B.C. aboriginals flexing their economic might today are enjoying not an instant success, but rather the results of decades of legal struggles.

“The history is that the province ignored First Nations for 120-some years,” says associate professor Gordon Christie, director of the indigenous legal studies program at the University of B.C. “That’s why we’re at this point now. They can no longer ignore the problem.”

In the early 1850s, colonial Governor James Douglas negotiated treaties with 14 B.C. bands on Vancouver Island before the money from London ran out. He made no effort to keep the ball rolling and compensate natives using creative methods, such as sharing in the sales of their traditional lands to settlers.

“It would have paid for itself,” Christie said. “There were other ways of doing this.”

(First Nations in northeastern B.C. are included within Treaty 8, negotiated by the federal government in 1899 to smooth relations during the Klondike gold rush, and extends across 840,000 square kilometres, including northern parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan and southern Northwest Territories.)

Failure to complete the land-claim process in B.C. set the stage for a long period of unresolved aboriginal grievances.

“The province has a poor history, very troubling,” Christie says.

In 1869, B.C. unilaterally denied existence of aboriginal title, claiming aboriginal people were too primitive to understand the concept of land ownership, notes the B.C. Treaty Commission.

The federal government also amended the Indian Act in 1927 to make it illegal for natives to raise money to advance land claims, an amendment lifted in 1951.

Yet aboriginals steadily pushed to have their claims heard.

“First Nations in B.C. are determined to set things right,” Christie continued. “Back in the 1880s, the Nisga’a used to take their canoes down to Victoria. That’s quite a trip.

It shows their determination. That’s not a trip you take lightly.”

The tide of government indifference began to shift in 1973 — but only after natives took their grievances to the courts.

In a case launched by the Nisga’a of the Nass Valley in west-central B.C., the Supreme Court of Canada reversed two lower court decisions and acknowledged for the first time that aboriginal title to the land had existed at the time of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The proclamation stated the Crown must negotiate and sign treaties with the indigenous people before land could be ceded to a colony.

Although the court remained evenly split on whether title still existed or had been extinguished, the decision proved instrumental in the federal government establishing a comprehensive claims process followed by creation of the B.C. Claims Task Force in 1991 and the signing of the B.C. Treaty Commission Agreement in 1992.

Six years later, in 1998, the Nisga’a signed B.C.’s first modern treaty.

(The treaty process is currently in doubt since Premier Christy Clark in March dismissed former cabinet minister George Abbott just before he began his job as head of the B.C. Treaty Commission, saying she wanted the treaty process to go in a different direction. The process has cost $600 million and achieved only four treaties in 22 years, not including Nisga’a.)