Nigel Biggar: Is Canada really built on 'stolen' land?

National Post

23-06-2025

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While natural moral rules such as these do provide a framework for governing interactions in the absence of commonly recognized law, they're much more contingent and less stable than legal rights. This is because whether I respect your freedom or invade it depends on whether I estimate that you have more than you need and I have less. Even if I make my estimate conscientiously, your estimate might well differ from mine and there is no overarching authority to arbitrate between us. What's more, not everyone is conscientious and some — whatever their skin colour or ethnicity — will be propelled by greed or by the unfair, egoistic assumption that the life of someone else is worth less than their own.
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To this already unstable mix must be added the incomprehension, uncertainty, mistrust and fear that naturally arise when two culturally alien peoples, speaking entirely different languages, collide with one another. Under such volatile conditions — and in the absence of any commonly restraining law — friction, conflict, defeat and conquest are, tragically, almost inevitable.
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Almost, but not entirely. Sometimes, it suits alien peoples to co-operate because they have reciprocal interests. In a new study of early relations between the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and Indigenous peoples on the coast of British Columbia, 'The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title,' the historian Ted Binnema reveals that land itself was not a bone of contention. While the company wanted to trade and gain access to natural resources, the Natives wanted the goods and opportunities that the British brought — including blankets, weapons, wage-labour and medical services.
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They also wanted security. The peoples of the Pacific Northwest subsisted on salmon, which perishes quickly unless processed. Processing was labour-intensive, requiring far more work than women alone could provide. So, all of them depended on slave-labour. Consequently, slave-raiding and war were endemic. The HBC, however, made it clear that it wouldn't tolerate warfare on its doorstep. As a result, the Native peoples coveted the security and status that proximity to the company's trading posts offered. And when the foreigners cleared and cultivated land, or mined coal, they had no complaint, for land and the black stuff weren't what mattered most to them. Moreover, when they wanted to establish reservations, the company complied. It wasn't until the HBC first offered compensation in the 1850s that the Natives began to demand it. After all, when one set of them seized from another what did matter — slaves — they weren't in the habit of paying.
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This reminds us that relations between colonizers and Indigenous peoples weren't always characterized by conflict. In many cases, and for long periods, they co-operated to their mutual benefit. But it also shows us that the value of land differs not only between cultures, but over time. Even if it were true that, in the early 1800s, the territorial expansion of European settlement in British Columbia did deprive Indigenous peoples of their livelihood by trespassing on their fishing or hunting grounds, to surrender huge tracts of territory to them in 2025 is not to unravel history and restore the past. That's because what mattered in the past was not land but subsistence. And British colonization replaced traditional means of subsistence with new alternatives — trading, farming and wage-earning. Now, through the Canadian state, it offers welfare payments, too.
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In the early 21st century, control over land means something quite different from what it meant in 1800. Its value has changed. Then, it meant access to fishing or hunting grounds and thereby the means of survival. Now, it means the lucrative ownership of resources for exploitation or development, which the Vancouver islanders in the 19th century could not imagine and did not value. So, to grant 'Native title' to Indigenous peoples today is not to uphold a historic legal right, for such a thing didn't exist. Nor is it to restore things to where they were, replacing like with like. It's to create a novel, unequal privilege.
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