Mi'kmaq land claims and the escheat movement in Prince Edward Island.

• Date: 01 January 2006
• Author: Bittermann, Rusty

Recent decisions on Mi'kmaq and Maliseet rights to resources in the Maritimes have underlined the potential for conflict between different groups of peoples who rely upon the harvests of land and sea for a livelihood. (1) Given the economic and cultural issues at stake, the strident rhetoric and, in some cases violence, should not have been a surprise, but they were not inevitable. There have been times in the past when rural leaders have thought in terms of the shared problems of those deriving a living from natural resources and of comprehensive solutions that might address the needs of them all.

In the spring of 1838, William Cooper made his way from his lodgings in East London to the Colonial Office. He had arrived in London from Prince Edward Island several days earlier, carrying a thick bundle of papers concerning property rights and the distribution of land on Prince Edward Island, which he presented to the officials responsible for Britain's colonies. (2) He also carried with him the hopes of much of the rural population of Prince Edward Island, as he had come to London charged with persuading the Imperial government to reconsider policies that permitted a relatively small number of landlords, some resident on Prince Edward Island, some in Britain, and a few elsewhere, to control four-fifths of the land in the colony. Indeed, an 1830 survey of landlord holdings showed that the six largest landlord estates included more than a third of the land on the Island. (3)

Although Cooper was a member of the House of Assembly, he did not represent the majority of the House at this time. Instead, he had come to London as the representative of a grassroots rural protest movement now known as the Escheat movement. The name reflects a central claim of the movement: that the grants of land that the British had issued were vulnerable to escheat, i.e., to resumption by the Crown. The British had acquired Prince Edward Island from the French by the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, and quickly moved to transfer most of the Island land into private ownership, with grants of large parcels of around 20,000 acres, subject to settlement conditions. Grant holders failed to meet these conditions and this weakness in their titles provided the Escheat movement with a basis for arguing that the state could (and should) reconsider the distribution of land on the Island and act to secure property in the hands of those who lived on the land and directly derived their livelihood from it. The movement Cooper represented had been growing in power across the 1830s; it gained a majority in the House of Assembly in the fall of 1838, following Cooper's return from London. (4)

Most of those supporting Cooper's mission were immigrants from the British Isles, or descendants of people who had migrated from the British Isles, some in the decades after the Seven Years' War, most in the early 19th century. Many were, in one fashion or another, refugees from transformations of the countryside of Scotland, Ireland and England...