Metis Land Claim Case to be Heard After Twenty Years

The Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench will hear the first ever Metis land claim case in Canada on May 13, 2002. Originally filed in 1981 by Yvon Dumont, (who later served as Lieutenant-Governor), the case has been tied up by legal wranglings and delays. The federal government opposed the claim and refused to participate in the process, leading to a 1990 ruling by the Manitoba Court of Appeal that the claim could not proceed. However, that decision was overturned in 1993, and slowly the case has made its way through the court system.

The Manitoba Metis Federation (MMF) is arguing that the federal government and Manitoba government failed to meet their obligations to the Metis Nation of Manitoba as outlined in sections 31 and 32 of the Manitoba Act of 1870. It was through this Act that the province of Manitoba joined Confederation and the Manitoba Act was incorporated into the British North America Act. Sections 31 and 32 guaranteed the Metis people a land base along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.

The MMF has assembled 35 volumes of handwritten documents that detail the history of the Metis uprising led by Louis Riel, the establishment of a provisional government in Manitoba and letters from Prime Ministers John A. Macdonald and George Etienne Cartier promising 1.4 million acres of land to the Metis in an area that stretches from present-day Winnipeg to Portage La Prairie.

According to David Chartrand, President of the MMF: "The archival material we've been able to extract is very, very strong and it shows that the federal and provincial government acted illegally in confiscating Metis land." Chartrand also pointed out that the Metis Nation would be in a much different situation today if the promises made to them in the past had been kept.

Certainly this is true not just for the Metis people, but all the First Nations. Until World War II, the majority of the Canadian state's revenue came from the extraction and sale of natural resources. To this day, this constitutes a significant part of the state's wealth. This is wealth that has been entirely appropriated from First Nations and Metis people. But the propaganda from the Canadian state is that, quite generously, billions and billions of dollars are poured into Aboriginal communities. In fact, the reverse is true; land and resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars was stolen and Aboriginal peoples have had to fight for decades to receive even a tiny fraction of the compensation owed to them.

The MMF has made it clear their intent is not to take over Winnipeg, as some are suggesting. Instead, what they are seeking is fair and just financial compensation so they can begin to build economically self-reliant communities with the money that is their due.