Our Home on Native Land: Unraveling the Colonial Institution and Land Theft in the Province of Ontario

• Main Author: Phoebe Margaret Flaherty
• Other Authors: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Public Policy, Dr. Douglas MacKay
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17615/1pag-bz96; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/x633f930w?file=thumbnail; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/x633f930w

The province of Ontario has the largest Indigenous population in Canada, and a complicated history of treaties between First Nations peoples and the Canadian government. In a settler colonial society such as Ontario, laws and institutions have historically been designed in alignment with settler-colonial ideologies, making the question of how to decolonize society complicated. In lieu of the legacies of colonial land theft and the wounds of colonization, the Canadian government developed the Specific Claims Tribunal (SCT). Decolonization is the equitable distribution of power between First Nations and settler colonial communities. This thesis assesses the effectiveness of the SCT by exploring the history of specific claims in Canada, and using statistical analysis to identify the positive and negative forces influencing First Nation community engagement with specific claims, and whether power is equitably distributed between First Nations and settler-colonial communities in the SCT. In doing so, this thesis discovers that First Nation communities are most likely to have claims accepted by the SCT if they are in close proximity to urban centres, have smaller land bases, larger on reserve populations, and receive low amounts of funding from the Canadian government. Communities are also more likely to repeatedly engage if they have a band operated education within the community, and for a specific category of land claim, are more likely to engage if policed by an Indigenous operated police force instead of a settler-colonial police force, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) or Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). Disparities in which communities have claims accepted by the government confirm that the SCT is not wholly contributing to decolonization, despite the institution’s supposed purpose to remedy the harms of colonization. Consequently, public policy reform is needed in order to restructure the SCT in a way that contributes to decolonization. Bachelor of Arts