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

• Main Author: Phoebe Margaret Flaherty
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries 2022
• Subjects: Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17615/1pag-bz96; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/honors_theses/4t64gx89c

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 ...