RUBENSTEIN: Who owns Ottawa? An indigenous tribe thinks they do

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.In a July 29 briefing note disclosed by Blacklock’s Reporter, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty’s department claims it respects indigenous “rights and title” to Aboriginal ancestral lands.This declaration has not prevented her department from continuing its court battle against an Indian tribe’s claim of ownership over Parliament Hill.A Western Quebec Algonquin tribe, the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, is demanding $5 billion in damages.The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg ("Garden River People") are currently based in the Quebec Outaouais region, where they control one Indian reserve, Kitigan Zibi, located on the shores of the Gatineau River near Maniwaki. In 2018, it had a total registered population of 3,286 members.If this claim is successful, each member would receive a windfall of $1,522,000.By way of comparison, Canada, Ontario, and the Algonquins of Ontario are still working together to resolve a land claim through a negotiated Final Agreement that will take the form of a modern-day treaty..As has occurred elsewhere in Canada, the Ontario Algonquins submitted a comprehensive land claim grounded in the fact that they never signed a treaty with the Crown.It should be recalled that many tribes and bands that signed treaties long ago are now claiming that this was done either under duress or that unwritten rights to land have gone unacknowledged by the Crown.Conveniently forgotten or ignored in contemporary Canadian land back claims is that unacknowledged indigenous rights could be posited by thousands of ethnic groups around the globe going back millennia.Covering approximately 36,000 square kilometres, the Algonquin Land Claim is one of the largest and most complex land claims in Ontario currently under negotiation..The Agreement-in-Principle sets out the main elements of a potential settlement, which would include: the transfer of 117,500 acres of provincial Crown land to Algonquin ownership; $300 million as settlement capital provided by Canada and Ontario; and defined ongoing rights of the Algonquins of Ontario related to lands and natural resources within eastern Ontario.The map shown above reveals that this agreement-in-principle also includes the same lands claimed by Quebec’s Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, testament to the migratory nature of foraging peoples before the invention and spread of the domestication of plants and animals..As for the more controversial Quebec Algonquin claim, “The Government of Canada is committed to maintaining legal clarity and stability in land ownership while respecting Aboriginal rights and title,” said the January 21 note titled Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg’s Title Claims In Downtown Ottawa.Federal lawyers have contested the claim in Ontario Superior Court for the past 10 years.“The plaintiffs seek an accounting of revenues and disgorgement of profits by Canada and its agent, the National Capital Commission, as well as equitable compensation for breaches of the duty to consult,” said the note.Originally filed in 2016 (and amended in 2024), the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg are seeking aboriginal title over Ottawa sites, including the House of Commons, the Senate, the Supreme Court of Canada, the national archives, LeBreton Flats, various islands in the Ottawa River, and other property.“They claim compensation of about $5 billion, except for improvements, for loss of lands, loss of opportunity, loss of culture, loss of profit, and to restore the honour of the Crown,” said the note.No mention is ever made in this claim and others like it of the many European contributions eagerly accepted by indigenous people as part of the colonization process: modern medicine; formal education, agriculture; science; Christianity; the abolition of inter-tribal warfare, slavery, and cannibalism; advanced Western technology; and capital accumulation.As Conrad Black has argued: “The Indigenous people [of Canada] were extremely skilled in various handicrafts, and as woodsmen, hunters, and warriors; they were physically remarkably strong and nimble and had a life expectancy approximately equal to Western Europeans at the time of contact. But the claim that the civilization the Europeans found in what is now Canada was in any other sense competitive with that of Western Europe is nonsense. For all its failings, this was the Europe of Shakespeare, Descartes, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. Many of the things we think of as touchstones of an advanced technological society — agriculture, written languages, metallurgy, knitted fabrics, and materials — were largely or entirely absent. Even the wheel was not to be found.”.As for the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg property claim, it is partly rooted in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), a global conflict fought mainly between Great Britain and France, shaped by colonial rivalries and European power struggles.Great Britain’s victory led to France losing nearly all its North American possessions, including all of what would eventually become Canada.The core historical and legal foundations of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg claim include the following: the 1760 Treaty of Oswegatchie, a pre-Confederation peace and friendship pact where the Algonquin Anishinabag allied with the British against their former French benefactors in exchange for explicit promises protecting their “land ownership” and possession; the Royal Proclamation of 1763; and unceded aboriginal title grounded in undocumented indigenous folklore claiming that the community's ancestors occupied and governed the watershed of the Kichi Sibi (Ottawa River) and Gatineau River long before European colonization.The complete verbatim written text document of the 1760 Treaty of Oswegatchie has long been lost. Instead, the agreement made on August 30, 1760, between British General Sir William Johnson and the Seven Nations of Canada is known primarily through Johnson's journals, colonial records, oral history, and subsequent related proceedings. These suggest the treaty terms were four-fold: members of the Algonquin Anishinabag would have free movement throughout their traditional territories without fear of molestation by British troops; they would also maintain their same privileges as they enjoyed during the French regime; the Seven Nations alliance with France would be forgotten and that they would be treated as friends of the British without fear of reprisals; and, the Seven Nations would continue to hold their lands, both villages and hunting territories.The courts will have to decide whether the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which transferred the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg’s traditional hunting and gathering lands from the French to the British, either abrogated or subordinated a missing 1760 agreement.More particularly, these courts would also have to consider whether unsubstantiated oral history — hearsay evidence in juridical terms — passed down from generation to generation by pre-literate peoples has any binding legal authority.They would also have to judge whether mobile hunter-gatherers who shared the same land areas with neighbouring peoples have valid claims to exclusive ownership of it in a modern legal sense.Equally important, it would have to consider the historical fact that the Kitigan Zibi are recent occupants of the Ottawa land they claim as their own. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Algonquins of the mission at Lake of Two Mountains, 200 km east of Ottawa, came to the area of the Désert River. The township limits were drawn in 1850 and were given the name Maniwaki by the Oblates at that time..Legally established in 1851, their reserve there was demarcated in 1853. In the decree implementing it, the reserve was called "Manawaki" (after mani aki meaning "Mary's Land") and also “River Desert.” The name "Kitigan Zibi" replaced the other two on September 24, 1994, when the band council adopted this title for the reserve.As for the Royal Proclamation of 1763, often called the "Indian Magna Carta" because it is a foundational legal document that recognized indigenous land rights, set rules for future treaties, and protected native territories. King George III issued it on October 7, 1763, after Britain won the Seven Years' War, so it is well worth citing because it established a new administrative structure for the recently acquired North American territories.It did so by clearly defining the land west of the established colonies as "Indian Territories," where indigenous people "should not be molested or disturbed" by settlers and where the Indian Department would be the primary liaison between the Crown and First Nations people.As for the eastern lands, the Proclamation established “four distinct and separate Governments, one of them Quebec/Canada [which includes much of modern Eastern Ontario] which is: “… bounded on the Labrador Coast by the River St. John, and from thence by a line drawn from the Head of that River through the Lake St. John to the South End of the Lake nigh Pissin [Nipissing]; from whence the said line crossing the River St. Lawrence and the Lake Champlain in forty-five degrees of north latitude, passes along the High Lands which divide the Rivers that empty themselves into the said River St. Lawrence, from those which fall into the Sea; and also along the North Coast of the Baye des Chaleurs, and the Coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Rosières, and from thence crossing the Mouth of the River St. Lawrence by the West End of the Island of Anticosti, terminates at the aforesaid River of St. John.”The Proclamation includes none of these lands as “reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.”More particularly, since Ottawa and the surrounding rivers clearly fall into the Atlantic Ocean, it is hard to comprehend how their continuing possession by either the nation-state of Canada, on behalf of the British Crown, or by the people of Canada, under generations of fee-simple ownership, can now be claimed as belonging to any indigenous tribe whose ancestors were wandering foragers with no permanent residence.Still, according to the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, their “members controlled the land at sovereignty and have never ceded their territory through treaty or any other means. At this point in time, pursuing Aboriginal Title in the courts is the only realistic choice for the community.”Most of all, this statement ignores the elementary fact that the territories occupied by the British prior to 1763 and those transferred to them by the 1763 Treaty of Paris were fruits of conquest, which, at that time, was a universally recognized principle of territorial acquisition and colonial possession, among both state and stateless societies alike, regardless of whether previous treaties were signed or not.Nearly every country in the modern world — roughly over 130 to 140 of the UN's 193 member states — has been colonized or controlled by a foreign power at some point in history. Only a tiny handful of nations, such as Japan, Thailand, and Iran, avoided formal European colonization, though definitions and historical eras vary widely.Looking even further back, thousands of distinct peoples have lost their land and ethnicity to conquest since the rise of tribal societies some 12,000 years ago.If history and archaeology teach us anything, it is that this process is a natural, normal, and often beneficial part of irreversible cultural evolution, a process indigenous leaders and their enablers are eagerly trying to subvert or reverse. Ignoring recorded historical facts and age-old accepted practices is now routine when it comes to the land back claims made by indigenous people across Canada, which is why our country is teetering on the edge of a cataclysmic but self-imposed political abyss.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Who owns Ottawa? An indigenous tribe thinks they do

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