Jasperites, ultimate ownership of the lands we hike, fish, climb, and enjoy ourselves on is disputed. There are people who believe that significant portions of the lands east of the Rocky Mountains were never formally handed over to the Canadian government by the First Nations groups who first lived on them.

“The federal government has never properly addressed the fact that the Kootenay Plains, the Bighorn Wildland, the half of Banff National Park north of the headwaters of the Red Deer River, and a broad, profitable strip of Jasper National Park, including the Columbia Icefield, were never the subject of treaty negotiations at all,” writes author, playwright, and lawyer Gary Botting, in his biography, Chief Smallboy: In Pursuit of Freedom. 

Botting believes that those lands still rightfully belong to First Nations groups as the original treaty negotiations ceding away their ownership were nothing more than a government backed fraud.

Why does he think this?

In Treaty Six, the 1876 treaty that deals with the central parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan given up by local Albertan Native leaders, much of western central Alberta is pointedly left out. The strip of mountainous lands between the Continental Divide and the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains were seemingly left for the Natives there. 

Explorers David Thompson and Alexander Henry both wrote of the aboriginals who waged fierce battles in those areas and both men knew to steer clear of them. Thompson wrote of people there with something approaching fear, strange considering the good relations he established with other natives around Alberta. 

Botting writes aboriginals there seemed highly possessive, frequently at war and in no way related to the central Canada Plain and Wood Cree Natives and the other tribes at Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt and Battle River, who signed onto Treaty Six. Those natives did not represent the natives further east and as such, the government did not ask them to sign away the rights of groups they did represent.

This way of thinking did not last.

With Treaty Eight of the late 1800s, the Canadian government, acting with much less than the aboriginals’ best interests at heart, sought to remedy the central-western Albertan lands left out. 

Treaty Eight primarily deals with lands in northern Canada and the areas around the Kootenay Plains, but the Bighorn Wildland and Banff and Jasper National Parks, the areas left out of Treaty Six, are also included. 

“It is unlikely that any of the chiefs [from Chippewyan, Slave, Beaver and the northern bands of the Woodland Cree tribes] present at the signing of Treaty Eight in 1899 had ever visited what is now Jasper National Park, the Kootenay Plains, the Columbia Icefield, [etc.],” writes Botting. Still, they were asked to sign away the rights of a people they had never met.

Botting believes the Chiefs at the treaty signing had little idea that they were even signing away their own property rights, let alone the rights of another group. In short, goes the argument, the government tricked one group of people into signing away the rights to land of a people they had no business representing in an act of state-sanctioned fraud.

One day, writes Botting, the First Nations groups will mount a legal claim to the lands we in Jasper stand on, one that will end up before the Supreme Court of Canada. Parks Canada could end up owing the Natives over a century of back rent.

Canadians and Albertans of all creeds would be wise to recognize that this rental bill will one day be stuffed into our mailbox. Whether we pay it or not, or even whether we should or not, remains to be seen. Until that day, however, we would all be wise to understand the arguments made in its favour and against it.

DISCLAIMER: The Last Word is an opinion column, it is meant to provoke thought and debate. As such, any opinions written here are the writers own and do not reflect the viewpoint of any other Fitzhugh staff member or the directors of the Jasper Media Group Inc.