There's been a lot of talk in Canada recently about the treaty rights of various Native bands across the country. The thing is a lot of people don't really understand what those rights are. They make comments about lazy buggers who get more than they deserve in the first place, or they lost a war so screw them.

Well the problem is that treaty rights in some cases were settlements for losing that war. When nations agreed to terms of surrender with the government of Great Britain, who ruled this land in those days, they were ceded control over certain territories in perpetuity. As the saying says: "As long as the grass is green and the water runs," they were promised full sovereignty over those lands under the Kings and Queens of England.

For some other tribes their lands were given to them as reward for loyalty to England. During the revolutionary war that brought about the birth of the United States, certain members of the Iroquois Nation sided with the British. Chief among them were the Mohawks and the Oneida.

Both nations were given large tracts of land in Southern Ontario to resettle in, as they had to leave their home territories in the United States after the war. As with the treaty rights of other nations in other parts of Canada their new territories were guaranteed to them forever.

Of course this was in the days long before anyone considered the value of what could be under the ground, or that a golf course would work really well there. In the dark ages of Canadian and Native relations, when the federal government was trying to solve the "Indian Problem" by committing cultural genocide with residential schools, they also ignored governments at the provincial and municipal levels developing and selling treaty lands.

Anyone with ready cash was allowed to do whatever they wanted from building gravel pits to housing developments. Trapped on their reservations and kept ignorant of their past through federal policy, most nations had no idea what was being done to them. Occasionally in attempts to make things look kosher, a government would agree to "lease" the land from the nation affected on condition that it would be returned when they were done with it.

But most times they didn't even bother and would just sell it out from under them. Some nations wised up before others. On the West Coast the Niska nation began fighting in the courts for the return of their treaty lands in the 1950's.

By the time they won their case some forty years later in the 1990's they were the proud owners of large chunks of expensive sub-divisions that had been built on their territory illegally. There was a great hue and cry from the right wing about "Indians" throwing people out on the street without having to pay for the houses.