BREAKING NEWS ON 125 YEAR OLD LAND CLAIM IN ALBERTA
Encouragingly, while governments have always dealt cynically with Indigenous people in Canada and the courts at one time were just as bad, jurisprudence on Indigenous people has been improving since the Calder case in 1973. By the late 1990s, one of the important victories that Indigenous people had won in the courts is that their understandings of various deals with colonial governments, as preserved in their oral history, became admissible in the courts. The long history of lies on the part of negotiators for the federal government about what would be included in the treaties that were signed with First Nations leaders who were illiterate and had to depend on what negotiators told them was gradually documented.
Euro-Canadian scholars were once part of the problem. They only believed written documents and regarded only European sources as credible. They were the products of ethnocentric schools of thought. As scholarly work moved more in the direction of giving voice to all sides, it became clear that the negotiation of the treaties had been something of a con job. Closer investigations of government sources revealed that much of the cynicism in the negotiatons--tell them what they want to hear so that we can grab their land in documents that we will say are the "legal agreements" and ignore what we have actually promised--is evident in materials from both the government and Indigenous side.
Scholars increasingly became witnesses for Indigenous peoples, able to provide "European" source material that reaffirmed the oral histories told by Indigenous elders. Thanks to my friends, Sarah Carter of the University of Alberta History Department and Faculty of Native Studies, and Walter Hildebrandt, formerly of Athabasca University Press, University of Calgary Press, and Parks Canada, for their contributions to this work. Kudos to the elders of the Blood First Nation for telling their stories and to the whole Blood Nation for fighting a wrong that had been done to them 125 years ago.
Southern Alberta's Blood Tribe, the country's largest reserve, has won part of its 40-year land claim battle against the federal government.
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