Algonquin members organize in fight for identity, land and nationhood

It's almost like a game of colonial whack-a-mole. Everywhere Algonquin Nation members look these days, it seems a new problem pops up.

If it isn't declining moose stocks, it's a proposed radioactive dump on unceded land, and if it isn't a controversial Ontario land claim or friction with the Métis Nation of Ontario, it's the rise of the self-declared eastern Métis in Quebec. 

With limited time and money — and a traditional territory larger than some provinces  — the Algonquin Anishinaabeg face hard decisions about the top issue to target, but according to a group that gathered last week in Ottawa, that issue should be unity.

"That needs to happen first in order for us to address all those other problems," said Kyle Brennan Shàwinipinesì, co-organizer of the two-day forum on Algonquin identity and nation building. "We've allowed this sort of chasm and colonial interference to really drive us apart."

He and two other members of Kitigan Zibi Anishinābeg in western Quebec hosted the meeting last week at the Ottawa Art Gallery for grassroots people to organize.

The meeting was sparked in part by concerns with "self-Indigenization," he explained, where Canadians reach back generations to find a distant Indigenous ancestor, then claim the modern identity to score cash grants and other benefits.

"The incursion of self-Indigenization has such a big impact," he said.

The Algonquin Nation has 17,000 status members spread across 11 bands through Ontario and Quebec, situated throughout the Ottawa River watershed, and thousands more claiming Algonquin ancestry.

Kitigan Zibi, about 150 km north of Ottawa, is on the frontline of the Indigenous identity wars — even intervening in a recent court case that ruled against the existence of a Métis community in nearby Maniwaki, Que., — but it's not alone feeling the heat. 

The Algonquins of Pikwakanagan is the only Indian Act band that belongs to the Algonquins of Ontario (AOO) umbrella group, which also includes nine more non-status communities.

The AOO is on the cusp of a modern treaty. If finalized, it would settle an Algonquin claim to nine million acres of land in Ontario. The group would get 117,500 acres, a $300-million payout and recognition of certain ongoing rights.

But the AOO had identity troubles, culminating in a June 2023 AOO tribunal hearing where a controversial 19th-century Algonquin ancestor was found to be French and turfed. 

That means potentially hundreds of non-Algonquin descendants could influence the treaty's 2016 agreement-in-principle, which Pikwakanagan members voted against. Meanwhile, Algonquins in Quebec widely reject the AOO, the treaty and the provincial boundary that divides them.

"Title is vested in the nation, and 80 per cent of our population lives on the east side of the Kichi Sibi," said Veldon Coburn, a Pikwakanagan member and associate professor at McGill University, using the Ottawa River's Algonquin name.