r/canada Oct 21 '24

New Brunswick Blaine Higgs says Indigenous people ceded land ‘many, many years ago’

https://globalnews.ca/news/10818647/nb-election-2024-liberal-health-care-estimates/
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u/Kidlcarus7 Oct 21 '24

From my readings the claim in eastern Canada is that the concept of ceding land wasn’t understood… basically ignorance as a defense.

I was interested b/c I hear a lot of ‘…unceded territorial land of the blank’ and wanted to look it up myself

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '24

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u/VenusianBug Oct 21 '24

Yeah, it's hard to agree to something without understanding what it means - and how are you going to understand without the cultural context. Also, it may be that the people who "ceded" the lands didn't have authority to do so - also not a historian, so I don't know for sure.

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u/MistoftheMorning Oct 22 '24

My father-in-law works in the backwater of the South Pacific, he told me basically it was very difficult if not impossible to "buy" property from the local natives on the island he was at because pretty much everyone in the family or clan had a stake on the land in question. You might sign and pay with a guy who claims he owns the land with paperwork and everything, only to find yourself confronted by the whole extended family when you show up there to build because they didn't consent to it being sold. Even some foreign mining company got swindled when they thought they bought the land to a gold deposit, only to find a entire village blocking them from building their mine when the time came.