I’d warned years ago that the performative “land acknowledgements” that so many Canadian organizations started using at the beginning of events and gatherings at least a decade back were a bad idea, because they were almost always historically misleading and might be used in future lawfare. Well, the future is here, and the precedent has been set in British Columbia with a court ruling that aboriginal land claims from a BC First Nation has more standing in court than the legal titles held by the current owners. On his Substack, Brian Lilley discusses the issue:
The City of Richmond, British Columbia is warning homeowners their title to their homes may be at risk. It all dates back to an August ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court called Cowichan Tribes that said Crown and private title in a 7 1/2 square kilometre area of Richmond was “defective and invalid.”
While some at the time said that the ruling would not impact homeowners, the legal department for the City of Richmond clearly thinks differently.
“The court has declared Aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners,” a letter sent to homeowners in the area impacted reads.
The letter was sent by Mayor Malcolm Brodie and tells residents the city will be appealing and holding public consultations. It’s not just the City of Richmond appealing this ruling it’s also the province and the Musqueam Indian Band.
You can read more from our friends over at Juno News.
The entire ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court is confusing, as is the jurisprudence set out by the Supreme Court on the issue of Aboriginal title dating back to one of those decisions in 2014. Thankfully Professor Dwight Newman, the Canada Research Chair in Rights, Communities and Constitutional Law at the University of Saskatchewan, has laid out an explainer of what happened in the Cowichan case, the 2014 Supreme Court case and what needs to be done going forward.
Last week, Kim du Toit responded to an Australian land acknowledgement on a recent TV show:
The history of this entire world is a story of migration, settlement, wars over territory and Tribe A taking land from Tribe B — bloody hell, they’re still fighting the same wars in the Balkans — but it’s only recently that the arguments over who owns what have become a third-party issue rather than something that the involved parties settle between themselves. Or, to put it in a more scholarly fashion:
Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who were displaced by force somewhere in their lineage. Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who displaced other people by force somewhere in their lineage. It’s an inevitable fact of human history. American natives fought with each other over land and resources, and some tribes, like the Dakota (Sioux), were notorious for attacking their neighbors. Europe’s history is rife with such, from the Vikings to the Norman invasion of Britain. In fact, few if any of the people of Europe today are the original inhabitants of the land they reside on now; the one exception may be the Basque of the Pyrenees Mountains, but even they, at some point, came there from somewhere else. The French people we know now derive their name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and as for the British Isles, that motley group of islands has seen so many invasions, from Picts to Celts to Romans, Saxons, Anglians, Jutes, and Normans, that it would be difficult to keep track as they go by.
Here’s the simple response to all the handwringing and aggrievement over the “stolen land” claims: get over it, because you’re never going to get it back. End of story.
And to a lesser extent, the same is true of “cultural appropriation”: where White kids are somehow forbidden to wear their hair in those disgusting dreadlocks because Africans somehow have “ownership” of a hairstyle. What bullshit. It’s like saying that Black people can’t drink Scotch whisky because whisky is traditionally a product of the northern provinces of (lily-white) Britain, or that the Irish can’t eat chips because potatoes originally came from America.
Everyone borrows cultural artifacts and customs from everyone else. That’s been the habit of mankind for millennia, and no cries of outrage can overturn it.
When it comes to land, the stronger group has taken it from its “original” (and sometimes not-so original) weaker inhabitants. That this activity has become somewhat less egregious and bloody in recent times does not gainsay its basic premise — and where it has become more bloody, the weaker continue to learn its hard history — as the “Palestinians” are (re-)learning in their efforts to eradicate the state of Israel. (They’re unlikely ever to give up, which simply means that Israel will be forced to teach them the same lesson again and again, ad infinitum. As I’ve said many times before, the Arabs are lucky that the Jews have an inexplicable aversion to genocide, or else “from the river to the sea” could easily have changed to “from the Golan to the Suez”. Vae victis — a Latin expression — has particular currency here.)
So enough with the kowtowing (a Chinese expression) to the Perpetually Aggrieved. Fuck off, all of you, and make the best of what you’ve got. Heaven knows, most of what you can achieve comes courtesy of Western civilization.
You’re welcome.
