FRANK CALDER LED FIGHT ON LAND CLAIMS
Nisga’a Tribal Council president was Canada’s first aboriginal MLA
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
In 1913, the son of Arthur Calder (Na-qua-oon, hereditary chief of the Nisga’a Wolf Clan) and his young wife Louisa, was drowned in a canoe accident on the Nass River. Not long after, a wise woman at Kincolith, a village 10 kilometres downstream from Arthur’s house, dreamed that Louisa’s youngest sister, Emily Clark, would soon conceive, that the baby would be a boy, and that he would be the spirit of the chief’s drowned son.
On Aug. 3, 1915, Frank Calder was born to Emily and immediately adopted by Arthur and Louisa according to Nisga’a law. Four years later, in 1919, at a tribal gathering of chiefs discussing the unresolved question of their legal ownership of lands settlers sought to take, Na-qua-oon picked up his son, held him high and said: “This boy is going to learn the language and laws of the K’umsiwa (the white settlers). When he comes back, he’s going to move that mountain.”
And that’s just what happened. Frank Calder attended the Co- qualeetza Residential School run by the Anglican Church. He studied theology at the University of B.C. and became one of Canada’s first aboriginal university graduates, worked in fishing and forestry, then in 1949 was elected to the B.C. legislature as the Atlin candidate for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner of the New Democratic Party. He was the first aboriginal elected to a legislature in the Commonwealth, the first to hold a cabinet post, and spent 26 years in public office.
But in the Nass Valley, he led the fight to move the mountain as his father, who died in 1937, had promised. He was founding president of the Nisga’a Tribal Council and was an aggressive activist in aboriginal land claims.
In 1969, represented by lawyer Thomas Berger, he sued the provincial government and asked the court to affirm unextinguished Nisga’a title to traditional territories. The suit was dismissed in B.C. Supreme Court, lost again before the B.C. Court of Appeal, but then in a split decision at the Supreme Court of Canada, a minority opinion argued by Justice Emmet Hall persuaded the federal government that aboriginal title existed and had to be negotiated. For B.C., everything changed.
Provincial denial of aboriginal rights was dead. The Nisga’a, Canada and B.C. signed the first treaty of the modern era, defining and affirming their title.
Frank Calder died Nov. 4, 2006, having moved the mountain.