The Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation had two land claims settled. The Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation filed a specific land claim to particular lands in the Park with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in the mid-1990s. The claim is commonly referred to as the 1906 Lands Specific Claim. Canada accepted the basis of this claim and has agreed to return 320 acres, described as East 1/2 Section 8, Township 20, Range 19, in the Province of Manitoba, to the Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation as Indian Reserve lands.
The lands, which were purchased in 1906 for the Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation, have been a part of Riding Mountain National Park of Canada since 1935 when they were expropriated for park purposes. The lands are located adjacent to Reserve 61A lands on the north shore of Clear Lake in the Park.
On the western shores of Clear Lake in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park there sits a small reserve belonging to the Keeseekoowenin Ojibwa Band. Officially designated Indian Reserve #61A, the parcel of land is located close to the main park town site of Wasagaming and the prime tourist areas surrounding Clear Lake. The presence of this reserve within in a national park might tempt one to conclude that the federal government has historically attempted to reconcile the goal of wilderness preservation with the historical presence of First Nations people in the Riding Mountain region.
The present reserve at Clear Lake is, however, only a recent addition to the political landscape of Riding Mountain National Park. In 1935 the site was deleted from the Indian reserve system; its boundaries were wiped from the map of the Riding Mountain region and its people were evicted from within the park boundary to an existing reserve near Elphinstone. In 1939 all the remaining buildings were burned to the ground. It was not until the resolution of a specific land claim in 1994 that the Clear Lake Reserve was returned to the Keeseekoowenin First Nation. A further settlement that was not resolved until 2005 brought $6,999,900 in compensation for the lost use of the land over a period of fifty-nine years.
The expulsion of the Keeseekoowenin Ojibwa Band from their reserve in Riding Mountain National Park is only one chapter in a long international history of local displacement due to the implementation of parks and nature preserves. During the zenith of European imperialism, for example, national parks were created in rich big game rich regions such as southern Africa and South Asia in a manner that restricted local access to bush meat and to traditional hunting grounds.
In North America, recent scholarship has suggested that many characteristics of colonial conservation initiatives were associated with efforts to preserve the fading wilderness spaces of North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the western part of the continent. Throughout this period, Aboriginal hunters on both sides of the Canadian border were routinely expelled from iconic wilderness spaces such as Banff, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, their former hunting territories turned to pleasuring grounds and recreation areas for middle and upper class tourists from the east.
As the wilderness movement expanded to the east in the 1890s, Native and non-Native homesteaders alike were barred from wilderness areas such as Algonquin Park, the Appalachians, the Quetico wilderness, Georgian Bay Islands National Park, and various national parks in Atlantic Canada.
Historians have offered several interpretive models to explain the adverse relationship between the wilderness parks movement and indigenous people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One common thread of analysis has suggested that the U.S. government sought to empty protected areas of people in order to create a tabula rasa that was fundamental to a national identity born out of its profound cultural encounter with the wilderness.
Other scholars have emphasized the influence of upper class sport hunters who sought to denigrate Aboriginal and other lower class ‘pot hunters’ and as a justification for enclosing the hunting and fishing commons so that only the true ‘gentleman’ hunter would have access to fish and game.
More recently, the historian Karl Jacoby has advanced the notion that the wilderness and wildlife conservation movements of the late twentieth century were tied to much larger efforts on the part of the state to control and regulate local systems of resource management at the rural periphery.
Finally, scholars in Canada—perhaps reflecting the heavy emphasis the federal government placed on national parks as public pleasuring grounds in this country—have tended to emphasize the role of local and state promotion of tourism as a primary factor leading to the expulsion of ‘undesirables’ such as homesteaders and Aboriginal hunters from within the boundaries of the national parks.
The case of the Keeseekoowenin Ojibway expulsion suggests that many factors influenced the decision to remove them from their reserve at Clear Lake. From 1929 (when Riding Mountain National Park was created) until the actual removal of the reserve in 1935, local and senior parks officials offered a range of justifications for deleting the reserve from within the park boundary. These included the desirability of having the park lands administered by one branch of the federal government, the need protect local game populations, the hope that the resident Aboriginal people might take up agriculture on their main reserve, and finally the expectation that the land base accorded to Indian Reserve #61A might be used for the development of further tourist and recreation facilities along the shoreline of Clear Lake. Noticeably lacking from the discussion was any mention of preserving wilderness values in the park.
Whether this absence of a wilderness ethos in the discourse surrounding Native exclusion from Riding Mountain National Park represents a general trend in the history of the Canadian movements is a question that can only be settled through further research. Nonetheless, the case of Riding Mountain National Park suggests that local issues and concerns, particularly the pragmatic managerial concerns of park administrators and political agitation from local people who supported the park’s tourism and game protection mandates, were the driving forces behind the deletion of Indian Reserve #61A. Indeed, the attempt to ‘de-humanize’ Riding Mountain National Park was a response more to local factional interests and social hierarchies than to abstract notions of the wilderness or concrete attempts on the part of the central state to control those living at the rural periphery .