Lament for a First Nation - The Williams Treaties of Southern Ontario (Hardcover, New)

Lament for a First Nation tells the legal history of the dispossession of the subsistence hunting and fishing rights of seven Ontario Mississauga and Chippewa First Nations. In the 1994 Howard case, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that one First Nation had surrendered its treaty rights to hunt and fish in a 1923 treaty, effectively extinguishing the rights of the others. No other First Nations in Canada have ever been found to surrender similar rights.Peggy J. Blair argues that the circumstances leading to the 1923 treaties resulted from a change in Crown policies that began in the mid-1800s. Before then, the Crown had affirmed and protected Aboriginal harvesting activities through treaties. However, as settlement pressures developed, the Crown began to increasingly restrict hunting and fishing, and, eventually, denied ever having made treaty promises to protect these activities. Blair posits that Crown policies were the means by which large tracts of lands and resources were opened up for the use of whites, and that the decision in Howard was determined as much by the Eurocentric assumptions of Canadian courts as by the failure of Canadian governments to live up to the honour of the Crown.Lament for a First Nation will appeal to scholars and students in legal, historical, and Native studies.