The Coast Salish Economic Miracle That's Waiting to Happen
Written for the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group negotiatior in 2017
How We Can Use Sovereignty and Snuweyeth To Become Wealthy As Our Ancestors Were.
We could use our sovereignty to earn vastly more money than comes to us now from Ottawa. Each family could have money coming directly to them and not be dependent on the government in Ottawa or dependent on the band office, either.
To discover how we can do this, we should ask ourselves three very basic questions.
The first question is this: Since our people were wealthy before 1863, why did they become poor after 1863? The short answer is because so much was taken from us by the hwinitum.
That leads to the second question. If the hwinitum took the wealth of our people and have had the use of almost all our lands and fishing areas for all this time, why is it that the hwinitum are not wealthy? A few hwinitum are wealthy, but if you divided up their wealth among the other hwinitum, it would not be enough to make much difference because there are millions who are not wealthy. They are wealthier than most of our people are now, but they are not wealthier than our ancestors were. Despite all their technology, despite their endless obsession with money and wealth, the hwinitum in our lands have produced less wealth per person than our ancestors did in those same lands. Why is that? The short answer is that there are things the hwinitum do that cripple any economy they ever create.
This leads to the third question. Is there some way that we could become wealthy by following the ways of our ancestors instead of following the ways of the hwinitum? The short answer is yes.
We, of course, need more than just the short version of the answers to these questions to actually do this. So here are some more details. In answer to the first question, yes, our people became poor because the hwinitum government took so much from us. Of course, that includes taking over the use of our lands and fishing areas, but that's not all they took. In 1885, an amendment to the Indian Act banned the potlatch. People were imprisoned for it. All the valuable goods brought to potlatch ceremonies to be given as gifts were confiscated by the hwinitum government. When they had trouble enforcing this oppressive law, they again changed the Indian Act. They combined the powers of the police, prosecutors and judges and gave all that power to the Indian Agents. Indian Agents had all the powers of the police and the courts and carried out "summary" proceedings without any court hearing to confiscate our property and destroy the potlatch. The potlatch ban remained in force until 1951. Our whole economy was centered on the potlatch. The main reason why people accumulated wealth was to give it away at potlatch ceremonies. Even when our people worked for hwinitum employers to earn wages, the employers were annoyed to learn that the main motive of our people in earning wages was to buy things to give away at potlatches. This made no sense to the hwinitum, so they banned it.
They just didn't understand how much sense it did make. Potlatch gifts are to be repaid with greater gifts in the future. Large gifts were not given to just anyone. They were given to those who were able and willing to make greater gifts in return. People who were able to produce wealth, but lacked the tools, could be given those tools as potlatch gifts. If a man needed a canoe to catch fish or a woman needed a loom to weave blankets, they might receive what they needed as potlatch gifts. They would then use the tools they had been given to produce wealth and repay the gifts with greater gifts, typically double the value of the original gift. A man given a canoe could use it to catch fish and give many fish as a return gift. A woman given a loom could use it to weave blankets and give blankets as a return gift.
The potlatch served the same function in our economy that the stock exchanges and other financial markets do for the hwinitum. Those who have wealth give some to others and receive a greater amount in return at a later time. The hwinitum typically do this with loans and investments. Our people also sometimes made loans, but we often gave potlatch gifts instead.
In both systems, those with less wealth receive some from those with more and use it to produce more, both for themselves and to repay those who helped them. The hwinitum do this with stocks, bonds, derivatives, complicated documents and lawyers. Our people did it with gifts. Our system worked better than theirs does today.
There are many reasons why the hwinitum system doesn't work well. One reason is because there are so many dishonest people involved. Another reason is because their system is controlled by rules that can easily be changed by some people, but are nearly impossible for others to change. Dishonest people constantly work to get the rules changed to rig the whole system in their favor even though it results in less wealth being produced. The victims of this cannot change the rules to fix the problem. Also, the hwinitum governments try to find ways to get money out of the financial markets through taxes, inflation and other tricks. The result is a system that takes wealth from those who produce it and gives huge amounts of it to those who changed the rules.
In our system, gifts were given directly to the people meant to receive them. There were no middlemen keeping gifts intended for others. There was no government coming in and stealing the gifts -- at least not until 1885. Then the hwinitum government came and did exactly that. Our economy was almost entirely destroyed. The hwinitum government is doing the same kind of thing to their own economy every year. They don't steal all of it at once like they did to us, but their taxes steal more and more every time tax rates go up.
It is not hard to see why our system was better than the hwinitum system. It's not that our system was brilliant. Their system is stupid.
This is the answer to the second question. The hwinitum have not become wealthy in our lands like our ancestors did. The reason for this is simply that their economic system is stupid. In our system, the most honored si'em were those who could give the most gifts to others. They produced as much as they could and gave as much as they could as potlatch gifts. When they received greater gifts in return, they gave this wealth also as potlatch gifts. Their honour and their wealth grew and grew by this method. There was nobody writing rules controlling everything.
In the hwinitum system, the greatest honour and the greatest wealth does not go to those who produce wealth and give the most gifts. The hwinitum government is honoured more than anyone. The most wealth also goes to the hwinitum government, not for work they've done, but because they write the rules and the rules include lots of taxes. The hwinitum government has vastly more money than any billionaire or any corporation. In fact, the hwinitum government prints the money that everyone else works to earn. And while everyone is working to earn money, the government prints more money which makes money go down in value and prices almost everywhere slowly creep upwards. This is an invisible pay cut for every worker. It is an invisible theft from everyone who holds any money at all. They do not realize they have been stolen from because they still have the same number of dollars. What most people don't realize is that each dollar is worth less than it was and the government's central bank, the Bank of Canada, has more dollars that are worth exactly the amount by which everyone else's money dropped in value. The reason it's exactly the same is because those extra dollars are what caused the drop in value of all the other dollars.
Everything in the hwinitum economy has been sabotaged by all this. When a storekeeper offers something for sale, he tries to find a way to make his prices low enough that people will buy, while still making a good profit. The customers try to figure out if they can afford to buy what they want or if the price is too high. While the buyer and the seller are trying to bring their prices together to make a deal, the hwinitum government is moving the prices apart so that millions of transactions that would benefit the buyers and the sellers cannot happen. They do this with sales taxes. These taxes cause the buyer to pay more than the seller receives. Then income taxes cause the seller to receive even less. Then the value of that money drops due to inflation. All these things sabotage every single transaction in the hwinitum economy. All these things bring money to the hwinitum government. All these things reduce the wealth of the people by more than the amount the hwinitum government receives. All this sabotage of the economy makes the hwinitum government powerful, but it makes the hwinitum poor. As long as we participate in the hwinitum economy and let the hwinitum write the rules instead of building our own economy, it keeps us poor, too.
So how can we rebuild our own economy?
There are two main ways. One that we've all thought of, is to regain control of our lands and waters and start from there. Of course, the hwinitum government stands in the way of that. The other way is to assert our rights to engage in economic activities that are not connected to our lands and waters. Let's look at the first way first. That will make it clear how important it is that we do have a second way.
The government and most hwinitum talk about it like it is a fact that the lands are not ours, that they have not been ours for over a hundred years and that they will never be ours again. We can almost believe that we are really poor. But we are not really poor. We are, in fact, already rich. We are rich because we do still own 100% of our territory. We own it and it is very valuable.
The government tells us that the value of our lands, our fisheries, our waters, and all other rights we may or may not have are worth about as much as they offer us at the treaty tables. How much is that? Somewhere around $40,000 per person at most. To get that much money all at once can sound like a lot. Of course, we should not accept such an offer. Our land is not for sale, after all. But it's worth considering how much our lands and waters are worth even if we are not going to ever sell them.
In 2011, TimberWest Forest Corporation sold 327,000 hectares of land on Vancouver Island, much of which is Cowichan territory. The buyer was, indirectly, the Canadian government, both federal and provincial. The government paid $1.03 billion for this land. They used money from federal and provincial employee pension funds to do it, but they paid over a billion dollars. Not a single dollar went to the actual native owners of the land. None of the native owners offered it for sale, either.
But according to the government's papers, the land belonged to TimberWest. TimberWest was in a desperate situation, $969 million in debt with a loan payment coming due in eight months for $134 million that it could not pay. Facing bankruptcy, TimberWest sold its land holdings to the government pension funds for barely more than the debt. The lands are actually worth far more than that.
The amount of land sold by TimberWest on Vancouver Island is almost as much as the total amount of territory of all members of the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group (HTG). TimberWest sale: 327,000 hectares. HTG territories: 335,000 hectares.
But the TimberWest lands are mostly out in the forest, away from the towns and the coast. Our land (territories of the HTG bands) that is closer to town or closer to the coast is much more valuable. Our land that is actually in the downtown areas of towns and our land that is actually right next to the beaches is even more valuable. So there is no possible way that our land is worth less than a billion dollars. That's the price that TimberWest sold a similar amount of land for when they were under pressure to sell and it was land that wasn't as valuable. There are about 6,600 members of the various bands that the HTG claims to represent. But if we do the math, $40,000 per person times 6,600 people is not a billion dollars. It is only about a quarter that much. The government actually paid TimberWest four times as much money as they want to pay us even though TimberWest's land wasn't nearly as good and TimberWest sold it cheap because they were about to go bankrupt. If the government offered the HTG the same price they paid TimberWest for almost the same amount of land, that would be more like $150,000 per person, not $40,000. But of course, it's much more valuable land and we should not sell cheap because we're not a corporation facing bankruptcy like TimberWest was.
Another way to look at the value of the land is to see what the government's tax assessors say the land is worth when they decide how much property tax to charge on it. HTG may have these figures. It is possible to get them from a crown corporation called BC Assessment that does the property tax assessments. Until we have the detailed numbers, we can get some idea of what they are by looking at some of the numbers BC Assessment has made public. On their website, they say that the real estate (land and buildings) in the Vancouver Island Region has a total assessed value of $170 billion. They are including a small amount of the mainland in that "region", but it's still approximately the value of the land and buildings on Vancouver Island. The total land area of Vancouver Island is 3,213,400 hectares. The HTG says the "core territory" of the HTG bands is 335,000 hectares. That's about 10% of the total. A little more, actually, which maybe makes up for the Vancouver Island Region including a small part of the mainland. So 10% of the value the tax assessors put on Vancouver Island is a good guess at the value of HTG territory. 10% of the $170 billion valuation for the whole Vancouver Island Region puts the value of HTG territory at something like $17 billion. Not $1 billion like they paid TimberWest. Certainly not the small fraction of that they were hoping to pay us.
$17 billion is a lot of money. How much is that per person? If we divide up that number among the 6,600 hwumlmukh mustimo who are part of the HTG bands, it works out to more than two and a half million dollars per person. This does not include the value of our fisheries. This does not include anything for our other priceless rights they want to buy with the same small amount of money. We are not poor. They just treat us like we are.
If we had the use of our lands, we could rent out the use of some of that land and get immediate income. We could still own it, just as a landlord still owns a house he rents to someone. He just gets money every month. How much money could we lease $17 billion worth of land for? Quite possibly a billion dollars a year. $150,000 per person. That's almost four times as much money every year as they want to pay us just one time.
That brings up another issue. Since the hwinitum government has been using our land all these years, selling it, leasing it, giving logging and mining licenses on it and so on, they have been receiving the benefits that should have gone to the actual owners. We are the actual owners. Every year that the use of our land was controlled by the hwinitum government instead of by us, they should have gotten permission from us and they should have either paid us what we asked or left us alone. If they weren't the government and we weren't "Indians", their own laws say they would owe us money for that. If one hwinitum took over by force the use of land that was owned by another hwinitum for one year, the owner could easily sue the other hwinitum in court and get money, probably a similar amount to what it would have cost to lease the land.
There are only two reasons why we can't just go to court and sue the government for the value they have taken from our territory all these years. One is racism against us. The other is because the defendant in the case would be the government. The government's courts treat the government differently than they treat everyone else, especially when the amount of money and land involved is so large that it would be a big problem for the government to do the right thing.
How much money is it? There are a lot of different ways to calculate it, but somewhere around $100 billion or more is a good estimate. That's another $15 million per person for every man woman and child in the HTG bands. This is why the government starts off the negotiations saying compensation for anything in the past is "off the table." That's a clever negotiating strategy to get us to give up a lawful claim against the government for over $100 billion. In exchange for giving up that claim, they offer us nothing.
If we really were going to sue the government over this, it would be normal to ask for additional damages for everything they have done to harm us and "punitive" damages as well. The BC government's role in bringing the smallpox epidemic of 1863 to our lands resulting in the deaths of many of our people is an example of additional damage they did to us. There are many other such things. When a hwinitum does something that causes the death of another hwinitum it is normal for the family of the dead person to sue the other person in court for "wrongful death." This includes not only a basic amount of damages but also additional money for "punitive" damages to punish the person who caused the wrongful death. There were thousands of wrongful deaths. The government wants the HTG negotiators to agree to a treaty that would give up any claim for that in exchange for nothing whatsoever.
The hwinitum often say that the government can't afford to pay what the land is worth. Okay. Maybe not. Though it's interesting that when they want to bail out TimberWest from its debts, they can pay a billion dollars for the same land they try to buy from natives for one quarter of that price or less.
But the billion dollars they paid TimberWest is a small amount compared to what they really owe us. If we look only at the value of the land and what they owe for using it all this time they owe HTG band members something like $120 billion. That's equal to 10% of the entire Canadian public debt for the federal government and all the provinces combined. If the Canadian government tried to pay all natives everything it owes them, it might be more than they can do. They really can't afford to buy our land and it's not for sale anyway. But they don't want to just let us use our land because they are concerned that they would have to do the same for all native groups and if all natives had control of their land, would the hwinitum still have any land?
One of the main reasons why the hwinitum government and hwinitum people are reluctant to do the right thing is that they fear they would have nothing left for themselves. All the work they have done to save money, buy houses, pay mortgages, pay taxes and things like that, would be for nothing. Of course, we didn't create this problem. It shouldn't have to be our job to fix it. But if we want to find a way out of the situation we are in now, it would help a lot if we could find a solution that the hwinitum could accept. Ideally, it would be best if we could find a solution the hwinitum could actually be happy with. If that were possible, they might agree to it easily.
Is it possible? Maybe.
The key to it is to look at more than just the land situation and the wrongs that were done to our people. Those matter. They matter a lot. They are the difference between us being poor or being millionaires. They are also the reason why so few of our people are still alive.
Yet, there are other issues that are important too.
As mentioned earlier, there are two main ways we can rebuild our economy. Regaining control of our lands and waters is only one way. The hwinitum government stands in the way of that. They have vast amounts of money, lawyers and police to fight us with and stop us from regaining control of our lands and waters. And they do fight us because they see no way that it would benefit them for us to regain the use of our lands and waters. All they can see is a cost to them, a cost so high it would ruin them.
There is another way to rebuild our economy. The other way is to assert our rights to engage in economic activities that are not connected to our lands and waters.
This way can be used immediately, even before regaining control of any lands or waters. What we can do is assert aboriginal rights to economic activities. We figure out how to do something profitable and we just go do it. That sounds the same as just getting a job, but it's very different. If you get a job in the hwinitum economy, you are limited to what an employer will pay you to do. And the employer is limited by the rigged rules of the hwinitum economy. Your pay may be reduced by taxes if the work is done off reserve. The value of your pay is reduced by inflation no matter what.
That's not a path to prosperity.
What we need to do is get away from the hwinitum economy and rebuild our own economy following snuweyeth instead of hwinitum rules. There is tremendous value in this. Our right to follow snuweyeth is worth more than our land. Yes, even though our land is worth something like $17 billion, our right to follow snuweyeth is worth more than that. It's not just worth more than that in some poetic way because the land is not for sale. No, it's actually worth more than that in actual money that you can actually get from following snuweyeth.
For example, one of the ways that the hwinitum system of rigged rules sabotages their economy is to require licenses from the government in order to engage in economic activities. Then they make the licenses difficult to get. Usually, the more profitable the activity, the harder it is to get a license. This makes the licenses very valuable. The whole scheme is a massive inefficiency in the economy, preventing the creation of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and destroying billions of dollars of value every year. The hwinitum somehow are blind to this.
Imagine if the government decided to give a poor hwinitum man a whole bunch of licenses for free. Suppose they gave him a business license to operate a restaurant, a liquor license, a license to operate a bank, a license to practice law as a laywer, a real estate license and so on. He would have no land or money, but the licenses are worth so much that he would suddenly be rich.
People might wonder what good it would be for a poor man to have a license to practice law or operate a bank if he's not a lawyer or a banker. The fact is, there are many students in law schools who would be happy to do the work of a lawyer, but don't have a license yet. There are even fully qualified lawyers with decades of experience who come here from other countries who don't have a license to practice law in British Columbia. The same is true for bankers, realtors and many other professions and industries. A man with a license but lacking the skills could enter into a partnership with someone who has the skills but lacks the license. Just having a license would make it possible for someone to become a part owner of a business even if they know nothing about that business and never do any of the work. If they did know something about that business or learned about it and did do some of the work, they could get even more money.
Hwulmukh mustimo already have every kind of license. In English, it's called sovereignty. In our language, you could say it as hwi'nitseelum. The right to go your own way. In our culture, you follow the advice of the sulhween and you may need to follow protocol with the leading si'em. But you don't need to fill out forms, pay fees, get a certification, take a written exam, wait a long time for your application to be processed and then do whatever the bureaucrats say to keep from losing your license to earn a living. Snuweyeth is a better way and the right of sovereignty is the right to follow snuweyeth instead of begging the hwinitum for licenses. The Indian Act says we can't even lease our own land on reserve or dig a gravel pit without permission from the Department of Indian Affairs. Everything requires a license and every license is a roadblock stopping our economic success. Especially when many of our people can't figure out the forms or the rules and don't have the money to pay the fees.
According to snuweyeth, the hwinitum have no right to tell us not to earn a living without a license. According to hwinitum law, Indians on reserve are exempt from all provincial laws. Sections 25 and 35 of the Canadian constitution acknowledge that we don't just have to follow all their laws, we have our own ways. The problem is that the government of Canada won't follow its own laws and constitution. That's typical of governments all over the world. We should not expect them to ever do differently. As our people learned long ago, the government says good things, then does bad things. Sovereignty is our right to do what snuweyeth guides us to do instead of what the government commands us to do.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canada finally agreed to in 2016, says we do have the right to claim sovereignty if we want to. That right is called "the right to self-determination". There is no doubt that is what it means. There is no doubt that it does apply to us. We can expect the Canadian government to do bad things even though they said good things when they agreed to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. But the path to using our economic rights is not completely blocked.
The government does allow us to not pay income tax while we're on reserve and in some other circumstances. It allows us to sell things to each other on reserve without sales tax. In Ontario, natives don't pay sales tax off reserve, either. The government admits that city bylaws and almost all provincial laws do not apply to Indian Reserves. Those are the laws that require people to get licenses to earn a living. Those are most of the rules that are sabotaging the hwinitum economy. We are already free from them. We already have the licenses that people pay thousands of dollars to get.
We can earn a lot of money just using the rights that the government already gave in on. Why don't we have our own banks? We can. No license required. Why don't we have our own accounting businesses, real estate brokerages, restaurants and stores? Why don't we have our own stock exchange? Well, you need a license to start a stock exchange and it's very hard to get and there's pages and pages of complicated rules and everyone involved has to have a license that's hard to get and the companies are required to have a huge amount of money and file complicated reports and… and none of that applies on an Indian Reserve. Any native can start a bank or a stock exchange with no license, no rules, no money. What is that worth? Billions of dollars. Who knows how? Well, lots of hwinitum know how. Find a partner. Tsutsuwatil.
This is how we can rebuild our economy even before we get any lands back. We can rebuild our economy in accordance with snuweyeth. We can offer hwinitum in our lands a chance to be our partners in tsutsuwatil. To get wealthy with us instead of arguing with us over whose land we're on.
When we are not living in poverty anymore, when we can hire all the lawyers we need, maybe we should sue the government. If that doesn't work, we will have the resources to assert our rights that the government doesn't recognize yet. That could be economic rights such as the right to sell to hwinitum in our territory without sales tax. That would bring many of our hwinitum neighbors over to our side on aboriginal rights issues.
When the time comes that we can regain our territory, we can make it understood that this actually doesn't have to cost any extra money to the hwinitum who live on our lands and have papers from the government saying they own our land. The hwinitum government doesn't really let anyone own land. It charges them all rent and calls it "property taxes." It doesn't let them build anything on the land without permission from the government. That reduces the value of most land to less than half of what it's really worth.
How would our hwinitum neighbors be better off? With papers from the government that say they own the land, or with lease papers from our people saying they have a long-term lease on the same land? With the government papers, they can only use the land with government permission and the government can take the land at any time through a process called "imminent domain". They have to pay about one third of one percent of the land value per year in property taxes. And they have to worry that someday the Supreme Court of Canada will issue another ruling like in the Tsilhqot'in case where they said the land really belongs to the natives and the non-natives suddenly lose the value of the land the government papers say they own.
With a lease from us, they are protected from any such court decision. Meanwhile, we get some of the benefit of such a court decision right now, even without the court decision. If the land is annexed by an Indian Reserve, the government will stop demanding property taxes without a fight. The hwinitum could pay us rent in the same amount as the property taxes or maybe even less. Their costs would go down instead of up. Their right to live in our territory would be more secure, not less. We can allow them to actually have the right to do what they want to on the property they lease from us. All the rules the government has about that go away when land becomes part of an Indian Reserve. Of course, we should impose a few rules of our own. They would be spelled out clearly in the lease agreement. For example, we should definitely get them agree not to pollute our land with toxic chemicals or destroy the environment. We could put whatever rules we want in, but they can easily be less than the hundreds of rules and restrictions the government imposes on them now. Do we really care if they mow the lawn? That's a common bylaw requirement they have to obey now in most cities.
Now if we only required them to pay us an amount equal to or less than the property taxes, that's far, far below normal rent. But it's something and right now we're getting nothing. It's not just a small amount of money, either. If all our territory off reserve were leased out with deals like that, we'd get over $50 million per year. That's without winning any court battles, without any direct action, without getting the government to admit we have any rights they don't already admit. But the $50 million per year isn't that much. It's not too far off from the entire annual budget of the Cowichan Tribes Band Office and it would make a difference, but it's still a small amount compared to what our land is worth. The importance of doing something like this is that we don't have to do these leases unless the leases say what we want them to say. So we could put in things like getting the hwinitum who sign the leases to admit that our territory is really our sovereign territory and not the jurisdiction of the hwinitum government. We could also get them to admit that we really own the land and that when the lease expires, they have to either get us to agree to a new lease or they have to leave and let us have our land back. We can require them to sign over the property deed to us in order to get the lease. After all, if they don't sign over the deed, the property can't become part of an Indian Reserve and can't become exempt from property taxes.
At first glance, it seems ridiculous that we could go to hwinitum who consider themselves "homeowners" and get them to agree that it's our land and that someday they will have to leave if we insist. But many of them would agree if the benefits they get from a lease are better than not having a lease. That is easily within our power to do. Suppose the term of the lease is not just a year or two or ten. What if we say that the first 100 hwinitum to agree to this deal will pay only one dollar per year in rent, will be exempt from property tax as soon as the property is annexed to an Indian Reserve and the lease runs for fifty years. Or a hundred years. After the Supreme Court of Canada decisions in the Calder, Delgamuukw and Tsilhqot'in cases, there really isn't much doubt that aboriginal title is slowly being recognized by the courts. In fifty or a hundred years, title deeds issued by the provincial government for our land may not be worth anything at all. What will be worth something is a lease agreed to by the aboriginal owners of the land. Hwinitum who get a lease from us are basically buying insurance against court decisions. Right now the hwinitum fear that if our ownership of the land is recognized, that we'll tell them to pay rent or get out. We probably wouldn't handle it that way, but if they are already paying rent to us under a long-term lease, they have nothing to fear from court decisions recognizing aboriginal title.
Suppose we announce that this deal is only good for the first 100 hwinitum who sign leases. There would be people who would say yes. One hwinitum woman a few years ago went to the Sliammon band office. She had just done a real estate transaction buying or selling a home and thought it just wasn't right that all that money changed hands and none of it went to the native people who really own the land. So she gave a cheque for $5,000 to the Indian Band whose territory the land was in. Maybe we shouldn't offer only $1 per year, but the point is that we could make the deal very good for the first few people to make sure some hwinitum do sign leases. Once this has started, the others will have more and more reason to think this is the way things are going. Every non-native who has a lease with the natives no longer has any reason to oppose recognition of aboriginal title. The more hwinitum stop opposing us, the more progress we will be able to make and at some point the people who don't have leases will be thinking, "Wow, I sure don't want to be one of the last to sign up and pay a much higher price or take my chances with the court decisions or the treaty process or whatever comes next."
So, as more hwinitum sign leases, we stop offering such good deals and the price goes up and the lease term gets shorter on each new lease until we are offering perhaps thirty year leases for the same price they would otherwise pay in property taxes.
That's even with no real recognition of aboriginal title by the government beyond what has already happened in the courts. We of course don't want to lease our land out for just one third of one percent a year. That's approximately the amount of property taxes. We of course want to receive the full amount of rent we would ask for or be able to use the land ourselves. Eventually, we will probably get that. But right now, every day that passes, we are getting nothing at all from that land. How many years, how many decades will we have to wait and struggle before we ever get a dollar paid or a single hectare returned to our use?
We don't have to wait any longer. We don't have to struggle any more. We just have to offer the hwinitum a good enough deal. Let them pay us less than the property taxes and bring the land into the Indian Reserves so there is no property tax. The most important thing is that the leases will eventually end. When that happens, the land will be ours completely and totally. Even the government land records will show native owners.
Which natives will own which land is a key question we need to answer among ourselves. Of course, we should seek the guidance of the sulhween in accordance with snuweyeth. We can calculate how much money the land is worth per person, but that doesn't mean it should just be divided up equally. If it can still be determined who owned which land off reserve, then that should not be ignored. If some land or fisheries are known to belong to people of a particular nation, but it can no longer be determined which family owned it, the elders can hopefully settle the matter. It is also important that we look to the elders to resolve situations where more than one nation claims the same land.
We need to have our own method of recording who owns what land. Band office certificates of possession are not good enough, even for land on reserve. They are part of the Indian Act system and rely on the Canadian government for their authority. We need a system that comes from our own sovereign authority. Then we need to try to get the government's land records to match our land records, one piece of land at a time. When a hwinitum signs over land to us in return for a long-term lease, this can be the way the government records can be changed to match ours.
Another way we can do this is to use our economic rights to become wealthy and then buy land from hwinitum. Later, we can sue the government for the price we had to pay to buy our own land back. Whether we win or lose such a case, we would still have the land. But with the lease idea, we won't have to pay anything at all, we just have to charge very little rent at first. This concept is known to the hwinitum. It is often used by them among themselves for different reasons. It is called "sale leaseback." Someone sells something, then leases it back from the new owner. They keep using it the same as before, but they don't own it anymore and make lease payments to the owner.
One thing we should be very aware of is that the amount we can help hwinitum save in property taxes if they will agree to transfer land title to us and pay us rent is a small amount compared to the other advantage we can offer them at no cost to us. Removing the restrictions on development of the land by adding it to an Indian Reserve can cause huge increases in the value of the land. That would still be true even under a long-term lease. There will be hwinitum who realize they can get a large amount of money by transferring land to aboriginal ownership in exchange for a long-term lease, have the land annexed by an Indian Reserve an then build something on it that zoning laws would not have allowed. Such as an apartment building. Or a restaurant. Or a car dealership.
Yeah, maybe we don't have to offer one dollar a year leases. We just need to find out how low the price has to be to get hwinitum to agree to it.
The point is that we can get large amounts of money by using our economic rights and we can get land back. We can do it by working together with our hwinitum neighbors in ways that make us all wealthy. We can show them that they are better off if snuweyeth is the law of the land in our territory than the laws that are sabotaging their economy now.
After all, whose fault is it that all these hwinitum came here and got papers from the government saying they owned our land? Did the settlers come here on their own to steal our land while the government tried to stop them? No. The government of the Colony of British Columbia invited them, begged them and bribed them to come. It lied to them and told them that we were about to sell our land to the government. That's why they started off calling settler land "pre-emptions". That doesn't mean they own the land, that just means they get the first chance to buy the land from the government when the natives sell it to the government. The settlers were just "pre-empting" other settlers from buying the same land when it was available for sale. It was many years later that the government started claiming we never owned the land and therefore they didn't need to buy it from us. By then, settlers who had been lied to had already built houses and farms on their "pre-emption" lands based on the lies the government had told them. They are not blameless. Our people did make it clear to the settlers that we still considered it our land. Many of them realized they had been lied to and left. The government then recruited other settlers to come and take their places. They used new lies and offered low, low prices to poor people hoping to build a better life for themselves.
The blame for this situation falls most heavily upon the government, not the settlers. We can work with the hwinitum settlers if we know how.
They don't want to bear the blame for things their ancestors did. That only works if they have not done anything themselves that is wrong. We should make it clear to them what is going on now that is wrong and how they can do what is right. Staying on our land with only a paper from the government is not right. When the whole thing was just a confusing mess and the government told them in 1993, just like in 1863, that everything was alright, that the natives would soon sign treaties selling the land, the hwinitum could believe they were doing no wrong. But if we come to them offering them a chance to replace their government paper with a lease from us and they refuse, then they are no longer blameless for the colonial oppression that is being inflicted on us every day.
Some will be motivated by moral reasons alone, but the combined influence of moral reasons and economic motivations is overwhelming. We have the power to make ourselves and our hwinitum neighbors rich. When they understand that, they will want to be on our side.
There are enormous opportunities for us to work with the hwinitum and regain our wealth, reclaim our lands, and revive our sovereignty.