TURF WAR: Manitoba First Nation challenges hunting rights awarded to MMF (2024)

A northern Manitoba First Nation has locked horns with the Manitoba Metis Federation (MMF) over the right to hunt, fish, and trap on traditional territory near the community of Nelson House.

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The Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (NCN) in a recent letter to the province asked for the elimination of Metis harvesting rights on its traditional land approximately 850 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

The NCN seeks termination of a 2012 decision, The Manitoba Government-Manitoba Metis Federation Points of Agreement on Métis Harvesting in Manitoba, and use of a map called Recognized Areas for Metis Natural Resource Harvesting.

The NCN says it wasn’t consulted, nor were other northern First Nations, before Manitoba announced the agreement and published the map.

Any people of mixed European and First Nation ancestry who were at the Hudson Bay trading post at Nelson House were known as Children of the Post, wrote NCN Chief Angela Levasseur in the letter to Premier Wab Kinew and several ministers recently.

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“These Children of the Post only hunted and fished within N’tuskenan — NCN ancestral lands — with the permission of the NCN family who brought them along when hunting or fishing or when the Children of the Post married into our families,” she wrote.

“There has never been, and there is not now, an historic Metis community or a separate Metis territory within Nisichawayasi N’tuskenan.”

The NCN cites work by anthropologist and archeologist Virginia Petch, who worked with the community to study anthropologic and archeologic records. Petch concluded there is no historic or current Metis community at Nelson House that would meet the tests for a rights-holding historic Metis.

According to compilations by historian Lawrence Barkwell, Metis people lived in northern Manitoba decades before Confederation on South Indian Lake, around 130 kilometres north of Thompson.

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“The Hudson’s Bay Company established a post here in 1803 and the North West Company opened a competing post in 1805. This area was historically used by the First Nations and Metis people from the Footprint Lake area, later Nelson House,” Barkwell wrote in a Louis Riel Institute publication. “A 1958 census documented 101 Metis living in this community.”

The entire conflict is unfortunate, said Will Goodon, MMF minister of housing and property management in a conversation with the Winnipeg Sun.

He’s calling for unity. He said traditional Indigenous territories across Manitoba are used for hunting by a number of Indigenous groups.

Metis are one of three recognized aboriginal groups in Canada, along with First Nations and Inuit.

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“First Nations from Nelson House can come and harvest in the south if they so choose,” said Goodon. “If I was the (NCN) chief, I’d be careful in how her words may be interpreted to say that now her citizens can only hunt in that small area, because that’s where the logic will lead.”

The rights of First Nations and Metis in Manitoba are not the same and don’t co-exist in areas of the province, wrote Levasseur.

“And (they) are not of equal standing, so says the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Powley and R. v. Blais.”

Goodon said Metis hunters, under a strict written code of ethics, are not misusing lands around Nelson House, adding Metis people still live in the region.

“There is a belief that First Nation rights have a higher hierarchy than Metis rights,” said Goodon. “That simply isn’t true. There’s a little bit of racism, where there’s a belief that because we are only half (Indigenous), in some peoples’ minds — we are not only half. I am Metis because of my ancestors who fought for Metis rights, who protected our lands.”

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Goodon called out the Manitoba Wildlife Federation for stirring up trouble with an “incendiary” letter to the premier and “horrible” social media posts about “the Metis going and killing everything — wiping everything out.”

“We know the wildlife federation doesn’t care about First Nations harvesting issues,” said Goodon. “It seems to me this chief has kind of been sucked into the wildlife federation’s (division). I blame the wildlife federation a lot for their exclusion, trying to pretend to be the white saviour. All Indigenous people care about the resource.”

The province says it is open to meeting with the NCN and MMF.

“Since receiving this letter, we are carefully looking at how we can address their concerns,” said Jamie Moses, minister for economic development, investment, trade and natural resources.

Have thoughts on what’s going on in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada or across the world? Send us a letter to the editor at wpgsun.letters@kleinmedia.ca

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