The Province of Ontario (the government) has issued licences for additional mining development on individual First Nations lands, despite the fact the map used by the government was made before land was even made available for the taking. To make matters worse, these licences have been issued by misusing language about the land that was and is an explicit part of the Treaty of the Six Nations of Canada (to the tune of over 7,500 words)
Breathing into it is totally non-negotiable: “The
Yes we reserve,
we reserve our homelands
For future generations”.
It goes on and on. The correct name for this language is Treaty Rights
and it is not just unnecessary at this point in history. The best thing that could happen is for this government to no longer be issuing mining licences, because that would mean that all lands and resources under the sovereign power of this nation would be taken over by them and the rest of the world would have no right to mine on them.
In essence, the Ontario government is also trying to trick people into signing treaties with them to either buy or sell ownership in Indian reserves (which they can no longer do) or property in one of the most abjectly racist pieces of legislation ever passed by any Canadian government: the 1892 Indian Act. This legislation made native Canadians officially an identifiable group. The government is holding these citizens under a non-negotiable Treaty of the Six Nations, with all the same rights and responsibilities as the rest of us.
As for the other bit of unnecessary text:
Full passage:
The vast majority of the lands are: Concessions of the lands by the government to the bounty developed since the time of the creation of Confederation; Rights recognized in the 19th and 20th Amendments to the Canadian Constitution; Rights and title vested in First Nations or their chiefdoms by Treaty of the Six Nations; and rights under aboriginal law, treaty or customary law.
Nonsense. This is absolutely ridiculous. Nowhere in any of the major treaties does it say that the government has a right to cede certain rights under the land in exchange for profits. What the treaty says is: all of the land. Nothing more, nothing less. The Treaty was never meant to be a mere aid to the government in buying land for large families. Every single Indian Nation in the nation was created because they had land and the government was transferring that land and just having it usurped for it- other governments don’t steal, they negotiate, and that is what this government has been doing. When you lose you shouldn’t look for a handout.
Indeed, the reason why the Ontario government gave the land to other Indian Nations so long ago is to prevent the usurpation of this land by one of the dozens of corporations who have been angling for this “good ground” and making any profit they can in order to justify the gargantuan amounts of money they pump into the system in the political contributions and bribes and the mostly empty promises of “We’ll give you our first, second and third shots at this and we’ll get lucky. Oh no we won’t. Oh no we will, it will be yours.”
It is no different here. Remember that there are tribes living next to the banks of the Don River in Ontario. Their ancestral lands are valuable. Somebody wants to profit, and the current government is more than happy to give this up. By giving this land up, they also grant the forest companies that have already claimed it, a free pass to continue their attempts to round up every Indian Nation they can and to use the latest advances in GPS and mining technology to nail Indians for any crime in perpetuity: even at their very sacred abode.
This is not the government’s fault. It is all them, and nothing else. They are like the monster from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story “The Raven”. It’s an old, tattered old version of the beast. Somewhere in the closet is the modern version, the only changed being how much power it has over the people of Ontario and other First Nations.
The speed with which these decisions are made must be shockingly insulting. A few years ago the government of Ontario bought the company that had operated the coal mine in the Molisewicks Forest near Ohsweken. As you might expect, the local First Nation was infuriated and they were very upset and they said so. Local and provincial politicians stood
