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This month, in a remote corner of northern B.C., just a few kilometres from the Alaskan border, three modest houses entered Canadian First Nations history.

The residences, all located on the self-governed lands of the Nisga’a Nation, are the first privately owned homes on Canadian native land. They can be mortgaged, they can be transferred without the approval of either Ottawa or local administrators and they can even be sold to a non-aboriginal.

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As Dorothy Elliott, the Nisga’a deputy registrar of land titles, summed up to the Vancouver Sun this week, the Nisga’a can now own their homes “just like they would in the rest of Canada.”

It is only three more private houses in a country of nine million homeowners. But with these homes, the Nisga’a are pioneering one of the most divisive issues in modern aboriginal politics.

To the Nisga’a and the First Nations looking to follow their example, private ownership of aboriginal land will pull their people out of poverty and put Canadian First Nations on the road toward unprecedented levels of economic and political power. For opponents, Nisga’a-style land reforms will be the trap door by which First Nations culture is inalterably scrubbed from the Canadian landscape.