We need land back now. Indigenous people were robbed of their unceded land.
It wasn’t just the indigenous people who were robbed, either.
The main issue is that Europeans had a very different concept of land ownership and land management; in the European view, land was a thing to be conquered, subdued, and divided up for exploitation by those who successfully did so.
The indigenous perspective, for the most part (different peoples had varying views on this), was that the land was something of which people were a part, and needed to be kept in balance.
When Europeans hear “unceeded”, they hear “land they never intentionally sold”. When indigenous people hear “unceeded”, they hear “land we never collectively agreed would be used in this way.”
Eby is such a dumbfuck. Screw with the courts and they’re gonna nail you to the wall.
I believe the majority of reasonable Canadians want to reach a just and fair reconciliation that rights the wrongs of the past. Any reconciliation that we expect to be done in mutual goodwill must consider the other innocent parties as well.
If private land is affected, then the land owners releasing title need to be fairly compensated by the government. That is the true and total cost of reconciliation.
Many people in this country are sympathetic to righting the wrongs of the past, but they are not going to destroy their own lives to do it. Let’s not forget that ancestry and history do not change the fact that people born in this country, whether indigenous or not, have known nothing other than this country, it is their home no less and no more than anyone else born here, and they have nowhere else to go.
There also needs to be a very transparent and clear timeline and total cost for reconciliation with a clear endpoint milestone.
Fighting against these things will simply create an expanding group of malcontents that will eventually have enough political power to push back in highly unproductive ways.
The unusual twist on this situation is that it appears that the people who may have any real sway in pressuring the government to understand the above seem to be the indigenous groups themselves.
