Bedard Appeal May Have Ripple Effect On Land Claim

Jeff Green | Jun 13, 2013

The fallout from the ruling by former Justice Chadwick for the Algonquins of Ontario to the effect that the names of 500 members of the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation are to be removed from the Algonquin electors' list is just starting to become apparent.

A number of those 500 people will be seriously affected by the decision because not only does it pull them out of the land claim, it also puts their very identity in limbo. The appeal only determined that the Algonquin descent of those who traced their ancestry to Simon Jude and Simon Gene Bedard cannot be verified. It did not determine that any other ancestry can be verified. The Bedard descendants, who have lived their entire lives with the knowledge that they have an Aboriginal heritage, will now have to establish that heritage through other means, and what those means are may be unclear.

Although determining their Aboriginal bloodline would not make the Bedard descendants “status Indians”, it would give them back their hunting rights, which are suddenly up for debate.

In addition to negotiating the Algonquin Land Claim, the Shabot Obaadjiwan have entered into a relationship with the Ministry of Natural Resources to manage the way their members hunt. If individuals carry a Shabot Obaadjiwan card, the MNR leaves it up to the First Nation to ensure that the hunt is managed and the species are being protected. The same is true of fishing.

Now that the Algonquin status of most of the Shabot has been relinquished, the inherent right to hunt that has been recognised by the Supreme Court for non-status First Nations peoples does not necessarily apply to those carrying Shabot Obaadjiwan membership cards.

That is, unless the Shabot Obaadjiwan turn all of the Bedard descendants out, and issue new cards to their other members.

Although the Shabot Obaadjiwan leadership has not spoken publicly since news of the appeal surfaced last week, there has been word that they are not going to accept the decision without a fight. Apparently there are a number of options under consideration, one of them being a court challenge to the appeals procedure itself.

Whatever the Shabot Obaadjiwan decide to do, it is clear that this whole scenario has opened up a rift within the Algonquin communities who have been sitting together for the last eight years at the negotiating table, and it was a rift among Algonquins that led to the Land Claim languishing for ten years before the current negotiating teams took shape in 2005.

There is a possibility that the vote on the Draft Agreement in Principle will be delayed or scuttled entirely due to internal squabbles, with dire consequences for the entire process.

There is likely too much at stake for all the players within the AOO for this extreme scenario to occur, but something that has long been dormant has been opened by the Bedard appeal. The Pikwàkanagàn First Nation did not see that simply being a Direct Descendant from an Algonquin person and being identified with one of the nine off-reserve communities was sufficient to make someone a beneficiary of the claim. They initially wanted to set some kind of a minimum blood quantum, a percentage of Algonquin DNA, perhaps less than is required for status under the Indian Act, but something more than was being offered.

In the end, the Pikwàkanagàn Council agreed to accept descendancy, but only to determine electors, not to determine beneficiaries.

One of the pieces of information that has come out is that this is still the case. An agreement has not yet been reached about who will qualify as a beneficiary to the land claim once a final agreement is reached.

The draft Agreement in Principle to the land claim has been controversial among rural landowners, municipalities, and interest groups such as hunting and fishing groups and cottage associations, as could have been expected. It has also been rejected by Algonquin individuals and communities who have opposed the process for years, as could also have been expected.

But the possibility of a new internal rift among the Algonquins of Ontario, which the Bedard appeal decision has opened up, could prove to be a much more difficult hurdle to overcome than the others.