...Part 1 -- A Recipe for Poverty
...Part 2 -- A Step Towards Better Native Housing
...Part 3 -- Wrapping Native Land in Red Tape
...Part 4 -- Let Natives Choose
Millions of Canadians take the right to buy and sell their own home for granted. Yet on Canada's reserves, where property is held communally, aboriginals are systematically denied this right. In this final instalment in her four-part series on the subject, Tanis Fiss calls on the federal government to end its patronizing native land-use policies.
Since 1997, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has been urging the federal government to implement a system of private property ownership on Indian reserves as a means to empower natives and reduce poverty. Regrettably, this idea has been rejected by a majority of native leaders and activists. They claim that the concept of communally held property is a basic tenet of aboriginal life.
But as Montana State University professor Terry Anderson has shown, this isn't true: Prior to European contact, North American Indians were well-versed in the notion of private ownership. The Machiacan Indians of the Northeast, for example, bequeathed rights to well-defined tracts of garden lands along rivers, and marked beaver-trapping territories by carving family symbols on trees.
These natives understood a basic principle: Economies function best when property is privately owned. Prof. Anderson's work proves this principle applies to modern-day Indians. He has shown that individually allotted Indian lands in the American West are more productive than tribally or federally controlled Indian lands.
To make Canada's native reserves prosperous and self-sufficient, we must take this lesson to heart. Private property rights that are stable and transferable have been the foundation for wealth creation in virtually every society on earth. It is scandalous that we would systematically deny the benefits of a market economy to reserve-resident aboriginals, the poorest segment of Canadian society.
The root of the problem lies with our Indian Act, a vestige of the 19th Century: Aboriginals who live on reserves cannot own their land. Even the tribes themselves cannot own the land. Instead, the land is held in trust by the Canadian government.
It is true that native Canadians aren't forced to live on reserves. But the various incentives offered to reserve residents, such as tax exemptions and free housing, discourage them from leaving. As I've noted previously, a major problem with the current scheme is that reserve-resident aboriginals are prevented from mortgaging their property in the usual way. This policy deprives them of a mode of financing that is commonly used by other Canadians to start businesses.
Reserve land is difficult to mortgage because a mortgagee cannot enforce his or her interest against the land in the event of a default. Section 89 of the Indian Act states: "Subject to this Act, the real and personal property of an Indian or a band situated on a reserve is not subject to charge,pledge, mortgage, attachment, levy, seizure, distress or execution in favour or at the instance of any person other than an Indian or a band." The original intent behind this provision was laudable: to protect native Canadians from exploitation and from loss of land due to seizure. But
intoday's world, this section only scares off potential investors and business partners, and is based on a view of native Canadians as incapable of participating in our economy as equals. Canada's progressive culturevenerates the respect for the land instinctively exhibited by Indians. So why don't we trust them to manage their own lands properly?
Aboriginals' inability to own their property affects their private rights. But this private problem has created a very public crisis on reserves. Since economic activity is so severely curtailed, development depends almost wholly on public money funnelled through band leaders. The few businesses and jobs that do exist on many reserves are thus beholden to the band council - a recipe for corruption.
It is demeaning to Indians for the federal government to continue to hold title to Canada's Indian reserves. We should let aboriginals themselves decide - on a band-by-band basis - whether their long-term interests are to be achieved through the private ownership of land, or the existing collectivist approach. Until we give them this freedom, they are doomed to a life of dependency on government handouts.