deals from the early years of colonial settlement that were found to be inconclusive.

There’s also the fact that much of the land in question — north of Lake Ontario, roughly between Lake Simcoe and the Ottawa River — was already being developed by settlers, who by the early 20th century had built homes, mines and lumber mills on land that the Chippewas and Mississaugas had never agreed to relinquish.

“They’re one set of historic treaties that were signed very late,” said Jessica Orkin, a partner at Goldblatt Partners who specializes in Aboriginal law.

“When they got around to it in 1923, the land had already been used for a long time and there was people (living) on it.”

This was in violation of 1763 Royal Proclamation, a foundational tenet of Britishcolonialism in North America that required agreement from Indigenous peoples in exchange for European settlement of their land, said Dan Shaule, an in-house historian with Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP, a Toronto-based firm that specializes in Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

Shaule explained that, while some treaties in the area were signed before Confederation, leaders from the First Nations tried repeatedly over several decades to start negotiations with the Crown for the unceded territory. But the provincial and federal governments were reticent to address the issue because of disagreement over who would compensate the groups for the land, he said.

“Generation after generation, they’re just turned away,” he said.

In 1916, the federal Justice Department learned that some pre-Confederation treaties were problematic, prompting Ottawa and Ontario to address the unceded territory and questionable