Canadian Environmental Governance and Indigenous Reconciliation: Land Back as Restorative Justice

Abstract

This major research paper argues that land reclamation through a commons-focused decolonial land governance framework is a necessary response to both the triple planetary crises and Indigenous reconciliation in Canada. It begins from the tension between idealized Canadian identity and the realities of Canadian governance and situates the analysis within the author’s relationship to Turtle Island, Aamjiwnaang First Nation (“AFN”), and an Anishinaabe research paradigm grounded in Land, Treaty responsibilities, and legal pluralism. The paper contends that Canadian colonial-capitalism has produced climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental racism, and ongoing Indigenous dispossession by prioritizing extraction, exclusionary property relations, and wealth accumulation over environmental justice and Treaty obligations. Through the case of AFN and the Chemical Valley, it shows how these structures have generated severe health, environmental, and jurisdictional harms, while the common law contract approach to Treaty interpretation and existing fiduciary doctrine continue to restrict access to justice for historic Treaty Nations such as AFN. In response, the paper develops an intersocietal framework for reconciliation built through economics, law, and land governance. It draws on ecological economics and degrowth Marxism to critique metabolic rifts and biocapacity deficits, advances a functional constitutional approach to Treaty interpretation rooted in Indigenous Treaty jurisprudence and the Honour of the Crown, and argues that this approach can restore access to justice for Treaty No. 29 and support restitution for environmental racism and breaches of Treaty. It then proposes commons governance, bioregional politics, Indigenous stewardship models, land reclamation mechanisms, Charter remedies, and plural, adaptive Land Back strategies, while insisting that lasting restitution requires the re-centering of Indigenous legal orders rather than the mere adaptation of settler property models. The paper concludes that true reconciliation requires restorative justice, renewed nation-to-nation relationships, and the rebuilding of Indigenous jurisdiction and governance over Land and environment.