Kwey kakina. Bonjour. Bon après-midi. Hello.
I wish to begin by thanking you for the invitation to address the committee today. I am Chief Gilbert Whiteduck, from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, about 130 kilometres north of here. I'm accompanied today by Councillor Wayne Odjick, who has been on the band council, just as I have been, since 2008, although I have served on band councils all the way back to the seventies. I've served at different times.
The community I represent is one of the ten Algonquin communities that make up the Algonquin Nation on whose lands the Parliament of Canada sits. The Kitigan Zibi community I represent was created in 1853. The KZ reserve lands total some 18,438 hectares of land, or approximately 45,600 acres. The initial discussions were that the reserve would be 60,000 acres. There was obviously some funny business in the 1850s. We have a total population of approximately 2,900, with 1,600 members living on reserve. We project that our population will grow to well over 2,000 over the next ten years. We have some 530 households built throughout the community. Homes, with the exception of 20, are owned individually by community members. Some 46% of reserve land is held by certificates of possession, with the remaining 54% considered to be commonly held land for which we have management plans or on which the school is built.
The community has always had a well-structured environmental protection plan for its commonly held lands. We have well over 5,000 CPs registered with the Indian land registry. Some 50% of the reserve was surveyed in the 1880s, with land being divided, even in those years, into individual lots. This process accelerated the movement towards a designation of CP lots.
The reserve has been surveyed, but in the late 1800s there was a strong push by settlers and lumber barons to have the membership surrender some 50% of the community. It was felt at the time that the red man would not make good use of the land. Although well over 1,000 acres of land was taken or stolen in one form or another, with large pieces located in the town of Maniwaki, over 500 acres of this land, or what has now become 23 specific claims, are presently the subject of negotiations with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Our goal is to have a speedy and beneficial result for the membership. We are approaching this as what we hope will be a global settlement.
I wish to also note that we initiated discussion with Quebec to add some 24 square kilometres of land to our present reserve, with the land really located in our backyard where our elders grew up. We are hoping that this process will move forward quickly, and subsequently to the federal level with the additions to reserve. This land will allow us to add to our management area and allow us to begin international tourism opportunities. We can only hope that the addition-to-reserve process works to support our efforts and not to create a barrier. We are having a unique discussion with Quebec, because it's not tied to a land claim. It's a discussion we've had with them. They've agreed in principle to making the reserve bigger for a variety of reasons. That is moving forward. We're hoping to have a decree from the Quebec government with regard to these lands by early summer of 2012.
I want to be clear. The attachment we have to the land is at the core of our identity and birthright. Wayne and I and all who have lived in the community were raised and educated to respect the land because the land will always take care of us. Even though CP land designations were in place in the 1800s, the concept of owning land as a commodity has always felt foreign because doing so does not identify with our values.
The Kitigan Zibi community has worked diligently over the past 30 years to develop a long-term management plan for its commonly held lands, and to initiate and assist business development on commonly held lands as well as on individually held CPs. I must say we have been modestly successful, but no doubt much more needs to be done.
I also want to share that I recently worked in a collaborative manner with the Business Development Bank in the development of a project on CP-held land. The development of an agreement took six months but allowed the project to be funded. All parties feel and know that there was a detailed arrangement, which came to entrench an important level of understanding and security. This was done without Department of Aboriginal Affairs involvement, directly with the Business Development Bank.
The analysis of our present land regime by our Kitigan Zibi lands staff concluded that there are many challenges to business development, but it would appear that the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development is a bigger challenge than the regulations in the Indian Act. This is not a slight to any individual, but the Department of Aboriginal Affairs machine is slow, often unresponsive, and not helpful. Bottom line, it is more worried about liability than true progress. It is our contention that it is possible to have speed of business under the present system. All it takes is a little vision and creativity.
It is our position that Canada, as the crown, and the provinces do not recognize or respect first nation rights over our ancestral lands. If we were to endorse privatization of reserve lands under any scheme, then this would mean that we are recognizing the present system as legitimate.
The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg has endured centuries of lies and thievery by governments and individuals wanting to take the little land we hold according to the crown. There is no doubt that we have reason to not trust government, and also to not trust prophets disguised as first nations who preach from the mountaintop that privatization will turn our lands into heavenly fountains of prosperity. These prophets are walking in their own heavenly clouds and know only the realities that are their own.
I do respect individual first nations communities that decide they want to move forward towards private land ownership. This is obviously their decision to make. But this discussion is forgetting the more inclusive, community-level reality, and questions around lack of resources, capacity for land-use planning, resourcing for land surveying, collective versus individual rights, and how commercial land changes would come to protect and not harm the environment.
Finally, I wish to state that we can't limit our discussion to only our reserve lands, as I firmly believe we must include the unavailable—at least for now—ancestral lands of our community and nation. If development is truly to take place, there needs to be visionary thinking, and that must be founded on respect, honesty, and accountability.
The words I have shared are a very small part of what I have learned growing up and living all of my life in the community. This is but a grain of sand of what was handed down from the teachings and what was recorded in our nation's wampum belts.
All of our efforts must be for the present and future generations, so that they may have opportunities that I and others never had. This I hope for my own children and my own four grandchildren, who all live in the community, and for all Kitigan Zibi children and future generations.
I firmly believe that much is possible with collective willingness.
Kichi meegwetch.