The Toronto Star

Protecting native land and rights

April 19, 2007 By Alex Neve

Today, in Seattle, the annual meeting of transnational logging giant Weyerhaeuser could mark a crucial turning point in the campaign of a small, indigenous community in northern Ontario to defend the fundamental rights of its people. But it will ring hollow unless the Ontario government also charts a new course.

For more than four years, the people of Grassy Narrows have mounted a blockade of a logging road in their traditional lands north of Kenora, Ont. They did this because they saw no other way to try to halt the clear- cutting that was ravaging the forests throughout their lands.

In standing up for their land, the people of Grassy Narrows are standing up for their land rights. And the land rights of indigenous peoples are human rights.

UN experts have repeatedly affirmed that all governments are obliged to respect and uphold the right of indigenous people to maintain and pass on to future generations their unique ways of living on the land.

But the situation of the people of the Grassy Narrows Nation provides a stark example of the inadequate safeguards for the land rights of indigenous people in Canada.

Since the 1950s, the people of Grassy Narrows have had their lands and wild rice beds flooded by hydroelectric development, rivers poisoned by pollution from a pulp and paper mill and trap-lines destroyed by clear- cut logging.

All this has taken place for the purposes of economic activities whose benefits the people of Grassy Narrows have not shared.

An Amnesty International research team is in Grassy Narrows this week and it has seen first-hand how industrial development has impacted on the enjoyment of human rights at Grassy Narrows. Over many decades, a range of companies has been responsible for much of the harm that has befallen the people there, Weyerhaeuser being only the latest in a long and sorry line.

At the Weyerhaeuser meeting today, we will watch to see if that company begins to turn that record around. A crucial resolution would initiate a study that could see the company source timber from other sources until Grassy Narrows' people consent to further logging in their traditional lands.

What is also apparent, however, is that the Ontario government is failing the people of Grassy Narrows. Decisions that could profoundly impact the community's use of the land have been made with little or no meaningful consultation, much less consent.

Clear demonstrations of community opposition to provincial decisions have been ignored. On Jan. 17, 2007, leaders of the community issued a call for "a moratorium on further industrial activity in our Traditional Territory until such a time as the governments of Canada and Ontario restore their honour and obtain the consent of our community in these decisions that will forever alter the future of our people."

When it comes to protecting indigenous rights in Ontario, or anywhere in Canada, it should not have to come to blockades and winning votes at corporate meetingS in the United States.

It is time for the Ontario government to work with the people of Grassy Narrows so that a land-use management plan can be developed that addresses their concerns and protects their rights. And until that happens, the government should not issue or reallocate licences for logging or other resource extraction within the traditional land use territory of Grassy Narrows.

Alex Neve is secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.