Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984. As predicted in my August 11 column, British Columbia has joined the Musqueam Indian Band in moving to appeal a landmark judgment of aboriginal title to a former seasonal village site near Vancouver International Airport.After more than 500 days of trial featuring more than 60 lawyers, BC Supreme Court Justice Barbara Young ruled in favour of the Cowichan Tribes, which brought the lawsuit more than seven years ago. .BC government to appeal precedent-setting court ruling on First Nations land claim.The Cowichan called it Tl’uqtinas, a summer camp used for fishing and raiding neighbouring tribes for dried salmon and slaves. The Cowichan have always been based on Vancouver Island, with nine traditional villages that are now Indian Act reserves along the Cowichan River near Duncan.The 800 acres awarded by the court is across the Strait of Georgia, with fee-simple ownership by the City of Richmond, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, multiple private property owners including an industrial park, plus federal Crown land. The judge declared that aboriginal title is “senior” to fee-simple ownership, forcing BC Premier David Eby to appeal to protect the legal structure of real estate in the province..The Cowichan Tribes’ own maps include as their traditional territory this key fishing area on the south arm of the Fraser River, the entire strait in between the mainland and Vancouver Island and parts of what are now the San Juan Islands in Washington State. Similar to the Haida Nation further north, the Cowichan were a feared naval power in pre-contact BC, dominating the coastal region with sea-going war canoes.The Musqueam have their own reasons for wanting to appeal. The Musqueam Declaration of 1976 sets out a traditional territory encompassing not only its Indian Act reserves at Vancouver, Sea Island (home of the airport) and South Delta, the contested south bank of the Fraser, plus “the entire watershed draining into English Bay, Burrard Inlet and Indian Arm,” including the City of Vancouver..THOMAS: Calgary's birthday celebrations an exercise in wokeness.They assert occupancy of the disputed lands for thousands of years, with some such as Sea Island having formed during that time from sediments deposited by the Fraser. A key objection to the ruling is the assignment of fishing rights to the Cowichan.Seasonal raids by the Cowichan, Musqueam, Squamish and other indigenous groups are documented in A Sto:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas (Douglas & McIntyre 2001), based partly on a journal kept at Fort Langley from 1827 to 1830. During those years the journal records that the Cowichan attacked the Sto:lo community at Chilliwack four times..How does an island-based indigenous group gain aboriginal title over the territorial claims of the Musqueam, Squamish and others based on the mainland? Justice Young skirted around that question by noting that the area "has been frequented by many indigenous groups since time immemorial."The private property implications of the decision have attracted the most attention, and drove the appeal coming from the BC government. The judgment is suspended for 18 months to give the parties time to negotiate a settlement to the tangled issues of Crown, private and aboriginal title..BRODIE: One province, one nation?.Leaving negotiations up to the BC NDP government is a worrisome option. This is the government that seems intent on surrendering Crown land and authority to some of BC’s 200-plus indigenous groups in exchange for approval of a handful of major projects to turn around a declining economy.Concessions so far have included mineral-rich lands with asserted but not proven aboriginal title, vast areas of Crown land divided up in “land use planning” conducted behind closed doors, and even provincial parks increasingly closed to non-indigenous people during key times of the year.BC Conservative leader John Rustad, a former minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation, has observed that “reconciliation cannot be achieved by taking rights away from one group and giving them to another.”This case offers a defining test of that observation, at further enormous cost to taxpayers.Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984. He lives in Victoria.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc
