Fort William First Nation [Boundary claim]

Fort William Indian Reserve No. 52 contains 5815 hectares of land along the north shore of Lake Superior, on the southern edge of the city of Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario. The registered membership of the band is 1726, of whom 839 live on the reserve.

Fort William First Nation is a signatory to the Robinson Superior Treaty negotiated between the Crown and the Ojibwa along the northern shores of Lake Superior in 1850. In 1852, the First Nation petitioned the Crown, saying that the reserve as described in the Treaty was not as agreed to at the Treaty negotiations and it protested again in 1853 when the reserve was surveyed.

In 1985, the First Nation submitted a claim to Canada and Ontario, alleging that the boundary of the reserve does not reflect the First Nation’s understanding of the location and size of the reserve. Canada accepted the claim for negotiation in 1994 but negotiations were suspended in 1996 pending Ontario’s decision to join the table. In 2001, Ontario offered to participate in the negotiations but only with regard to specifically limited aspects. In 2002, Canada and Fort William First Nation began bilateral negotiations, including loss-of-use studies, and in 2005 Canada agreed to Ontario’s offer of limited participation. The parties began tripartite meetings to develop an approach for completing the negotiations.

The ICC’s role during these negotiations is as study coordinator, acting as the liaison between the negotiating parties and independent consultants hired to complete research and loss-of-use studies, including forestry loss of use, agriculture loss of use, mines and minerals loss of use and a historical research study looking at other land developments. At the conclusion of this past fiscal year, the loss of use and historical research studies had been completed and land appraisals were about to begin.