Good afternoon and thank you, Mr. Chair and members.
My name is Larry Innes, and I'm a partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend. We're a national law firm with offices in both Toronto and Yellowknife. Our practice focuses on advancing the rights and supporting the evolving jurisdictions and authorities of indigenous governments across Canada.
I'm pleased to be joining you from Sǫ̀mba K'è in the Chief Drygeese territory of the Yellowknives Dene.
My work has been in trying to reconcile the complexities and the conflicts inherent in what our Supreme Court described more than 20 years ago in the Haida Nation decision as the fact of prior sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their lands and resources with the asserted sovereignty of the Crown.
As a white Canadian, someone who has the privilege of working for clients in the negotiation and implementation of modern treaties and in self-government agreements, as well as, to Mr. Calla's points, working to create real wealth for communities through impact and benefit agreements and other constructive partnerships with industry, I have a perspective on what restitution means.
I have also served as an adviser to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which is a national organization that's working to advance indigenous-led conservation and guardians programs across the country. I understand that the committee has already heard evidence from ILI in the testimony of my colleague Dahti Tsetso, who appeared before this committee in May.
Also relevant is my own perspective as a fourth-generation Albertan whose pioneer ancestors settled in the shadows of Nínaiistáko, or Chief Mountain, in the Blackfoot Confederacy in the late 1800s, just outside the boundaries of what is now the Waterton Lakes National Park, in what was then still the Northwest Territories.
Like many Canadians, I am trying to understand my own history in this context and what it means to become a treaty partner. To this, I offer that there are many pathways we can follow to answer these questions. For me, it's largely been through a love of the outdoors. I grew up hiking, fishing and hunting in the foothills, coulees and mountains of southern Alberta. I moved to the north in my twenties, and I've had the opportunity to spend most of my life and most of my career deeply immersed in indigenous communities, where I've learned from the patient teachings of my Inuit and Dene teachers what it means to be on the land and to be of the land.
For many Canadians, those are remote possibilities. It's through our national, provincial and territorial parks that people really get an opportunity to form these connections to land. These iconic places showcase, certainly, some of the best of what Canada has to offer. They've created lasting memories for generations of Canadians. While these places, our national parks, are a model we share with the world, they also have a deeper and darker side. Few Canadians know of the histories of indigenous dispossession that have followed the designation of places like Banff or the consequences that have followed.
To set a single example, when Wood Buffalo National Park was created in the northeast corner of Alberta and the southeast corner of the Northwest Territories, the government assumed that the lands were taken up and that all indigenous rights to that area were extinguished. Denésuliné peoples, in particular, were driven from the park, their homes burned and their belongings left behind. Members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation were reduced from being independent and economically self-sufficient people to being beggars on the margins of their own land in less than a generation.
These events are history, but they're also a metaphor for the ways in which our understanding of our relationships to land is shaped by narratives that are unfortunately all too one-sided. We celebrate our parks and we celebrate our nature, but too many Canadians don't understand the past and present experience of indigenous dispossession.
When the committee is looking at restitution, when the committee is considering what this means, it's complicated, and necessarily so. There are solutions, but they have to go deeper into our history and look at some of the solutions that have been devised in comparable jurisdictions. We can look to recent examples in Australia, where such iconic national parks as Uluru and Kakadu have been handed back. We could also look to similar examples in Canada, where the recognition of indigenous rights and the sharing of jurisdiction with indigenous governments are occurring in the context of indigenous-protected and indigenous-conserved areas.
These are only the beginnings.
I would like to thank you for your attention.
Mahsi cho. Thank you very much.