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Nicole C. O’ByrneDroit Documents |
Projet de recherche A rather vexed question…: The Constitutional Responsibility for Métis Scrip It is commonly assumed that s.35 of The Constitution Act, 1982 represents the first constitutional recognition of aboriginal and treaty rights in Canadian history. However, this is not the case. The British North America Act, 1930 constitutionalized a series of intergovernmental agreements between the federal government of Canada and the provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. These agreements transferred control and administration of the natural resources and public domain lands from the federal government to the provincial governments. One of the conditions of the transfer was that the provincial governments would undertake to fulfil all pre-existing obligations to third parties. One of these obligations was to redeem outstanding Métis scrip, a form of land currency that had been issued by the federal government in order to extinguish the Métis share in Indian title to the lands of the North-western Territory and Rupert’s Land, the lands that would later be divided into the three prairie provinces. The 1870 Rupert’s Land Order, in which the British crown transferred these lands to Canada, provided that the Canadian government would be required to recognize aboriginal peoples’ land interests. In my dissertation, I examine the origins of the constitutional obligation to recognize aboriginal land interests. I also analyze the extent to which the constitutional obligation, originally owed by the federal government to the British crown, was transferred to the three prairie provinces. This transfer of the constitutional obligation has had important implications for the recognition of Métis rights to the land in their traditional territory as well as the various federal and provincial government programs that have been implemented over the past 125 years. My study will shed light on many of the current governance issues that surround issues of aboriginal self-government. The most important being whether the scrip program fully extinguished the Métis share to Indian title to the lands of the North-West. References to post on the IPG student website: |
