Reaching Just Settlements: Land Claims in British Columbia

Gwynneth C.D. Jones is a policy advisor with the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

This is a collection of short statements by participants at a conference
held in Victoria in February 1990. The conference brought together
Native leaders and representatives from non-Native business, labor,
municipalities, academia, and law to exchange views on what is necessary
to produce a just resolution of the land question in British Columbia.

The vision of the Native speakers is clear and compelling. They cannot
talk of giving up land or rights because no aboriginal society has the
authority to cede the birthrights and responsibilities of generations of
their people, past and future. However, they welcome the opportunity to
negotiate a way for aboriginal and nonaboriginal societies to “share
our lives in these territories,” as Miles Richardson of the Haida
Tribal Society puts it. Dispossession of either aboriginal or settler
peoples should not be part of the agenda. The impetus of federal land
claims policy, they point out, serves only governments and nonaboriginal
interests. It turns co-existence negotiations into a large real estate
transaction— trading rights and lands for money and reduced rights and
lands, when instead the focus should be on recognizing and rebuilding
Native governments, societies, and economies.

The nonaboriginal vision is more clouded. Although industry
representatives say that they have no concern about who controls the
conditions of development, as long as those conditions remain favorable
and stable (a viewpoint easily understood in the international context),
lawyers and advisers overlay the co-existence vision with case law,
division of jurisdiction, third-party interests, and categories of
rights until the familiar sensations of complexity and paralysis set in.

The juxtaposition of these two worldviews is the most educational part
of the book. As a collection of remarks at a conference, it is
impressionistic and disjointed, and ideas are only suggested rather than
developed. The strength of the book lies in the aboriginal understanding
of what the task in negotiations really is, and of the need to create a
common understanding of that task that will result in truly just and
lasting settlements between aboriginal and nonaboriginal peoples.