(File photo/meadowlakeNOW staff)

By Kenneth Cheung

RAILWAY CLAIM

Ottawa settles 93-year-old land dispute with Flying Dust First Nation

Apr 22, 2025 | 2:37 PM

Nearly a century after land was taken for a railway line, Flying Dust First Nation reached a $30-million settlement with Ottawa — including $10,000 for every band member — in what the chief calls a long-overdue step toward reconciliation.

The agreement was finalized in March 2025, when the Minister of Crown–Indigenous Relations signed off on the settlement. Canada has until May 5 to deposit the compensation into the First Nation’s trust account, with payments to members expected by the end of the month.

Chief Tyson Bear said the settlement not only provides direct compensation to community members but also includes a $3 million investment toward future land acquisition under the Treaty Land Entitlement (TLE) framework.

“I could have paid it all out, but we didn’t want to. We wanted to make sure that the land and opportunities will carry on for generations,” Bear said.

“One thing we do as leadership is to make sure that any of the decisions we make carry on further than we can see.”

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The settlement brings closure to a grievance dating back to 1932, when the federal government took a 214-acre strip from the Flying Dust reserve to build a railway line. The land had been granted to the Nation under Treaty 6 after it relocated from the Green Lake area around 1900.

“They took 214 acres of land,” Bear said. “It was easier to just take land from First Nations people.”

Chief Tyson Bear of Flying Dust First Nation. (website/ Flying Dust First Nation)

According to Bear, officials at the time gave a small sum to the chief to sign expropriation papers — a transaction he described as “borderline bribery.” Though the land was intended for public infrastructure, it remained unused for years and was never returned to the nation.

Community members saw the act as a betrayal of treaty promises and part of a broader pattern of colonial dispossession.

“It was just another process… if they could have, they could have put it on the other side,” Bear said, noting that the government at the time could have routed the railway elsewhere, but chose to cut through the reserve instead.

The push to reclaim the land began in the mid-1980s under the leadership of then-chief Richard Gladue, who placed a caveat on the title and initiated legal steps to pursue redress.

“He was just a young chief back in the day… anywhere from ’86 to ’87 he started getting involved in the claim,” Bear said.

The official specific claim was filed in 1993 and slowly worked its way through Canada’s complex claims process. For years, progress stalled.

“They just weren’t making time for it. It wasn’t a priority,” Bear said. “It was just a lack of acknowledgement on Canada’s part of the government in general that was in leadership at the time to admit to their mistakes.”

A shift came in the mid-2010s when a new federal government signalled greater willingness to resolve long-standing Indigenous claims. Bear, now in his third year as chief and having served eight years as a councillor, was in leadership when the final agreement was signed.

“It’s a big note on reconciliation,” he said. “We talked about it — all the stuff that the people went through… being moved and put on reserves and the past system and the residential schools and the Sixties Scoop and the starvation and all that stuff.”

The Sixties Scoop refers to the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities during the 1960s, placing them in mostly non-Indigenous, middle-class homes across North America.

Canada’s specific claims policy, established in the 1970s, allows First Nations to seek compensation when treaty obligations were breached or reserve lands were unfairly taken.

The 2025 Flying Dust settlement joins a growing list of resolved claims across the country, part of what Ottawa describes as a broader effort to confront its colonial legacy and advance reconciliation.

Bear emphasized that while current members will benefit from the compensation, many elders who endured hardship and injustice never got to see this day.

“There’s been generations of people that have lost out on the opportunity… they’re not here to benefit from it,” he said.

Beyond individual compensation, Bear said the Nation is focused on restoring its land base through the TLE process, a mechanism developed in Saskatchewan to fulfill historical shortfalls in treaty land allocations. Flying Dust will use a portion of the settlement to purchase new land that can be added to the reserve.

“This is just one of the things, you know, when you talk about reconciliation,” Bear said.

“We know we’re benefiting from the claim right now today and my people, but there’s been generations of people that have lost out the opportunity, elders that went through tough times and starvation and… the residential school systems… they’re not here to benefit from it.”

Reflecting on decades of advocacy by leaders like Chief Gladue, who Bear said “spent 30-some years on the file” — he called the settlement both an achievement and a responsibility.

“When I make decisions, I think about the future and I think about the elders that had lost these opportunities,” he said.

Bear added he’s hopeful the provincial government will follow the federal example in supporting reconciliation through concrete policy change.

“I really like to acknowledge the [federal] government for making it right,” he said. “Reconciliation is slowly, possibly coming back in a lot of ways.”

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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com