Category: We Are All Treaty People

Passing The Buck

It’s not hard to see in who’s favor this dispute is going to be resolved once it gets kicked upstairs to the Feds.

A lobster fishing group in Nova Scotia has failed in its bid to persuade a judge that a First Nation does not have the treaty right to commercially fish for lobster out of season and without a licence.

In a decision released Wednesday, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Ann Smith says the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance could not proceed with its claim against the Sipekne’katik First Nation because the court lacked jurisdiction.

Left Coast, Lost Cause

We are governed by a secret cabal of our enemies.

Without legislative approval or a public mandate, the BC NDP government—apparently enabled by the federal government—is negotiating a secret agreement with a tiny, remote Indigenous community that aims to recognize legally unproven Aboriginal title, transfer lands, share revenue and cede unprecdented governance authority over 11 per cent of the province in one of Canada’s most mineral-rich districts, containing an estimated value of known deposits exceeding C$1 trillion.

That’s trillion with a ‘t.’

The end goal of the so-called “foundation agreement” is the recognition of Tahltan Nation rights and title over “Tahltan territory,” defined repeatedly as its entire legally unproven territorial claim spanning 96,000 square kilometres, according to public documents and other heavily redacted files obtained under a Freedom of Information request by the Public Land Use Society.

“The [foundation agreement] negotiations will be based upon recognition of Tahltan Aboriginal Title and Rights in Tahltan Territory,” reads a 2020 “shared prosperity agreement” that defines the geographic area as “the traditional territory identified by the Tahltan.”

Tahltan’s territorial claim spans an area larger than Portugal, including 70 per cent of the Golden Triangle, one of the richest mineral districts in Canada, which the BC Geological Survey estimated in 2021 to hold a total contained metal value of C$1.28 trillion. […]

The Tahltan Central Government is the administrative governing structure for the Tahltan and Iskut Indian bands representing two clans who together make up the Tahltan Nation with 636 people living on reserve and 2,444 registered members living elsewhere.

The most stubborn obstacle to securing recognition of Tahltan title may might not be having to prove it in court—both senior levels of government appear inexplicably eager to dispense with the constitutional standard of proof, as they did with Haida title. Nor have governments openly expressed any concern for the public interests or the usurping of its governance authority over Crown land. Rather, the biggest pushback may come from neighbouring Indigenous communities.

Via Juno News.

Some Unmarked Graves Are More Equal Than Others

Oh, so now they want to dig.

After purchasing a property in Port Colborne, Ontario and beginning construction of their future home, the Reios discovered ancient human remains on the site. Since then, they have been ordered to fund an archaeological investigation that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even exceed $1 million.

Despite legislation that allows the government to step in when compliance would impose an undue financial burden, provincial officials refused to provide assistance.

The Canadian Constitution Foundation is supporting their court challenge, toss a few bucks their way if you can afford to.

Justice For None

Anyone with a different skin tone would have served jail time. What’s notably absent from the article is any mention of the impact on the victim’s family. Is their loss just collateral damage?

…Provincial Court of Manitoba Judge Wanda Garreck said defence counsel’s request for a conditional sentence was more appropriate after applying both the Gladue principle and precedents from R. v. Ipeelee, another landmark Canadian decision involving “systemic and background factors” related to Indigeneity.

Linklater, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was tossed from the vehicle at some point during the crash and was pronounced dead on the scene. It’s not clear how severely Okemow was injured, if at all, but she did produce “blood alcohol readings over three times the legal limit.”

Critical Shovel Theory

“Neutrality is a luxury that archaeologists are not afforded and they cannot be apolitical in the face of politics,” she wrote….

Five years of national angst and anger over the “discovery” of “graves” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School was driven by an archeological report by a self-proclaimed activist archeologist and critical theory advocate Sarah Beaulieu. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2019, glorified her social warrior/critical theory credentials.

In her thesis, Archaeology of Internment at the Morrissey WWI Camp, insight into Beaulieu’s philosophy is revealed in chapter two under the headings “Critical Theory” and “Applications of Critical Theory within Modern Conflict Archaeology.”

Critical theory, she explained, has a dual purpose: exposing ideologies (or regimes/governments) that justify oppression and forcing a commitment from the “practitioner” (in this case Beaulieu) to act against the oppression once it has been exposed.

“Through the application of critical theory, researchers gain an understanding of how certain groups have become exploited. This understanding allows the researcher to use this knowledge and critique gained through research to strive to end such oppressive forces,” wrote Beaulieu, a professor at Fraser Valley University.

“Critical archaeologists thus take part in an emancipatory archaeology to serve marginalized societal groups and challenge the dominant class.”

I’ve linked to the archived page, but if you have a couple of bucks to spare, consider subscribing to the National Post. They’re the only ones with the cajones to take these hoax mongers on, and it costs nearly nothing.

Undeserved Guilt

The key to allowing a myth to become as pervasive and as thoroughly embedded in a culture as the myth of residential school mass graves, it seems, lies with getting enough people to buy into the notion of a secularized version of original sin.

The Kamloops fiasco has changed this nation for the worse. Canadians were made by their government to feel shamed, demoralized and bitter in being labelled génocidaires. The breadcrumb trail from these feelings leads directly to the media. Sorry, but a head must roll for that. Reconciliation? When First Nation leaders join other Canadians in calling for an annulment of the genocide resolution, we will know that the reconciliation process has begun.

 

Small Victories

I’d rather that the Supreme Court ruled that aboriginal title doesn’t apply to government land either, since the acceptance of that precedent has already saddled taxpayers with billions of dollars in undeserved payouts, but at least someone finally drew a line in the sand.

The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a ruling that Aboriginal title cannot be declared over private land, in a decision the federal government says will have an impact on the Cowichan Tribes case in British Columbia.

 

Smoke Signals

Sam Cooper;

When Winnipeg police laid out the largest drug seizure in Manitoba history last week — more than 525 kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl, 14 firearms, and $825,000 in cash — the bricks of narcotics and the row of guns drew the cameras. A quieter item in the evidence locker did not: 1.35 million contraband cigarettes.

To a former senior Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) organized crime investigator who has spent decades tracing the illicit tobacco trade, that detail was perhaps the most revealing thing in the multi-agency probe. Illegal cigarettes, he told The Bureau, are the connective tissue of the networks that flood hard drugs from China and Mexico into Canadian communities. If tobacco produced on Indigenous lands fueling fentanyl production does not register with citizens, he says, the one billion in tax dollars lost every year in Ontario alone should at least raise eyebrows.

“In that April 21 column, I tried to imagine how Canadian media outlets would square this circle.”

Jonathan Kay;

A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.

On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.

It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.

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