[Witness spoke in Nsyilxcen]
[English]
Thank you to the committee for me to be present for this important topic on land restitution.
[Witness spoke in Nsyilxcen]
[English]
I speak the names of my late mother and father, John Terbasket and Delphine Abraham, as well as my children, councilman Ira Edward and my daughter Tanisha Begaye.
I speak the names of my ancestry and descendants because their names tie us inextricably to our lands and our water and our tmixw, which are all living things. My homelands are the Similkameen and Tulameen watersheds in south central British Columbia and Washington state. It's comprised of over 7,500 square kilometres in British Columbia and 1,700 square kilometres in Washington state.
Our tribe, the Okanagan Nation tribe, is cut in half by the Canada-U.S. border, with 12 of our tribes in Washington state and seven in Canada. Our lands are unceded. We have never sold nor ceded our lands through treaty or any other legal mechanism.
The Similkameen-Okanagan systems are one of three biodiversity hot spots in Canada, hosting 77 terrestrial species at risk, including 28 that only exist in the Okanagan-Similkameen.
I am involved as a negotiator and policy analyst for the Smelqmix people and the Smelqmix government. We are working through national park reserve negotiations and MOUs with Environment Canada, through the Canadian wildlife service, to find pathways to overcome policy and funding barriers that will enable us to protect our homelands both for food sovereignty and biodiversity purposes.
In March 2022, the Smelqmix people declared an area of approximately 150,000 square hectares as an indigenous protected area, the Ashnola protected area. We did this because we could not get the support nor the tables established that would allow us to develop collaborative relationships with the federal and provincial governments despite all of our attempts.
We are working to translate our oral traditional laws into written law in order to further the process of legal pluralism and harmonization of legal orders between the Crown and our nation, and to incorporate, by reference, our Syilx water law and tmixw laws through our national park reserve discussions. We are working to address the impacts of legislative impairments from the Species At Risk Act. That would allow us to define and develop processes to compensate or trade lands so that we can protect those species that are so vulnerable and exist sometimes within our reservation lands, or are protected through limited access, through our reservations.
Based on the water-warming trends, the extreme water over-allocation, siltation caused by clear-cut logging, and mining contamination of sulphates, arsenic and mercury that are leaching into the Similkameen's systems, we can see that we are at a critical junction in terms of our time frames for indigenous nations to restore our systems, where the provincial and federal governments have not.
The treaty process and lengthy and expensive court proceedings leave Canada, the provinces and first nations in a perpetual state of animosity, distrust and economic uncertainty. These are not viable solutions.
What recommendations do we make?
First is that restitution within the traditional lands of the Smelqmix and Syilx, and all indigenous peoples in fact, must be framed within the context of our historic and future sovereignty and unceded and unimpaired jurisdiction over our land and our resources. We must make way for the constructs and pathways that allow for legal pluralism.
We know there are mechanisms that allow for transfer of lands across governments, such as lands that are transferred from provincial to federal jurisdiction through the parks process or additions to reserve. What is needed are pathways to allow for restoration, not to Indian reserves that are mired in bureaucratic red tape, but to sovereign tribal lands that make room for true reconciliation and legal pluralism within our homelands and this country that we call Canada.
Recognizing and enforcing indigenous laws are a mechanism that would allow us to hold industry accountable where colonial governments have not. This is imperative for both colonial and indigenous citizens, as we all pay the price through taxation, health costs and through expensive legal costs when our fights end up in colonial court systems. What is needed are stable financial commitments that would enable us to protect, restore and to also build economic models that are based on the concepts of sustainability.
We need processes that include nations that cross international borders and that do not pit us against our brothers and sisters across the U.S. and Canada, but that ensure co-operative, collaborative agreements.
We hope that in moving forward, the committee will look at these important issues.
[Witness spoke in Nsyilxcen]