You don't have to be Cowichan to know that this win is a win for people who stood up against tyrranny.
A note about the Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 BCSC 1490, caught my attention. The decision is explosive: the court recognized Aboriginal title even where the province had stamped “fee simple” and folded the land into its titles system. In plain words, the court declared that the government never had the authority to extinguish title in the first place.
(Sources: Delgamuukw v. British Columbia [1997] 3 SCR 1010; Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia [2014] 2 SCR 257; Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 BCSC 1490).
This may just be the fracture in the myth of state sovereignty.
Could The Indian Act be Seen as Control Disguised as Law?
In my opinion The Indian Act remains one of the most effective pieces of social engineering ever written, its purpose was control: stripping nations of autonomy, reducing sovereign peoples to wards of the Crown. The government acted as though it were a benevolent guardian, while in truth it was the jailer. The Act created dependency, engineered division, and entrenched state dominance over land and people. It was management of populations for the benefit of the state.
It seems to me that “Truth and Reconciliation” has been left in the hands of politicians who preside over the very systems that caused and continue to cause the harm, regardless of title - the elementary school principal (pursuing his end game upper management position) via curriculum driven propaganda or the member of parliament by way of lobbying money and agenda propaganda. They stage ceremonies, issue apologies, and commission reports but the machinery of dispossession rolls on. It is reconciliation theatre: managed, controlled, and sanitized by those least qualified to deliver justice and education.
Picture a family. A government as the narcissistic parent: manipulative, self-serving, addicted to control, drunk on power and all while in a position of authority. The children — Indigenous and Settler alike — are kept divided. The parent thrives on chaos. To keep power, it pits the children against each other, feeding resentment and suspicion. The siblings spend generations fighting one another while the parent steals from the table. The cycle only breaks when the children see the truth: the parent is the problem and the only solution is to cast that parent out from its position of power. This is Canada’s land story. Division between peoples serves the government and unity against it threatens its hold.
I see patterns, it’s just one of my things. I can’t help it and it is annoying. I’m often unable to find words to describe the patterns I see and I’m definitely always uninterested in the details of those patterns but I still pick up on them, so here’s what I see, an Empire’s playbook never seems to change, whether it’s the Ottomans, the Byzantines, or the Romans.
In Ireland, the Crown stripped land, enforced plantations, and weaponized famine.
In Scotland, the Highland Clearances forced people from ancestral homes.
In Canada, reserves, the Indian Act, and expropriation laws legalized dispossession.
In rural Alberta, farm and ranch land expropriated by municipalities and non-elected boards.
The language differs, the victims change, but the script is the same: governments write laws to sanctify theft and call it progress. People get dispersed, or are left to die and those that are left are oppressed and marginalized and forced to comply.
I suspect the Cowichan win is the breach in the dam and there is a flood coming, the likes of which no dyke can hold. The Cowichan ruling confirmed what history already showed: governments act beyond their own authority, seize what is not theirs, and bury truth until it claws its way back to the surface. Aboriginal title was not extinguished. The pattern is clear to me, this was another war that never ended. The invasion was a war and it was followed by an attempted regime change that was simply not well executed, never finished and preemptively celebrated. The writing is on the wall, well, actually it's now on the land title deed.
Governments paper over history with surveys and registries, but memory persists. Courts, after centuries, are forced to admit what was always true: that title existed long before a Crown seal, and persists long after.
The central struggle is not Indigenous versus settler. It is people versus government. Governments treat land as a commodity, people as obstacles, and history as disposable. When neighbours are turned against each other, governments win. When people recognize the real abuser in the room, governments lose. To openly critique and question history is to be labelled a history revisionist. How convenient for the person reading history from the perspective of the victor and when your job depends on telling the right version of the story who would dream of questioning it.
History leaves us a few clear paths forward but things won't change as long as the masses remain confortable and on the Dole that's handed out by the narcissistic parents I refered to previoulsy. Here are three and boy oh boy to effect change through any of these three measures would require grit en masse that I haven't seen since my grandparents were alive.
Radical Decentralization — Authority pushed down to the smallest, most local level. Communities deciding for themselves, not through distant bureaucrats.
Restitution Without Bureaucracy — Direct transfer of land, resources, and decision-making power, without the layers of state management that exist to water down justice.
A Libertarian Model of Governance — A state stripped back to its true purpose: protection of individual rights and freedoms, not domination. Governments exist only because people consent, and they serve only so long as they remember it.
The Final Word
Land disputes are not accidents. They are the direct result of governments claiming a right they never had. Every “title,” every “deed,” every “act” is built on the same fiction: that power can erase memory, law can erase truth. The Cowichan decision shows otherwise. The cracks are widening. The abusive parent cannot hold forever. The children — Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike — must stop fighting each other, recognize the source of their suffering, and cast the parent out. Only then does freedom return. I am not interested nor am I willing to fight my fellow brother and sister but I will fight for our shared rights and freedoms as human beings. Parts of my ancestral family are here because they were starved out of Ireland and some parts were run out of Scotland and other parts of my family were the perpetrators of those war crimes and now I am here seeing the same crimes taking place, only now they may be just a little harder to distinguish due to the level of comfort available. .
I congratulate the Cowichan win, it was earned, the legal preparation has clearly been ongoing for decades and I respect tenacity, resilience and courage.I believe this is just the beginning and new jobs will have to be created to address this new aspect to real estate purchases and sales. I believe the entire definition of land ownership will need to be changed and I believe that precedent will continue to be set as land claims are challenged area by area.
Unnecessarily large governments do not give freedom, they take it and they only stop when the people unite to take their freedoms back. I enjoyed Mad Max as much as anyone did but I'm not sure we've raised any revolutionaries in the last 40 years here in the West. If we have then come find me and I will happily put down my $6.00 soy latte and pick up my pea shooter as soon as I wakeup from my high content THC induced afternoon nap.
Your's in Truth Always,
Kathleen
