The Anishnabek fight for a fair share of their own pie (ep 291)

MEDIA INDIGENA : Indigenous current affairs

This week: Billions in back rent? A pair of treaties covering a territory roughly the size of France are at the heart of a legal fight for a fair share of its resource revenues. Known as the 1850 Robinson Treaties, together they span the north shores of both Lake Huron and Lake Superior, ancestral homelands of the Anishnabek Nation. A Nation forced to sue settler governments over a special section of these treaties, known as an annuity 'augmentation' clause—a yearly payment that’s supposed to grow in step with the staggering amount of wealth extracted annually from Anishnabek lands.

And, while the Crown’s failure to honour its end of the bargain may not come as a surprise, what might is the success so far of Anishinaabe litigation, blazing a path that may have only one place left to go—the Supreme Court of Canada. How did we get here? Where might this all lead? And, just how do you make good on a debt amassed over some fifteen decades?

The kind of mind-boggling, multi-million-dollar questions very much on the mind of our friends at the Yellowhead Institute, thoroughly explored in their new special report, Treaty Implementation in the Age of Restoule, co-produced with JFK Law.

Joining host/producer Rick Harp this week for the first in a two-part discussion about the report: Christina Gray (Ts’msyen and Dene Research Fellow at the Yellowhead Institute and Associate at JFK Law, among the legal counsel taking part in the Restoule case's third stage) plus Hayden King (Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing, executive director of Yellowhead at Toronto Metropolitan University).

>> CREDITS: Our opening/closing theme is 'nesting' by birocratic.