And as I commented in another thread - I believe in response to your post - we can either collectively acknowledge the true and full cost of rectifying this situation, including fairly compensating those who are affected, or we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend that me and my kids, who were born in this country no differently than indigenous families and who know no other home, are expected to destroy our lives in service of the wrongs of the past.
If private property is affected, then the displaced people need to be fairly compensated. In general the impact on everyone needs to be considered in the calculus. I opened my eyes for the first time in this country, just like everyone else born here did, regardless of what atrocious actions were committed by those in the past. I have nowhere to go, this is my home as much as it is anyone else’s.
If we don’t acknowledge these facts willingly and openly i fear we will be forced to acknowledge them unwillingly.
What happened in the past is the government appropriated the land, it seems at the very least unethically, and then sold it to private interests. Somewhere along the line an innocent citizen bought the land thinking it was freehold or otherwise was the owner’s land to sell. It seems that now the land is being expropriated.
If it was never the government’s land to sell, and the courts have ruled in that way, then the government needs to compensate the people to whom the land was sold.
This cost needs to be considered by the government when they negotiate with FN groups. It is the true and total cost of reconciliation. If it is excluded then it will cause enormous dissatisfaction with the entire exercise of reconciliation, and it will eventually destroy the program. If the goal is harmonious coexistence, this will be unachievable if some of the victims - and they are also victims - are pushed out and ignored.
My other adjacent point is that a full cost and schedule for reconciliation must be made clear to everyone, so that all stakeholders can understand the objective and agree on the end goal.
Let’s be clear about what you are actually saying here. You are describing the privatization of stolen land as if it were a simple matter of unfortunate paperwork. The government did not simply unethically appropriate the land. The settlers orchestrated a campaign of displacement and genocide, then laundered the loot through property deeds to create a class of settlers whose innocence is built on that foundational violence. That citizen did not buy freehold land. They bought a fantasy, a clean title washed in the blood of the original people who were murdered or removed from it. The courts are not handing down philosophical rulings. They are finally, begrudgingly, acknowledging a truth that Indigenous people have never stopped stating which is that the land was never Canada’s to sell.
Your entire argument hinges on the moral panic of the settler who feels cheated. But where is your panic for the people who were cheated of everything? You call for the government to compensate the buyer, to make the settler whole, but this just completes the cycle of colonial logic. It says the ultimate victim of theft is the one who ended up holding the stolen goods, not the people who were robbed in the first place. You call them also victims. They’re not victims, they are the beneficiaries. Unwitting perhaps, but beneficiaries nonetheless of a system that granted them property through ethnic cleansing. Reconciliation priced on making those beneficiaries happy is not reconciliation. It is the perpetuation of the same power dynamic with a polite apology attached.
When you demand a full cost and schedule, you are talking about a budget for justice. You want to put a ceiling on what is owed. But true reconciliation isn’t a government program you can sabotage with stakeholder dissatisfaction. It is the unfinished business of dismantling a colonial project. If the current property owner is compensated, that is a cost of doing business for a state that built itself on theft. It is not a debt owed to the public by Indigenous people. The goal is not harmonious coexistence built on a ledger that balances the comfort of settlers against the rights of nations. The goal is justice, and justice is inherently disruptive to the unjust peace that has existed here for centuries. You cannot put a timeline on decolonization. The only thing that needs to be made clear is that the era of pretending these lands were ever legitimately Canada’s to give away is over.
You can wrap it in as many words as you want. What you are saying is that I, and others like me, who were born here just like you were, and just like indigenous people were have less of a claim to this country as their homeland. This is the basis that seems to allow you to justify taking away the lives of other people.
The goal can only be harmonious coexistence, or it will be doomed to fail. If your project is built on the destruction of the lives of others, then it will not succeed.
I will say again - I first opened my eyes in this country. It is my home and I know no other. I and FN peoples are the same in this regard. I am not special nor do I hold an exalted position over you, and neither do you over me. In the end I’m putting demands on the government to recognize the true and full cost of reconciliation. I’m not putting demands on FN people. I’m not sure why you feel aggrieved that I’ve identified another group that is being impacted by this project.
You are asking for people to sacrifice to right the wrongs of the past. I want to do this, and others do to. But if you treat them as lesser and don’t try to understand the impacts on them, and you invoke academic concepts to justify why they should just ‘suck it up’, you’re going to be unsuccessful. Eventually you have to live with these people. And like I said before, they are no different than you, no less and no more.
This is not about wrapping anything in words. It’s about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.
You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That’s just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.
You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.
No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn’t the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn’t. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.
Nobody has any claim to any land. So if being born here gives no one the right why do Indiginous have the right? They stole the land from others before them. And there is no guarantee that they would have the land still if left alone. Reality is one tribe would have started taking over / killing the others.
Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡
And as I commented in another thread - I believe in response to your post - we can either collectively acknowledge the true and full cost of rectifying this situation, including fairly compensating those who are affected, or we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend that me and my kids, who were born in this country no differently than indigenous families and who know no other home, are expected to destroy our lives in service of the wrongs of the past.
If private property is affected, then the displaced people need to be fairly compensated. In general the impact on everyone needs to be considered in the calculus. I opened my eyes for the first time in this country, just like everyone else born here did, regardless of what atrocious actions were committed by those in the past. I have nowhere to go, this is my home as much as it is anyone else’s.
If we don’t acknowledge these facts willingly and openly i fear we will be forced to acknowledge them unwillingly.
You keep talking about this as something that happened in the past as opposed to something that’s currently happening.
Well it did happen in the past.
And it is happening now.
I’m going to talk about private land exclusively.
What happened in the past is the government appropriated the land, it seems at the very least unethically, and then sold it to private interests. Somewhere along the line an innocent citizen bought the land thinking it was freehold or otherwise was the owner’s land to sell. It seems that now the land is being expropriated.
If it was never the government’s land to sell, and the courts have ruled in that way, then the government needs to compensate the people to whom the land was sold.
This cost needs to be considered by the government when they negotiate with FN groups. It is the true and total cost of reconciliation. If it is excluded then it will cause enormous dissatisfaction with the entire exercise of reconciliation, and it will eventually destroy the program. If the goal is harmonious coexistence, this will be unachievable if some of the victims - and they are also victims - are pushed out and ignored.
My other adjacent point is that a full cost and schedule for reconciliation must be made clear to everyone, so that all stakeholders can understand the objective and agree on the end goal.
Let’s be clear about what you are actually saying here. You are describing the privatization of stolen land as if it were a simple matter of unfortunate paperwork. The government did not simply unethically appropriate the land. The settlers orchestrated a campaign of displacement and genocide, then laundered the loot through property deeds to create a class of settlers whose innocence is built on that foundational violence. That citizen did not buy freehold land. They bought a fantasy, a clean title washed in the blood of the original people who were murdered or removed from it. The courts are not handing down philosophical rulings. They are finally, begrudgingly, acknowledging a truth that Indigenous people have never stopped stating which is that the land was never Canada’s to sell.
Your entire argument hinges on the moral panic of the settler who feels cheated. But where is your panic for the people who were cheated of everything? You call for the government to compensate the buyer, to make the settler whole, but this just completes the cycle of colonial logic. It says the ultimate victim of theft is the one who ended up holding the stolen goods, not the people who were robbed in the first place. You call them also victims. They’re not victims, they are the beneficiaries. Unwitting perhaps, but beneficiaries nonetheless of a system that granted them property through ethnic cleansing. Reconciliation priced on making those beneficiaries happy is not reconciliation. It is the perpetuation of the same power dynamic with a polite apology attached.
When you demand a full cost and schedule, you are talking about a budget for justice. You want to put a ceiling on what is owed. But true reconciliation isn’t a government program you can sabotage with stakeholder dissatisfaction. It is the unfinished business of dismantling a colonial project. If the current property owner is compensated, that is a cost of doing business for a state that built itself on theft. It is not a debt owed to the public by Indigenous people. The goal is not harmonious coexistence built on a ledger that balances the comfort of settlers against the rights of nations. The goal is justice, and justice is inherently disruptive to the unjust peace that has existed here for centuries. You cannot put a timeline on decolonization. The only thing that needs to be made clear is that the era of pretending these lands were ever legitimately Canada’s to give away is over.
Well let them come and take it.
just look at this brave colonizer
You can wrap it in as many words as you want. What you are saying is that I, and others like me, who were born here just like you were, and just like indigenous people were have less of a claim to this country as their homeland. This is the basis that seems to allow you to justify taking away the lives of other people.
The goal can only be harmonious coexistence, or it will be doomed to fail. If your project is built on the destruction of the lives of others, then it will not succeed.
I will say again - I first opened my eyes in this country. It is my home and I know no other. I and FN peoples are the same in this regard. I am not special nor do I hold an exalted position over you, and neither do you over me. In the end I’m putting demands on the government to recognize the true and full cost of reconciliation. I’m not putting demands on FN people. I’m not sure why you feel aggrieved that I’ve identified another group that is being impacted by this project.
You are asking for people to sacrifice to right the wrongs of the past. I want to do this, and others do to. But if you treat them as lesser and don’t try to understand the impacts on them, and you invoke academic concepts to justify why they should just ‘suck it up’, you’re going to be unsuccessful. Eventually you have to live with these people. And like I said before, they are no different than you, no less and no more.
This is not about wrapping anything in words. It’s about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.
You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That’s just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.
You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.
No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn’t the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn’t. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.
Nobody has any claim to any land. So if being born here gives no one the right why do Indiginous have the right? They stole the land from others before them. And there is no guarantee that they would have the land still if left alone. Reality is one tribe would have started taking over / killing the others.
Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡