THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Indian owners of Prime Canadian land are getting upset with the failures of the Ottawa government to complete negotiations with the local Indian tribes. And they are promising to evict various paleface companies from their lands if nothing is settled.

A dispute over land now has Gitxsan hereditary chiefs threatening to grind trade along that route to a halt. If the British Columbia (B.C.) government doesn’t address the Gitxsan’s concerns by Sept. 16, the group’s leaders say they could begin service disruptions along the railway through their territory, escalating a longstanding feud with the province.

Last month, chiefs served what they called “eviction notices” to the national railway, logging companies and sportfishing operators, asking them to halt commercial activities in the aboriginal people’s sleepy territory. Additional police have been dispatched.

“Everything is on the table until we get our desired result,” said Beverley Clifton Percival, a negotiator for the Gitxsan who also goes by her First Nations name, Gwaans.

The Gitxsan say the province has included land inhabited by their people in treaties proposed for two neighboring Indian bands. Placing new pressure on the Gitxsan’s stalled land negotiations is the natural-gas boom spurred by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In fact, the Gitxsan Treaty Society, a negotiating body composed of a small group of hereditary chiefs, has broken off discussions on two proposed pipelines that would transport liquefied natural gas, or LNG, through their territory. There’s also intense debate in the province about plans to construct two pipelines for the transport of heavy crude oil from the neighboring province of Alberta to Canada’s west coast. One, Enbridge Northern Gateway, would run near Gitsxan territory.

The Gitxsan and First Nations peoples across the country have been emboldened by a June Supreme Court of Canada decision they describe as a “game changer.” In that case, the court sided with the Tsilhqot’in First Nation, a band of roughly 3,000 people residing in British Columbia’s interior, in a dispute over commercial logging. The court ruled that because the Tsilhqot’in were found to hold “aboriginal title” over the territory in question, their permission was required before logging could proceed.

“Canada is witnessing something that I call the rise of native empowerment,” said Bill Gallagher, a lawyer and author who specializes in First Nations legal challenges. “The Supreme Court of Canada has declared, verbatim, that the doctrine of terra nullius — that nobody was here when flags were planted by colonizers — that that doctrine does not apply in Canada.”

Could be big trouble brewing. And the Mounties won't be much help with this one.