Whose land lies along the only road running north along the east side of Lake Winnipeg and past Bloodvein First Nation?

It is provincial Crown land, administered by Manitoba for the public, subject to treaty and other legal rights. Bloodvein Chief Lisa Young has acted as though it were hers to close. For a second hunting season, her checkstop on this important provincial road, 20 kilometres south of the reserve, has turned back licensed hunters bound for unoccupied Crown land. The Manitoba Wildlife Federation has five such reports this season.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has praised the measure as responsible governance. Last year Grand Chief Kyra Wilson went further and told the province it had no right to issue hunting licences in First Nations’ traditional territories.

That claim sits at the heart of the dispute, and the law does not support it.

Bloodvein is a Treaty 5 nation, and the treaty contains a hunting promise. The 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreement reshaped that promise province-wide: First Nations people may hunt for food at all seasons on unoccupied Crown land, while provincial game laws otherwise apply. The Supreme Court examined that language in Badger (1996). The right is constitutionally protected, and it is a right to harvest, conferring no control over passage or land use.

The court has drawn that line repeatedly. Sparrow (1990) gives Aboriginal harvesting priority after conservation, with the Crown remaining the regulator. Grassy Narrows (2014) confirms that a province may take up and manage treaty lands, subject to its duty to consult. A right to exclude others flows from Aboriginal title, and title must be proven. Bloodvein has proven no title along Rice River Road.

Nor did last year’s court case give it one. In November 2025, the Court of King’s Bench dismissed the wildlife federation’s application to halt the checkstop. Bloodvein said the stop intercepted drugs and alcohol, and Chief Young, through counsel, undertook to let licensed hunters pass if they complied. The court let the checkstop stand on that footing and granted no right to exclude hunters. This season’s refusals break the undertaking it heard.

Premier Wab Kinew put it plainly on Friday: treaties are about sharing the land. The province sent Bloodvein a cease-and-desist letter on Sept. 19.

None of this dismisses the worries of a people who hunt to eat. Bloodvein’s traditional territory reaches across the lake into the Interlake, where the province’s 2024 survey found moose critically low in game hunting areas 21 and 21A. In nearby game hunting area 17A, the same survey estimated 462 moose, with a 90 per cent confidence interval of 359 to 673, and found the population stable since 2000.

The lawful remedy exists, and Manitoba has used it. Bloodvein can press the province for better surveys and tighter licence allocations, and can challenge decisions that infringe its protected harvesting rights. Last season the province restricted licensed hunting within 500-metre buffers along the road and the river; it did not close the road to travel. Other northern nations have simply asked hunters to stay away. Persuasion is governance; a roadblock asserts a jurisdiction its builders do not possess.

The precedent extends beyond moose. Trappers, anglers and outfitters use that road, and so do members of other First Nations, whose right to hunt for food on unoccupied Crown land does not end at a checkpoint Bloodvein has chosen to staff. If a band council can close a public road on land it does not own, what stops other groups? A checkstop that decides who may pass makes its operators the arbiters of everyone’s rights, answerable to none of them.

Premier Kinew warned that the checkstop risks a backlash against Indigenous people who had nothing to do with it. He is right to worry. The surest way to prevent it is to restore the principle before resentment fills the vacuum: open the road, count the moose, and let the authority that answers to every Manitoban allocate the harvest under expert assessment and law.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the vice-president of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.