How B.C.'s conflicting Indigenous land claims are a problem 150 years in the making
Shortly after British settlers established the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1849, governor James Douglas signed a flurry of treaties with the region’s First Nations to secure lands for fur trapping, mining and other activities.
Known as the Douglas Treaties, the 14 agreements between 1850 and 1854 might have seemed at the time like a template for future arrangements with British Columbia’s Indigenous peoples, who occupied lands stretching from modern-day Vancouver to the northern border with Yukon. Instead, the province stopped signing such agreements — a result of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s refusal to continue funding negotiations — and reached virtually no other treaties for the next 150 years.
The absence of such land agreements has left British Columbia with a patchwork of unresolved, overlapping and highly complex land claims that persist to this day, a gargantuan legal headache that the province only recently began to address. Currently, Indigenous peoples still claim the right to around 80 per cent of B.C.’s lands.
“B.C. really created this problem for itself by not entering into treaties back then, and that’s why there are these massive land claims,” said Kent McNeil, an Indigenous law expert at York University.
The scope of the province’s situation makes it unique in Canada, McNeil said. While Ontario, the prairie provinces and other governments signed treaties with the majority of their First Nations, B.C. simply coasted along as British immigrants settled on non-treaty lands. Between then and now, British Columbia — and by extension, Canada — has suffered incalculable social, legal and economic damages as a result. Never-ending court challenges have continued to sap public resources, while a lack of clarity around title rights has interrupted critical investments like mines, pipelines and port expansions.
The consequences of B.C.’s failure to negotiate treaties came to the forefront again this week, after news emerged of the federal government’s recent deal with the province’s Musqueam Indian Band.
Under the agreement — which was first announced Feb. 20 but only started gaining widespread attention earlier this week — Ottawa officially recognized the Musqueam’s “rights and title” over a huge swathe of its traditional territory in southern British Columbia. By doing so, it acknowledged the First Nation’s right to use, manage and occupy those lands, which cover more than 500,000 hectares including much of metro Vancouver.
The deal fed concerns about whether the Musqueam agreement could impede on private property rights in British Columbia, particularly following a landmark B.C. Supreme Court ruling last summer that left some legal experts howling. In that decision, Justice Barbara Young ruled that the Cowichan’s claims to certain lands in Richmond, B.C., and along the Fraser River should override the Crown’s granting of some fee-simple titles in the region.
Opposition to the Musqueam deal extended beyond existing private property owners, however. Several other First Nations, who claim rights to territories that overlap with the Musqueam, issued statements that expressed concerns over Ottawa’s agreement, underscoring the impossible complexity of the issue.
The Squamish Nation, which said it was not consulted on Ottawa’s arrangement, promised to challenge any Musqueam land claims that conflict with its own. (The southern half of the Squamish’s territorial claims share borders that are remarkably similar to the Musqueam.) The Tsawwassen First Nation, meanwhile, said Musqueam’s claims appear to overlap with its own traditional territory around Brunswick Point, a coastal inlet south of Vancouver. The Kwikwetlem First Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation also claim lands that conflict with the Musqueam’s.
Karen Restoule, director of Indigenous affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said the opposition to the Musqueam deal highlight how the problem runs deeper than one-to-one differences between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. Restoule, who is Ojibwe from the Dokis First Nation in Ontario, said conflicts between First Nations are often highly entrenched, originating long before European settlers landed on Canada’s shores.
“Prior to contact, we weren’t living in some Disney utopia where we all just got along,” she said.
Still, Restoule and other Indigenous experts say the issue could have been avoided years ago had the respective Canadian authorities addressed Indigenous claims.
“There are a lot of people who are portraying this as the result of Indigenous action or inaction, when in fact this is lazy governance that spans over 100 years,” she said.
While British Columbia’s initial neglect of its relationship with Indigenous peoples was catastrophic, the way that modern-day governments have tried to amend the problem are just about as worrisome, legal experts say.
In recent years, the federal and B.C. governments have begun adhering to legal interpretations that recognize Indigenous title claims with a wider scope than traditional treaty arrangements did. Guiding those efforts is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, a directive that aims to restore Indigenous peoples’ lands and right to self-determination.
B.C. first adopted UNDRIP legislation in 2019, and the government of then prime minister Justin Trudeau passed its own federal version under Bill C-15 two years later.
While the principles behind UNDRIP seem like a compassionate effort to correct historical wrongs against First Nations, its real-world implementation appears to contradict Canada’s inherent interests as a sovereign nation, according to Thomas Isaac, chair of the Aboriginal law group at Cassels law firm. In its recent agreement with the Musqueam, viewed by the National Post, the federal government asserted that UNDRIP now represents the “minimum standards” in the interpretation of Canadian law.
“It’s such a self-destructive move by Canada,” Isaac said of the assertion.
UNDRIP supporters say First Nations land claims can coincide with Canadian law, but Isaac warns that a number of recent court decisions like the Cowichan ruling suggest they are actually directly at odds.
That was certainly the case in a B.C. Court of Appeal ruling in December 2025, which found that the province’s UNDRIP legislation was inconsistent with its mineral rights laws. The decision, based on an interpretation of B.C.’s own UNDRIP legislation, effectively questioned the foundation of the province’s entire natural resource sector, saying much of its economic activity had occurred on First Nations’ lands without their explicit consent.
A failure to repeal or rewrite the province’s UNDRIP legislation in light of that decision, Isaac said, could have serious consequences.
“If that act were to stay in place, British Columbia is ungovernable,” Isaac said. “You can’t govern in accordance with UNDRIP.”
B.C. Premier David Eby, for his part, has already started to back away from the province’s UNDRIP legislation, saying his government would amend the existing law sometime in the spring.
“Last week’s court of appeal decision invites further and endless litigation,” Eby told a Vancouver business crowd just following the ruling in December. “It is the exact opposite of the direction we need to go: less certainty, not more; more conflict, not less.”
Gradually, Canadian governments are negotiating their way through the land claims. In May 2000, the B.C. and federal governments entered into a treaty with the Nisga’a Nation, marking the first such agreement with an individual First Nation in more than 100 years. The treaty gave the Nisga’a explicit rights to self-government, and the community has since partnered with a Houston-based energy company on its plans to build a liquified natural gas project through its territory.
Some in the nearby Gitanyow First Nation, whose traditional land claims overlap those of the Nisga’a, oppose the project.
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