In 1784 the Crown bought land from the Mississaugas and gave it to the Mohawk who had kept faith through the Revolution — six miles deep on each side of the Grand River, from the mouth to the source — for them and their posterity, to enjoy for ever.
No government has ever produced a document showing when that promise ended. Asked in the British Parliament in 1922 to name the date it was denounced, Winston Churchill could not. Nobody has since.
In April 2026, Ontario’s Director of Land Registry Services — having consulted the Director of Titles — confirmed in writing that an interest of this kind is “not registrable under Ontario’s Land Titles system,” while stating that the province offered “no opinion on the validity of any claim.”
Not denied. Not extinguished. Just unrecordable.
That admission is not this project’s problem. It is the reason for the application now before the Divisional Court.
What is being asked
Not that anyone leave their land. Not a dollar in compensation — no monetary relief of any kind is sought. Not a ruling today on who holds what, or how far it runs.
One thing: that the officer who keeps the register be required to consider and determine a request to note that an interest is asserted, and that its absence from the register is not proof it does not exist.
A notation. That is the whole of it.
Asking a register to record something is the opposite of asserting a right on disputed ground. The point is to move the question into the one place equipped to answer it.
If you own land here
None of this is aimed at you. The defect is in the Crown’s chain of title, and it reaches every owner alike. You were told by the province’s own register that your title was clean.
You are the second person this failure happened to — not the cause of it.
Why “acquired”
This is not a claim resting on occupation before the Crown arrived. The Mohawk were brought to the Grand River by the Crown, in payment of a debt of honour, onto land the Crown had purchased for that purpose.
Canada says so itself. Its published position is that the Haldimand Proclamation “is not a treaty and did not set aside or create an obligation to establish a reserve,” and that the lands came from a treaty made with the Mississaugas in 1784.
If it is not a treaty, no right under it is a treaty right. If it created no reserve, the Indian Act has nothing to attach to. What remains is a Crown instrument dedicating purchased land to a named people — which is what section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867 preserves.
Acquired, not reserved. The word is the Crown’s.
It is also the word international law uses.
Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples protects two different things. It covers lands Indigenous peoples have “traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used” — the familiar ground of most land claims. But it also covers, separately and expressly, lands “which they have otherwise acquired.”
That second category is not an afterthought. It exists for exactly this situation — where a people holds land not because they were always there, but because it was given to them.
And Article 26(3) says what follows: states “shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources.”
Legal recognition. Not consultation, not sympathy, not an acknowledgment read at the start of a meeting. Recognition of the kind a person can find when they search a register.
Canada endorsed the Declaration without qualification in 2016 and gave it statutory footing in 2021. That December the Prime Minister directed every minister of the Crown, in writing, to implement it.
Not one has ever been directed to do anything about the instrument by which these particular lands were acquired.
The book
Acquired Territory — 25 chapters, roughly 105,000 words. The public companion to a sworn affidavit of 205 paragraphs and 134 exhibits, tracking it chapter by chapter so the two can be read side by side.
Two chapters argue the Crown’s case at full strength — including the authorities that have gone against Indigenous claimants in Ontario — before answering them.
Every page carries one sentence in the lower margin distilling that page’s point. You can read the book from the footers alone.