The efforts of Canada's Indigenous rights movement to flex political muscle are most acutely felt in British Columbia. B.C.'s strategic location as the country's only Pacific province gives it outsize influence over energy projects that require its unique geography, yet the province is also home to Canada's most legally ambiguous claims of Indigenous territory. Enormous swatches of British Columbia were never officially surrendered by Indian treaties and in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Indigenous nations can still assert "title" to the land.
Symbolically, it has been easy for British Columbian politicians, academics, entertainers and "woke" individuals broadly to adjust to this new understanding by ostentatiously acknowledging the "unceded" nature of their province before any public act. As a practical matter, however, things are trickier.
If legal authority over most of British Columbia has never been granted to the governments that purport to rule it, then it follows that use of B.C. land must be carried out according to the wishes of its true owners. But who speaks for them?
Canadian governments tend to talk to the Indigenous governments recognized by the Indian Act, which, since 1876, has required any "body of Indians" holding claim or trust to organize themselves through elected councils. Though politicians claim to find the Victorian paternalism of the Indian Act distasteful, the notion that aboriginal governments should conduct themselves democratically seemed among its least contentious provisions. Yet a recent jurisdictional struggle highlights the degree to which even that assumption can no longer be taken for granted.
The council of the Wet'suwet'en Nation has authorized construction of a natural gas pipeline through their claimed territory but the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs have not. Forces loyal to the chiefs set up blockades and earlier this month mobilized outrage among Indigenous Canadians and the Canadian left. The notion that elected aboriginal councils are colonial impositions at odds with "traditional governance structures" like hereditary monarchies has burst into the mainstream. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who theoretically backs natural resource development but also vows to make Aboriginal "reconciliation" the hallmark of his tenure, has conceded to Indigenous nations that "it's not for the federal government to decide who speaks for you."
Yet if the federal and provincial governments (to say nothing of private industry) are going to have any useful relationship with the true owners of British Columbia, at some point someone, somewhere, has to give the question of "who speaks for the Aboriginals" a definitive answer. In some corners, even framing the question elicits offense. Canada's First Nations are collectivist and egalitarian, they say, meaning community consent may emerge slowly, through gradual consensus between leaders and people.
As a functional matter, of course, it will be bureaucrats, lawyers and judges who will sort out these complicated questions of Aboriginal decision-making. The fact exposes the shifting economic and class interests that define Canada's new era of reconciliation.
When Canada's modern Indian Affairs regime was set up by Ottawa in the 1970s, Canada's leaders could take for granted a certain symbiosis between the interests of Indigenous Canadians and the strength of the country's natural-resource sector. Given the number of Aboriginal people living in rural communities close to oil wells, gas pipelines, mines and dams, it was rational to assume that a more cooperative management of traditional native territories was the most viable way of bringing long-term material benefit to First Nations. Negotiation was mostly a matter of divvying up royalties and jobs.
Such sentiments are still shared by many in the Indigenous community. When the pipeline through the Wet'suwet'en territory was given final approval this past October, Karen Ogen-Toews, a former elected Wet'suwet'en chief who now serves as leader of an alliance of pro-development aboriginal bands, praised the decision as something that would bring "real benefits to Indigenous Peoples and communities, long-term careers and reliable revenue to help First Nations close the economic gap between their members and other Canadians."
However, recent decades have also seen a powerful faction of the Indigenous rights movement become more interwoven with the interests of urban professionals in Canada's big cities. Priorities migrated from the pursuit of material gain for aboriginal individuals to big, existential questions of land ownership and political authority.
Power, accordingly, shifted to the sorts of people and industries capable of contributing to such conversations, including lawyers, academics, civil servants and consultants of all kinds.
Many progressive, white-collar professionals have found their alliance with First Nations exhilarating. They have gained prestigious new clients who offer workplace opportunities to pursue ideological goals. This notably includes environmental activism, a cause now deeply intertwined with Aboriginal assertions of land control.
It has come at a price, however. As urban professionals equipped to manage Indigenous political disputes enjoy more visibility, those working in natural-resource industries in rural Canada might face a corresponding bust. Notably, this includes tens of thousands of Aboriginal workers. Natural Resources Canada estimates that more than 16,500 Indigenous Canadians work in mining, while the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers claims that 11,900 Indigenous employees work for the country's oil and gas industry. Collectively, this makes Aboriginal Canadians "better represented in the resource sector than in any other sector of the economy outside of public administration," according to the Conference Board of Canada.
Episodes like the Wet'suwet'en affair, or the Trans Mountain pipeline debacle before it, demonstrate the modern Indigenous rights movement's ability to make the creation of new resource projects that sustain jobs in the industry extraordinarily difficult - and, in time, probably not worth attempting. This has generated considerable populist outrage among affected workers and will be one of the reasons Trudeau's party will likely perform terribly in western Canada during this fall's general election.
Yet even if Trudeau loses, it won't matter much. The laws and policies that form the foundations of Canada's modern Aboriginal affairs framework have been largely forged outside of Parliament, dictated by an unelected judiciary consistently biased in one direction.
In more ways than one, Canada's Indigenous future looks likely to be divorced from the democratic assumptions that governed its past.