A wild experiment is under way in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province: the government is rewriting its laws to share power with Indigenous nations over a land base bigger than France and Germany combined.
Decades in the making, this transition entered history in 2019, when BC became the first jurisdiction on Earth to sign the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law. This means the regional government would share decision-making power over land management matters with First Nations, potentially affecting leasing and licences for forestry, mining and construction.
The legislation is dauntingly complex, involving distinct negotiations with more than 200 First Nations and the dismantling of a system built to protect industrial profits over any other interest.
“We’re building a plane while flying it,” says Terry Teegee, chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations and chair of BC’s UNDRIP implementation committee. “It’s unique to anywhere in the world.”
“It’s path-breaking,” agrees Sheryl Lightfoot, an Anishinaabe scholar and member of the UN expert mechanism on the rights of Indigenous peoples. “What we see in BC is such a deliberate, intentional approach to implement the Declaration,” Lightfoot says. “We’ve all been calling for member states to do [similar] legislation.”
Almost 150 countries voted for UNDRIP when the UN general assembly adopted it in 2007, but their support is purely symbolic. So far only Canada has followed BC’s lead in turning UNDRIP into law. The impact of that federal legislation has been muted, however, by provincial jurisdiction over land-use decisions – the very authority BC is starting to share with First Nations.
While a handful of countries, from Ecuador and Bolivia to Norway and Kenya, have introduced constitutional reforms with UNDRIP in mind, “they’ve all experienced quite an implementation gap”, Lightfoot says.
A painful example she cites is New Zealand, widely regarded as a world leader in Indigenous rights: “In 2019, the expert mechanism was invited into New Zealand to give advice on how to implement the declaration. We recommended legislation, reporting mechanisms and an action plan, similar to what’s happening in BC now. And there was work in New Zealand on the action plans, but the weakness was they didn’t do legislation first.”
The pandemic slowed everything down, then last October a new Conservative coalition formed a government that is openly hostile to Indigenous rights. “Now nothing is happening.”
“A lot of people look toward New Zealand as being a leader, but in actual fact British Columbia is so far ahead of us,” says Valmaine Toki, a Maori scholar who took over from Lightfoot in July as chair of the UN expert mechanism. “Our government has not progressed any legislative recognition of UNDRIP.”
Despite BC’s size – the province’s forest cover alone would blanket Ukraine – it’s also a microcosm of a colonised world in the grip of ecological crisis. According to the UN Environment Programme, 80% of the world’s biodiversity teems in territory owned, occupied or used by Indigenous peoples. 6% of the world’s population is Indigenous; so is 6% of BC’s. That’s 300,000 people speaking 34 languages, spread across coastal fjords and misty rainforests, subalpine meadows and semi-arid desert and dense boreal forest. Most have been here since the last ice age.
Almost their entire land base – about 97% of most of what’s now “British Columbia” – was seized without a treaty or any pretence of legality. Since then, four-fifths of the province’s primary forest has been logged. Wild salmon and herring are down to a 10th of their once-spectacular abundance. Habitat destruction from mining and fossil fuel development have pushed another 2,000 species to the brink of extirpation.
Over the past 30 years, a string of supreme court decisions established the illegality of all this. Many nations devoted entire generations to those court battles; others fought on the land, leading the largest campaigns of civil disobedience in Canadian history against pipelines and old growth logging.
None of that is ancient history; some of those protests are still simmering. Examples of industrial excess remain common. Any leader you speak to, Indigenous or not, will emphasise these caveats and express grave concerns about the injustices First Nations continue to suffer in almost every corner of the province. But most will also acknowledge that things are changing faster than ever before – and faster than anywhere else.
“They’re unpacking 175 years of public policy that’s been grounded in denial of First Nations rights and title,” says Adam Olsen, a member of BC’s opposition Green party from the Tsartlip nation. “It was never going to be easy.”
“We would like to see more progress,” says Teegee, “but we went into this knowing full well that there was really no instruction manual, no place to state that this is ‘the way’ to reconcile with First Nations. It’s unique to anywhere in the world, and we’re leading the way.”
Recent developments have been striking. In April, the Haida Nation gained aboriginal title to the entirety of Haida Gwaii, a stunning archipelago of more than 200 Pacific islands spanning 10,000 sq km. In June, a 2,000 sq km conservation area called Klinse-Za was expanded in the province’s north-east, to be co-managed by two First Nations there. July brought the launch of the Great Bear Sea initiative, a network of marine protected areas spanning 100,000 sq km off BC’s north coast that will fall under the shared authority of 17 coastal nations.
That’s a small sample of announcements from the past few months alone, but dozens more are in the works.
“We made a solemn commitment,” says Murray Rankin, BC’s minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation. “Everybody in the legislature stood up that day to say we agree with the Declaration Act, and now we’re putting meat on the bones.”
Still, 175 years of colonial plunder doesn’t turn on a dime. As the scale of this endeavour comes into public view, so does the public backlash. A provincial election is coming next week on 19 October; BC’s governing New Democratic party finds itself grappling with a surging Conservative opposition that has promised to revoke the act and shred the environmental protections that come with it. British Columbians may soon learn whether their landmark legislation can withstand such a change in government, or whether Indigenous rights remain as vulnerable to public whim as they are in New Zealand.
This election will unfold in the shadows of the American supernova. But BC’s outcome will set a global precedent. Collapsing ecosystems threaten economies and democracies everywhere, and Indigenous communities are on the frontlines in much of the world. In British Columbia, a political map to navigate the crisis is being drawn before our eyes.
Reporting for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.