First Nations to vote on $1.1 billion settlement
New agreement will see end to decades-long fight over past unmet treaties
OTTAWA — Seven First Nations spread out from Georgian Bay to Lake Scugog will decide this weekend whether to accept a $1.1-billion settlement from the federal and Ontario governments over a long-standing treaty dispute, the Star has learned.
Members of the Alderville, Beausoleil, Chippewas of Georgina Island, Chippewas of Rama, Curve Lake, Hiawatha and Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations will vote on the proposed settlement Saturday.
If approved, the deal would end decades of court litigation and negotiations over the controversial Williams Treaties from 1923. The First Nations have alleged for years that the Crown unjustly crafted and implemented these agreements without fair compensation for their land, and that the nations never surrendered fishing, hunting and other rights in the 20th-century treaties.
Chiefs from each of the First Nations either declined to discuss the proposed deal, citing confidentiality ahead of Saturday’s vote, or did not respond to interview requests from the Star this week. Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett’s office also did not respond to requests for comment on the proposed deal.
But documents obtained by the Star show details of the proposed agreement signed May 3, more than a year after Ontario, Canada and the First Nations announced renewed talks toward a settlement for Williams Treaties court cases that have languished since the early 1990s. In a memo to the Curve Lake First Nation, Chief Phyllis Williams lays out the broad details of the potential deal: a total of $1.1 billion for the seven First Nations, and recognition of rights to hunt and fish on land from treaties signed before Confederation. Each nation would receive between $90.9 million and $98.7 million from the Canadian government, and between $60.6 million and $66.2 million from Ontario, according to the documents.
Williams’s memo also says the deal would grant 312 square kilometres of new land to the First Nations, and that both levels of government apologize “for having denied rights and appropriate compensation to our First Nations for nearly a century.”
The Williams Treaties dealt with lasting claims over huge swathes of land where treaties with Indigenous nations had never been signed.
Much of the land in question was already being developed by settlers, who by the early 20th century had built homes, mines and lumber mills on land that the Chippewas and Mississaugas had never agreed to relinquish.
This was in violation of 1763 Royal Proclamation, a foundational tenet of British colonialism in North America that required agreement from Indigenous peoples in exchange for European settlement of their land, said Dan Shaule, an in-house historian with Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP, a Toronto-based firm that specializes in Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
In 1916, the federal Justice Department learned that some pre-Confederation treaties were problematic, prompting Ottawa and Ontario to address the unceded territory and questionable previous deals at the same time.
The result, Shaule explained, was two treaties inked in the fall of 1923, in which the seven nations received a lump sum of $500,000 — or $7.3 million at 2018 value — for massive tracts of land from Toronto’s Humber River to the Bay of Quinte, and north past Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River.
Unlike other treaties in Ontario and elsewhere, there were no annual payments or new reserve lands for the First Nations in the deal, and the governments held that rights to fish and hunt on the territory had been surrendered.