“Aboriginal Fatigue”

Shortly after British settlers established the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1849, governor James Douglas signed a flurry of treaties with the region’s First Nations to secure lands for fur trapping, mining and other activities.

Known as the Douglas Treaties, the 14 agreements between 1850 and 1854 might have seemed at the time like a template for future arrangements with British Columbia’s Indigenous peoples, who occupied lands stretching from modern-day Vancouver to the northern border with Yukon. Instead, the province stopped signing such agreements — a result of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s refusal to continue funding negotiations — and reached virtually no other treaties for the next 150 years.

People living in a trailer park in the Comox Valley say they’re being evicted unfairly by the K’omoks First Nation.

The First Nation has given notice that residents at the Queneesh Mobile Home park have less than two years to move off the property.

Many considered them their forever homes.

Indian givers! h/t Patti Jo & Mauser

An Indigenous group on British Columbia’s central coast is claiming ownership of private lands in a case that relies on a groundbreaking court decision from last summer that opened the door to Aboriginal claims on private property.

The Dzawada’enuxw First Nation is seeking a court declaration that almost 650 hectares of fee simple lands around Kingcome Inlet are rather “Indian settlement lands” that should never have been pre-empted by settlers more than a century ago. (Fee simple lands have long been known in Canadian law as the highest form of private land ownership.)

Over $285 million in federal government contracts for Indigenous businesses were awarded over a five-year period to companies that have since been removed from its Indigenous Business Directory, according to a response to a written question in the House of Commons.

The public directory was created to help Indigenous-owned businesses pursue opportunities, including federal contracts.

Companies must be at least 51 per cent owned and controlled by First Nations, Métis or Inuit to be eligible.

“We’ll triple the amount of money spent on the Indigenous people of Alberta, through a constitutionalized revenue-sharing program,” Rath said at the Stay Free Alberta event. “We’ll lift them out of the abject poverty that Ottawa has left them in, in an embarrassing fashion, for 100 and some odd years.”

The Chiefs know which side their grift is buttered on.