Land claim elector criteria coming under scrutiny as vote nears

Jeff Green | Feb 17, 2016

Seven thousand and seven hundred Algonquin electors are eligible for a ratification vote on the Algonquin Land Claim Agreement in Principle between February 29 and March 7. Voting will take place in nine off-reserve communities, including Sharbot Lake, as well as at Pikwàkanagàn First Nation.

The claim has been 25 years in the making, and now that the vote is near, questions that have been put aside for at least the last 10 years are now being raised.

A report commissioned by the Kebaowek First Nation, an Algonquin community in Quebec also known as Eagle Village, which has a substantial territorial overlap with the Ontario claim, has researched the origin of a sample group of 200 Algonquins of Ontario electors. The results surprised the researchers; 72 of the 200 electors they looked at had only one Algonquin ancestor, stretching from four to six generations back.

“If these examples are typical of the AOO list, then it represents a triumph of genealogy over common sense…Call it the homeopathic approach to Aboriginal Title and Rights - a little drop will do you,” concluded the report, according to an account by APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network)

The report goes on to say that “None of these people would qualify as electors for any existing comprehensive agreements or modern-day treaties.”

The Kebaowek First Nation has a reason to be skeptical about the Ontario Algonquin Land Claim. Although they are based in Quebec, they lay claim to about 300,000 hectares on the Ontario side of the Ottawa - land that is included in the Ontario claim.

The revelations about the lineage of Algonquin electors is not a surprise to anyone who has been following the claim over the last dozen years or so. The decision was made to include as an elector any individual who could prove they are a “direct descendant” from an Algonquin individual and could also demonstrate a cultural connection to an Algonquin community.

At a meeting at the Catholic church hall in Sharbot Lake in 2003 or 2004, representatives from the nine non-status communities as well as the entire Pikwàkanagàn Council debated the question of “blood quantum” for beneficiaries of the claim.

At that meeting, the lawyer Robert Potts, who had taken on the role of chief negotiator to the claim just a few months previously, sought common ground between the position taken by the Pikwàkanagàn Council that a minimum “blood quantum” was needed for legitimacy, and the position of the non-status communities, who argued that direct descent, no matter how far back, was sufficient.

The compromise that Potts came up with was to say that direct descendants, as long as they can be vouched for by a community that was already known to the process at that point, was sufficient to gain someone the right to be an elector, giving them the right to vote in the election of their representative to the land claim negotiating table, and the right to vote on an agreement, should one ever be negotiated.

The entire seven-member Pikwàkanagàn Council would sit at the negotiation table, as well as one representative from each of the nine non-status Algonquin Communities.

The further question of beneficiary status was left to future negotiations. Members of the Pikwàkanagàn Council did not make a commitment at that meeting but since the negotiations have proceeded on that basis, it is clear they decided to stay with the process under those terms.

To my knowledge the beneficiary status has never been finalized, but since all the proceeds of the land claim will be going to an Algonquin corporation based in Pembroke and no individuals from those communities will receive a payment of any kind, beneficiary status may not be as important as people envisioned back in 2003.

Potts defended the way electors are verified to APTN this week, saying, “Why is that a problem if people have been practicing their culture over five generations? The Indians that are part of this country are not all status…You don’t ignore non-status people….It is hard for some of the old hard-line status-type people, who feel it is an incursion of their rights.”

As I have written before, there are problems with both sides of this debate. The idea of “blood quantum” leads only to fewer and fewer people having the right to call themselves Algonquin. As an elder from the Alderville First Nation said to me years ago, “We like to think of ourselves as a nation, but what nation tries to limit its membership? Nations need to grow and get stronger, not shrink and get weaker.”

On the other hand, a direct descendant can have nothing more than a forgotten great great grandmother who was listed on a census as of Algonquin heritage in part. The provision for a “cultural connection” is, in practice, a fuzzy requirement. How do you quantify that? When Mr. Potts says people have been “practicing their culture”, what does he mean when the entire culture was underground until very recently? Pride in Indigenous heritage is a pretty recent phenomena in Canada.

Now that this question of blood quantum versus direct descent, which has been lurking for a dozen years, has come to the fore, there are other questions about the Algonquin electors and the nine communities that might be raised as well. A number of communities, including the Ottawa, Bancroft and Ardoch communities, have dissident former members who claim they have been pushed out of leadership roles in those communities by the land claim hierarchy itself, for no other reason than their opposition to the bargaining position that has been taken at the land claim table as the agreement in principle was being negotiated.

We will look at one of these internal issues in next week's paper.