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April 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Polar vision Feature: Carbon cemetery Feature: North Shore highway The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Among other things, the treaty, one of British Columbia’s first such agreements in 150 years, will create a new form of geographic tenure in Canada. The reserve will disappear, and for the first time, provincial land-use laws will apply to territory governed by a First Nation. Also for the first time, a First Nation government — not an Indian Act band, but a new form of democratic self-governing body — will have the kind of control over its own land use that municipalities currently enjoy.

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Individual Tsawwassen members will be able to own land and will eventually pay sales tax and income tax. The new Tsawwassen government, which will receive a lump-sum payment of about $20 million and an additional 334 hectares of land, will have control over its assets and will be able to pursue economic development projects to produce revenue and jobs for its members without having to ask permission from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) bureaucrats in Ottawa.

Throughout it all, Baird forged ahead, driven by a vision of a new future for her daughters and her people. “This isn’t just about money,” she told band members last summer. “It’s about putting a long, sad chapter of poverty and dependence behind us.”

For nearly four years, I sat across the negotiating table from Baird. Originally from New Zealand, I worked on a landmark treaty there between the government of New Zealand and the Ngai Tahu people that gave them greater control over their economic development, natural resources and cultural heritage. After moving to Canada, I was hired in 2000 as the chief negotiator on the Tsawwassen land claim for the government of British Columbia. Baird was head of the Tsawwassen negotiating team, which by then was in its seventh year of treaty talks. “It is fundamental that we regain our land,” she told me. “We want control back.”

The federal government exerts its control over qualifying aboriginal people in Canada with a 132-year-old statute known as the Indian Act. The legislation provides a tax exemption for Indians living and working on reserves and annual program funding delivered by INAC. But the Indian Act also has significant drawbacks. INAC’s $5.5 billion budget for the services it provides to Indian reserves is split among more than 1,200 organizations across the country, including 640 Indian bands, or First Nations. INAC funding is never adequate to meet community needs, and it is difficult for bands to raise their own revenue. Nobody on a reserve owns land outright, either individually or collectively, making it next to impossible to borrow money from a bank to build or buy a house or start a business on a reserve. Band governments, in the form of elected chiefs and councils, have limited bylaw-making powers and are shackled by a heavy-handed federal bureaucracy that sets the priorities for how government funding is spent on reserves. Bands must troop, hat in hand, to Ottawa for permission to undertake major initiatives.

At one time, children of Indian women who married non- Indians automatically lost their status. Thus disenfranchised, many aboriginal people drifted away from their communities. Some status Indians have left their reserves to follow job opportunities or non-aboriginal spouses. For those who wished to remain living on the land on which they and their forebears were born, there was little option but to remain an Indian under the Indian Act, living on an Indian reserve.

But in 1973, a Supreme Court of Canada decision favouring the legal aboriginal rights of the Nisga’a Nation to its traditional lands on the remote north coast of British Columbia forced the federal government to the negotiating table at last. The provincial government joined the process in 1991, and the Nisga’a Treaty came into force in 2000. Elsewhere in Canada, the land claims of the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic were settled with the creation of Nunavut in April 1999.

Where Tsawwassen differs from its predecessors is in its geography and its potential influence. Like Nunavut, the Nisga’a territory is far enough out of sight that negotiations, while controversial, did not affect the daily lives of many non-aboriginals. But the Tsawwassen Treaty is the first to be settled in a difficult urban context: the fishbowl that is British Columbia’s highly politicized Vancouver region. It has attracted wide attention, and is proving to have far-reaching implications not only for First Nations but for their non-aboriginal neighbours as well.