National Farmers Union BC Stands in Solidarity with Indigenous Communities
The Province of BC must recommit to meaningful implementation of DRIPA as written.
Members of the National Farmers Union – British Columbia call on the Province of BC to reaffirm its commitment to implementing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), as co-developed between BC First Nations and the province and unanimously passed by the Legislature in 2019.
The NFU is a democratic organization of farmers and farm workers cultivating food sovereignty. Our membership is composed of family and co-operative farmers in both rural and urban areas. For over 50 years, we have, through our democratic governance processes, advocated for and developed policies that put human rights and environmental stewardship before corporate profits. The NFU knows that solidarity between settler farmers and Indigenous peoples is essential to achieving food sovereignty on Turtle Island and in BC.
To build that solidarity between Indigenous peoples and NFU farmers, we must first reckon with the truth that settler agriculture has played a large role in colonization and dispossession. In BC specifically, agricultural settlement was encouraged and supported by policies as a strategic necessity to create stability and longevity for the colony, which was once dominated by transient mining operations. We are grateful for the historical education shared by Jacob Beaton of Tea Creek Farm, and many other Indigenous leaders doing the tireless work of telling the stories of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and farming in BC. We must begin with shared acknowledgement of what has happened before and how history shapes the way things are today in order to create a new path forward together.
BC First Nations are the best partners that British Columbia could possibly find to help us build a resilient, abundant province where everybody is cared for. Nobody knows better how to live sustainably and feed large populations on these landscapes, and their track records for honesty, integrity, feeding the hungry, and sharing their homes with weary travellers are much better than the colonial governments’. We will all benefit from living in a world where Indigenous nations have a greater ability to govern their territories and uphold their traditional responsibilities. These lands and waters are absolutely capable of providing more than enough for us all, if settlers and the settler state take the time to figure out and uphold our responsibilities to these places and everyone who shares them.
Farms and farmers have been tools for advancing settler colonialism on these lands, often to the detriment of Indigenous communities. NFU farmers have a strong desire to evolve beyond this and be a powerful force for solidarity in action.
As farmers, we have a responsibility to address the recent wave of fear-based, anti-Indigenous rhetoric that has been using farming and farmland protection as justification for continuing to ignore and undermine Indigenous peoples’ rights on their traditional territories. People, farmers especially, feel that their lives and farms are in a precarious position right now. Wildfires, flooding, drought, war, tariffs, the hollowing out of public services, the rising cost of living, and the ongoing consolidation of corporate power in our food systems are driving an ever-tightening cost-price squeeze on farmers. Farmers in BC undoubtedly face uncertainty and risks, but to point fingers at Indigenous communities and willfully ignore their repeated public statements that nobody is coming for private property is a form of scapegoating. Farmers are exploited and disempowered by the same systems and corporations that extract wealth from Indigenous territories and fight to maintain the oppression of Indigenous people. However, we must also recognize that farmers have and continue to benefit from colonial policies aimed at dispossessing and disempowering Indigenous peoples. As farmers, we should use our privilege to build a better future for all.
Politicians, who have access to all of the relevant information, are deliberately stoking fear and fueling misunderstanding about the “risks” involved when we finally acknowledge that even by the colonial government’s own imposed laws, Canada never legitimately obtained title to most of the land in BC. If BC residents keep resenting and mistrusting our neighbours, we will lose sight of the need to hold our governments accountable for harm done by the increasing austerity and vulnerability caused by decades of neoliberal policies.
Change is inevitable. Looking at the environmental destruction, relentless wealth extraction, and increasing militarism around the world, abrupt, destabilizing, and dangerous changes seem more and more likely to be coming for all of us, including those of us who have historically benefited from these types of changes being “externalized” to the Global South and Indigenous communities. We can fear change and cling to what we have until it comes anyways, or we can navigate change in good faith, through due process, with the knowledge that we all have to live here together, whatever the future brings.
DRIPA gives us an opportunity to pause for a moment, look at the big picture, and figure out a way forward where everyone might be able to get what they need. Until now, the prosperity of some people has been achieved through the systematic dispossession and disenfranchisement of others. While farmers who benefit from this arrangement may not have been personally responsible for setting it up, as farmers in the NFU, we are grateful for the chance to participate in building new, unified relations with Indigenous communities and territories. It would be an honour to leave that legacy for future generations.
If realizing the rights of Indigenous peoples does result in settlers needing to make adjustments to how they farm or operate their businesses, we wholeheartedly believe that these changes will be for the long-term sustainability of the lands, waters, and communities we call home. Change and possible uncertainty is not a justification for continuing to violate Indigenous peoples’ rights. Honouring DRIPA means we get to build something else, something that is not going to be perpetually vulnerable to the “threat” that the wrong might get righted.
The BC government has made $150 million available to support fee simple landowners in the Cowichan title claim area in case of impacts to the perceived speculative value of their properties. Unresolved land claims are one of many contradictions and vulnerabilities for farmers in BC. The opportunity to turn a new leaf and create systems that work for the world we live in today and future generations, with the government having a duty to support those efforts, should give us all a reason to feel hopeful.
The First Nations Leadership Council is calling for people in BC to tell our government that we want to see the Declaration Act through. They have created a website where you can learn more about the Act, debunk the misinformation that is being spread by sources that should be credible, and add your voice in support through the letter-writing tool to contact your MLA. There is also a joint call from over 120 civil society organizations and community leaders being organized by West Coast Environmental Law; you can read the statement and find out how your organization can sign on and support here.
BC NFU members are steadfast in our commitment to working together to create livable futures for everyone. We welcome any outreach and requests to support food and agricultural policy change and/or mobilize farmers in service of truth and reconciliation, restitution, rematriation, decolonization, mutual aid, or land back.
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Notes
[1] In 1859, the Governor of the colony of British Columbia, James Douglas, wrote “the regular settlement of the country by a class of industrious cultivators is an object of the utmost importance to the colony which is at present dependent for every necessity of life, even to the food of the people, on importation from abroad.” The system of “pre-emption”, whereby settlers could be granted title for land by farming it, was introduced in 1860. In 1897, Farmers Institutes were established to facilitate the government’s support for agrarian settlement. To learn more about the impacts of colonial food, ag, and land policies on Indigenous communities in BC, check out this Research on agricultural land use regulations in the context of Indigenous food security, authored by Jess Mukiri, NFU BC BIPOC Representative, in consultation with Jared Qwustenuxun Williams.
