No, Indigenous people are not coming for your privately owned land

Despite what you may have read over the last several weeks, Indigenous people – with the help of the courts – are not coming to seize your privately owned land.

Since the landmark B.C. Court decision which declared that the Cowichan Tribes had never given up (what the law calls “surrendered”) a part of their territory and so continue to have legal ownership (“the courts call it “Aboriginal title”) to that part of the territory, commentators have come out of the woodwork to warn us of the impending doom that will surely result from restoring to the Cowichan land that was stolen from them by Crown governments.