The relationship between Canada and First Nations plays out like a marriage on the rocks. Once upon a time, separate Nations came together: some brought a love of land, and others had more of a lust for it. They made a solemn covenant, sealed the deal in ceremony, and then: things went horribly sideways.
Maybe it was the way Canada kept insisting that their good intentions were enough to excuse abuse and neglect. Or how, though they kept saying “sorry”, they couldn’t help but take up all the space, ‘flagspreading’ their way to occupy 98% of the sofa without once handing over the remote. Tired of watching Beachcombers re-runs and being gaslit over wounds ancient and fresh, Indigenous Peoples negotiated, accommodated and — finally — litigated.
So it’s no big surprise that Canada’s legal systems tend to borrow from family law when it comes to repairing relationships. From the issuance of Advance Costs to fund litigation, all the way down to the idea of reconciliation itself, instruments developed to settle disputes between quarrelling parties have been adapted to address this country’s most fundamental fallout.
Let’s look at just one case: colloquially known as the Defend the Treaties trial, Anderson v Alberta was launched in 2008 by Beaver Lake Cree Nation(BLCN). Located 200 km north of Edmonton in the heart of what was once Alberta’s boreal forest, BLCN was faced with the explosive expansion of oil and gas projects in their territory. As a result, the community was finding it increasingly impossible to get out on the land to hunt, fish, and collect berries and medicines. Without these activities, it was growing difficult for families to make ends meet, and to pass on cultural knowledge from elders to parents, and from parents to children.
Imagine if every time you set out to check on your traplines, you discovered another road, another well, another tailings pond. What you once knew as a sinuous landscape layered with lineages of your ancestral ecosystem knowledge has become a maze of dead-ends and no-go zones. Imagine if the rare caribou or moose you did encounter was inedible, the meat poisoned after the animal licked at the salty-tasting bitumen that seeps to the bog’s surface because of in situ oil sands extraction.
For the small Indigenous Nation, the writing was on the wall: go to court, or lose everything at the heart of what it means to be Beaver Lake Cree.
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