Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture: British Columbia’s Great Land Grab: Exploring the entanglement of fee simple property and Hul’qumi’num jurisdiction on Vancouver Island

Event Recording

Event Description

This lecture will examine the historical and contemporary relationship between the doctrine of Aboriginal title, fee simple ownership, and Indigenous jurisdiction through the case of ‘privately-owned’ forest lands on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. In the late 19th century, a vast swath of unceded Indigenous territory was granted to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company in exchange for the development of a portion of railway on southern Vancouver Island. Despite ongoing assertions of title and jurisdiction by several Indigenous Nations, including the members of the Hul’quimi’num Treaty Group, the lands were subsequently purchased by investment firms. They are now held as assets by major public pension funds and operated as industrial forest lands, transforming unceded Indigenous territories into ‘financialized commodities’.

We will explore the need for Canadian courts, governments, and land owners, to go beyond the existing boundaries of Aboriginal title to take Indigenous relations with private land seriously. Deep and meaningful engagement with Indigenous legal orders and jurisdiction in the context of fee simple lands has the potential to unsettle dominant understandings of ownership, and in doing so to transform people-place relations.

This event is eligible for 1 CPD credit.

Speakers

Sarah Morales (Su-taxwiye), JD (UVic), LLM (University of Arizona), PhD (UVic), PostDoc (Illinois) is Coast Salish and a member of Cowichan Tribes. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, where she teaches torts, transsystemic torts, Coast Salish law and languages, legal research and writing and field schools. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Victoria, she taught at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law where she taught Aboriginal law, Indigenous legal traditions and international human rights with a focus on Indigenous peoples. Sarah’s research centres on Indigenous legal traditions, specifically the traditions of the Coast Salish people, Aboriginal law and human rights. She has been active with Indigenous nations and NGOs across Canada in nation building, inherent rights recognition and international human rights law.

Professor Estair Van Wagner researches and teaches in the areas of natural resource law and property law and how these intersect with Indigenous rights. She is co-director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic. Her work explores how law is used to structure relations with the environment and place. Professor Van Wagner joined Osgoode in 2017 from the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law in Aotearoa New Zealand where she taught Property, Natural Resource, and Resource Management Law.

About the Lecture

About the Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture

The annual Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture focuses on the law of equity or British Columbia legal history and is held alternately at the Allard School of Law and the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.

Madam Justice Southin graduated from the law school in 1952 and was called to the bar in 1953. Over the years, she earned a tremendous reputation with the Bench, her colleagues and litigants for her representation of a wide range of clients in a very broad litigation practice. Madam Justice Southin was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1969, was elected a Bencher in 1971, and became the Treasurer of the Law Society in 1977. She was the Editor in Chief of the British Columbia Law Reports from 1979 until her appointment to the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1985. She was appointed to the Court of Appeal in 1998 and retired in 2006.

This important lecture pays tribute to her legacy by reminding others to pay heed to these two important influences - law of equity and legal history - on the legal profession.