extensive interest in the current situation from the director.”
Ward Elcock was CSIS director from 1994 to 2004. Before that, from 1989 to 1994, he was the security and intelligence co-ordinator at the Privy Council Office, the department that serves the prime minister.
Having seen the armed confrontation at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in 1990, known as the Oka Crisis, Elcock said in a recent interview with CBC Indigenous that the potential for violence did appear to exist at Gustafsen Lake, making an investigation justified.
“Until you’ve done some sort of a level of investigation, you can’t be certain whether there is a level of violence that is problematic or a level of violence that is non-existent,” he said.
“You can’t do it. You can’t make those decisions on the basis of wilful neglect.”
CSIS declined an interview request and in response to written questions declined to comment specifically on Gustafsen Lake.
“CSIS acknowledges that investigations on Indigenous activism and the term ‘Native extremism’ were contained within the documents from the 1990s,” wrote spokesperson Magali Hébert in a statement.
“However, CSIS no longer uses that term. As well, CSIS does not base its investigations on specific communities.”
Instead, the service now uses the categories of ideologically, religiously and politically motivated violent extremism, the statement continued, adding reconciliation is a priority and ongoing process to which CSIS is committed.
Elcock said the papers don’t disclose how intrusive the investigation was, meaning CSIS could have based its assessments at Gustafsen Lake on intelligence gathered by intrusive means or collected out of newspapers. It isn’t clear.
The documents do confirm CSIS was collecting newspaper articles, keeping an eye on the rising tensions through August. The clippings often described the defenders as militants, renegades and rebels. One headline called the group “squatters [who] appear doomed to a bloody end.”
To Manuel, these articles are a stark reminder of the media’s influence.
“That was my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousins, my family that was there, so we all knew that they weren’t rebels,” Manuel told CBC Indigenous.
“They were actually freedom fighters fighting for Indigenous Peoples’ rights to land, water — our self-determination.”
Years later, defence lawyers discovered the Mounties taped the entire Gustafsen Lake operation as a training video, including an embarrassing backroom meeting that returned to haunt the force.
“Is there anyone who can help us with a disinformation and smear campaign?” one officer was filmed saying. Another officer, the RCMP’s spokesman Sgt. Peter Montague, replied later, “Smear campaigns are our specialty.”
RCMP and Indigenous activists stand off at Gustafsen Lake in 1995
Wool, now 83, still remembers the shock on the jury’s faces when it was played in court. He maintains the policing and prosecutions were political, calling the CSIS reports “pivotal” since they disclose no proof linking any defenders with terrorism.
“RCMP fabricated the ‘terrorism’ label as a justification to bring in the military and put on a political prosecution,” he said by email.
A B.C. RCMP spokesperson declined to comment.
On Sept. 11, 1995, James “OJ” Pitawanakwat and non-Indigenous activist Suniva Bronson were driving down a dirt access road where they hit a buried explosive planted by the RCMP, engulfing their pickup truck in smoke.
A 45-minute gunfight ensued, where the Mounties shot and killed Pitawanakwat’s dog and shot Bronson in the arm. No police were injured. The next day, a police sniper shot at a camp member who was walking in an agreed-on safe zone. Police testified later the goal was to kill the man.
CSIS seemed nervous.
“Pockets of Native unrest continue [to] erupt across the country. The publicity surrounding the ongoing tensions at Gustafsen Lake and [Ipperwash] Provincial Park has become a lightning rod for Native malcontent,” reads a secret briefing note dated Sept. 15, 1995.
“We are also witnessing an air of Native co-operation and solidarity fostered by a growing ‘us vs. them’ attitude.”
While heavily censored, the briefing note was titled “Cross Country Native Update,” suggesting CSIS was watching protests countrywide.
The standoff ended on Sept. 17, 1995 when the remaining activists left the camp. Charged with crimes were 18 people, including Rosette, Wolverine, lawyer Bruce Clark, John “Splitting the Sky” Boncore Hill, and Pitawanakwat.
A group trial ended in 1997 with a jury offering mixed results: 39 acquittals and 21 convictions. Most were convicted on the charge of mischief, though some were locked up for years on the more serious charge of mischief endangering life.
Wolverine spent five years behind bars. Pitawanakwat was convicted and given a three-year sentence but fled to the U.S. where in 2000 an Oregon court refused to extradite him, finding his crimes were “of a political character.”
Shortly before he died in 2016, Wolverine and others began calling for a national inquiry into the level of force used by the RCMP.
Manuel said the need for answers remains.
