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_— ~ BY: ROBIN SU

In recent months, tensions with indigenous peoples have
spiked across Canada as energy companies seek to construct
projects on and through indigenous lands. Both TransCana-
da and Kinder Morgan are attempting to build their Coastal

GasLink pipeline and the Trans Mountain pipeline.

First Nations have been emboldened by this sum-
mer’s Supreme Court of Canada William decision, which
recognized the aboriginal title of the Tsilhqot’in nation to
1,750 sq km of their land in central British Columbia.

While the ruling did not defer outright ownership, but
the right of use and stewardship of land while reaping its
economic benefits. As a ruling on the federal level, it affects
all “un-ceded” territory in Canada — lands never claimed
through war or by treaty.

This landmark ruling by the supreme court has creat-
ed a precedent that is particularly worrying for large scale
resource extraction infrastructure investments across

Canada.

However, with the Kinder Morgan and ‘Trans-Canada
pipelines, there has been an aggressive acceleration in the
development of their projects likely in attempt to increase
the scale of the investments in order to forcefully influence

policies determining the reality of aboriginal title

In an interview with The Guardian, Gordon Christie,
a scholar of indigenous law at the University of British

Columbia said,

“Unlike the rest of the country — where relationships between in-
digenous groups and the state are governed by treaties — few indigenous
nations in British Columbia ever signed deals with colonial authorities,
meaning the federal government still operates in a vacuum of authority
on their lands. What I see is a long history of the Canadian government
doing its best to avoid acknowledging the existence of other systems of
government. The Crown has itself acknowledged that the way it gets
authority over territory is through the making of a treaty. So, this is

their problem.”

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