Canadian First Nations Seek to Protect Forest Homeland
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150224-poplar-river-first-nation-ojibwa-manitoba-global-war
The truth and reconciliation process is part of a larger movement among the First Nations of Canada to force the government to honor treaties relating to indigenous sovereignty and to return control of ancestral land taken away during colonization. Much of the land in contention is wild, as well as rich in timber, oil and gas, and minerals. The traditional territory of the Poplar River First Nation, for example, is the size of Yellowstone Park and mostly undeveloped. Like other First Nations, the people of Poplar River want it to stay that way.
Consequently, the effort to regain control of ancestral land has become a potent environmental strategy, especially as the world’s industrialized countries go to ever greater extremes to satisfy their appetite for natural resources. (Related: “Naomi Klein on How Canada’s First Nations Can Take on the Oil Industry and Win”)
Renewing ties to the land, says Sophia Rabliauskas, of the Poplar River First Nation, is the only way “to keep the heart going, to keep the flame from dying out.” The way that aspiration has played out in the Poplar River and neighboring communities east of Lake Winnipeg—the Bloodvein First Nation, Little Grand Rapids First Nation, and Pauingassi First Nation—has inadvertently placed them in the vanguard of the definitive environmental battle of our time.
That’s because that territory encompasses a vast section of unspoiled boreal forest—a crucial front in the campaign to slow climate change. If the trees are left standing, and the soil undisturbed, the immense amounts of carbon they contain won’t be released into the atmosphere as heat-producing carbon dioxide.
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