OP-ED: Does a Quebec indigenous tribe own Ottawa?

"In a 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."

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty

Author: Hymie Rubenstein

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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

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This declaration has not prevented her department from continuing its court battle against an Indian Band’s claim of ownership over Parliament Hill.

A Western Quebec Algonquin band, 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 proves successful, it will mean a whopping per-member windfall of roughly $1.52 million.

Conveniently forgotten or ignored by this band and others like it across Canada is that unacknowledged indigenous rights could be posited by thousands of ethnic groups around the globe going back millennia.

Regardless of this history, “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.

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.

The $5 billion seeks compensation “… 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, or 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.

The core historical and legal foundations of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg claim include the following: the 1760 Treaty of Swegatchy, 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 no longer exists. This means 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 following the latter’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, either abrogated or subordinated a missing 1760 agreement.

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.

Moreover, they would 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 19th century, Algonquins of the mission at Lake of Two Mountains, 200 km east of Ottawa, came to the area of the Désert River.

As for the Royal Proclamation of 1763, often called the “Indian Magna Carta,” it is a foundational legal document that recognized indigenous land rights, set rules for future treaties, and protected native 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.

Not so for the lands to the east whose rivers drained into the Atlantic Ocean, none of which the Proclamation “reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.”

This historical fact has not prevented the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg from claiming that 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 signed with the French were fruits of territorial conquest, which, at that time, was a universally recognized principle of land 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