Written from the Unceded Traditional Territories of the Bourbons

 

Attended a Zoom seminar today in which each speaker began by “acknowledging that they were on the unceded traditional territories of the X.” Fill in the blank with the fashionable modern term for this or that Indian cultural group.

I presume they all meant well, none of them being themselves visibly aboriginal, but this is a dangerous precedent.

First of all, in most parts of Canada, in Ontario and the Prairies, the “First Nations” have in fact ceded all claim to the land. Where it has not been ceded by treaty, a series of different tribal groups must always be mentioned—because all of them lived in the general vicinity, within perhaps a few hundred kilometers or so, and none of them had uncontested ownership. Almost every area native groups passed through was a “no-man’s-land,” in permanent territorial dispute. And the list of tribes who hunted through the area is necessarily incomplete. We only know who has been passing through since the first European settlement.

Which almost necessarily means that no such group can establish a claim to possession prior to that of the first Europeans.

The concept of native land ownership violates, in any case, the concept of property rights. God made the land; accordingly, it belongs to no one person more than any other. It is there for al las needed, like the air or the water. An individual properly owns only the effort, the labour, he or she has put into the land. If it is inseparable from the land itself, this establishes a claim on the land. This is why we have “squatter’s rights”: if you do not use it, someone else has the right to.

This doctrine then applies to all the land in Canada, beyond those smaller parcels near villages where Indians might have practiced agriculture—roughly what are now their reserves. By common law, they never had ownership. “Aboriginal rights” have been invented as a convenient legal fiction to draw Indians into the social contract—to ensure their acceptance of Canadian sovereignty.

The silliest was someone in Montreal saying they were on the unceded territory of the Mohawks. The Mohawks who live near Montreal today came from Upstate New York to learn of Christianity from the French. They never even claimed the territory around Montreal. The French are actually historically more indigenous than any other existing group to the lands stretching from the Saguenay down to Windsor—where the majority of the Canadian population resides. The Iroquois wiped out all the other groups within recorded history. So why are the French not mentioned as having local “traditional territories”? Why not the Spanish, who claimed these lands under the Treaty of Tordesillas? Unlike the various Indian groups, Spain has never renounced this claim. The Treaty of Tordesillas has never been abrogated, and it has been cited in the 20th century by Chile, Indonesia, and Argentina to justify their own land claims.

But the real problem with all this is that it implies that there are at least two distinct classes of Canadians, with different rights. This is incompatible with the doctrine of human equality and human rights on which Canada is predicated. If special rights to aboriginals, why not to, say, those of French or English ancestry, or of European ancestry? The logic is the same: their ancestors were here first. In fact, this notion of prior creation or prior residence is exactly the doctrine on which ruling classes have been established in other nations in the past.

The concept of aboriginal land rights is the concept of a landed aristocracy. It is what most of our ancestors came to Canada to escape.