Vanished: The Impact of the Sixties Scoop on Indigenous Kinship Systems
Dominga Robinson
Accepting Different Understandings of Kinship: A Reflection on Mohawk Kinship Perspectives
Brandon Bonspiel
A Consideration of R v. Desautel and the Potential of Sheltering
Josh Favel and Leslie Anne St. Amour
Learning Wahkohtowin through Wahkohtowin: Reflections on Relational Indigenous Law Learning from the Wahkohtowin Intensive Course
Hadley Friedland and Casey Caines
Indigenous Taino People Exist—And So Do Their Kinship Laws: Nurturing Future Generations by Honouring Ancestral Legacies
Erica Neeganagwedgin
Mayan Women Today
Laura Morales
Retracing, Reclaiming, and Rebuilding Family Roots
Lindy Lemay and Kaelyn Macaulay
Terry Beaulieu
leTTer from The ediTors
This volume of Rooted centres and extends from kinship, a foundational legal principle in many Indigenous legal orders. Kinship often includes both intimate personal relationships and a broader web of connections encompassing place, the non-human world, and the entirety of creation. Perhaps it goes without saying, but this volume was compiled during what feels like a particularly bleak historical moment. International conflicts continue to erupt and spin out of control; corporate greed, empowered by complicit Western legal structures, continues to fan the flames of the climate crisis; and closer to home, cost of living across Canada continues to skyrocket.
Kinship represents a distinct paradigm, rooted in obligations and relationships rather than an assumption of adversarial postures. This issue’s contributors highlight the meaning kinship holds for their communities, peoples, and nations in maintaining and restoring (good) relations.
Kinship is the foundation, the living practice of shared connection, reciprocity, and the capacity to change. Hadley Friedland and Casey Caines reflect that learning Indigenous laws starts with learning from each other, and Laura Morales’s visual art grounds us in the depth of relational ties and touch. Similarly, Erica Neeganagwedgin outlines the constitutional structure of kinship in Taíno law, encompassing land and ancestors.
The resurgence of laws founded in kinship are also acts of resistance. Settler-colonial institutions have targeted and continue to target kinship systems: residential schools, child “protection” systems, and other assimilative schemes were designed to disrupt and fracture ties between peoples, animals, and land. The Canadian legal system, which effected and enforced these schemes, continues to struggle to conceptualize kinship. Brandon Bonspiel highlights the knowledge gap between Canadian law’s ignorance of Indigenous relationality in Bill C-92’s child placement scheme and the specific living protocols of the Mohawk nation. Through their commentary on R v. Desautel, Josh Favel and Leslie Anne St. Amour imagine the ways in which settler law could be stretched, shaped, and moulded to support kinship relations.
A return to living according to kinship principles often involves consciously reclaiming and grappling with the identities that were broken and artificially reconstructed by Canadian law. With a multi-generational lens, Lindy Lemay and Kaelyn McCaulay reflect on their own experience of revitalizing kinship in Indigenous-led but federally recognized Métis institutions. Terry Beaulieu recounts his journey towards a fuller understanding of his own Métisness, reminding us that kinship responds fluidly to specific contexts and dynamics.
Dominga Robinson begins with a personal reflection on the impacts of the Sixties Scoop and concludes with a call to action that seems especially pertinent following the cautious optimism around the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to uphold Bill C-92’s constitutionality: to scrutinize the true rationale behind Canadian laws.
We are enormously grateful to our contributors for their time, labour, and insight. We thank our Advisory Council (Kirsten Anker, Hadley Friedland, Sákéj Henderson, and Larissa Parker) for their guidance and support. This issue would not have been possible without the time and effort of our Associate Editors. We are endlessly grateful to Isabelle Zwicker for the cover art. Finally, we are thankful for the financial support of the Students’ Society of McGill University’s Equity Fund, which allows us to distribute honorariums and gifts to our contributors.
Thank you,
Eric, Kasia, Julia, Chloe, Clara
Vanished: The impaCT of The sixTies sCoop on indigenous Kinship sysTems
By Dominga Robinson
Dominga Robinson is a Nakota/Jamaican woman from the Pheasant Rump Nakota First Nations in Treaty 4. She is currently a 3L student at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law. Dominga is a dedicated and passionate individual with a goal of supporting Indigenous Peoples and communities. Her journey is characterized by her strong commitment to various roles, from her current position as President of the Indigenous Law Student Association to other volunteer work with organizations like the Pro Bono Law Students Association, the Rainbow Youth Centre, and Law Students Association’s Anti-Racism Task Force Committee.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Dominga actively engages in public speaking and moderation roles at prestigious events and conferences. As a Guest Speaker, Panelist, Moderator, Guest Lecturer, Student Host, and Facilitator, she has consistently demonstrated her ability to inspire and lead. Dominga is an adept public speaker and facilitator, with a track record of engaging audiences both inperson and online.
Dominga has a knack for legal research, client consultation, and project coordination, as well as a proven ability to lead and communicate effectively. Her extensive experience in nonprofit leadership and funding consultation underscores her commitment to community consultation and planning. Dominga’s involvement in numerous workshops and her role as a Teaching Assistant for the 1L Kwayestastatowin for the past two years, underline her dedication to helping others understand complex and sensitive subjects. Dominga remains grounded and focused on her goal of making a positive impact on Indigenous communities through legal practice. Since October 2022, Dominga has worked at Sunchild Law, a firm whose primary focus is supporting Indigenous people and communities.
Sixties Scoop: How
did we get here?
The year is 1960. The location is the White Bear Reserve in the southeast corner of the Treaty 4 territory in the area now labelled as Saskatchewan. A 4-year-old Nakota girl, who was orphaned the year before, lives happily with her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They don’t have much, but they get by. They are happy, healthy, and together. One day, a social worker comes to their small house on the reserve, accompanied by the RCMP. They inform the grandparents that they will be taking the 4-year-old child to live with a white family in a nearby town because the family did not have the financial means to care for her properly. There is no discussion with the grandparents. There is no fight. They are terrified of the RCMP. There are only tears and broken hearts. The young child is taken and never lives with her family again. She simply vanished from their lives for close to thirty years.
Sounds like a nightmare, right? Well, sadly this is a common story for thousands of children and families across North America.
This is the story of the Sixties Scoop. This story was my own mother’s experience. I am an intergenerational survivor of that trauma. The Sixties Scoop describes the policy of taking Indigenous children from their families without consent and adopting or fostering them in non-Indigenous families.1 This policy was sanctioned by the Federal government under the Constitution Act, 1867. 2 It was policy enacted by provincial child welfare and protection services and supported by powers of the RCMP.
Beginning in the 1950s and stretching into
the mid-1990s, First Nations children were taken from their families and placed in nonIndigenous homes at extremely high rates.3 One in three children were apprehended and 70% of those children were relocated to nonIndigenous homes.4 These removals occurred without full family or community consent and were enforced through legal authority.5 Disguised as child welfare measures, these actions, upon closer examination, reveal a governmental paternalistic assimilation tactic targeting children and families.6 The goal being to oppress First Nations communities to facilitate stealing land and resources. Emerging as a refined approach following in the wake of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop was a government-endorsed, legally upheld method, designed to disrupt Indigenous kinship systems—a pure and heinous manifestation of systemic racism.
Compared to residential schools, the government’s Sixties Scoop assimilation tactic and its impact on Indigenous communities lack widespread awareness.7 Its ongoing repercussions are evident in survivors who have trust and abandonment issues, struggles with addiction, and are disconnected from their culture, language, family, and community. Survivors were frequently physically, sexually, mentally, and emotionally abused.
My worldview has been deeply shaped by my mother’s experiences. Her perspective was profoundly influenced by the rupture in her kinship bonds due to colonial governments and their legal system. I am acutely aware of the harm that ensues when the law is used to dismantle family structures based solely on race—I am a product of that interference.
When my mother was taken, she was thankfully old enough to remember where she came from, and her birth family was acquainted
with her foster family, so they were able to keep an eye on her from a distance. In that regard, she was among the fortunate ones, if you can call it that. Many were taken as infants and had no memories of who or where they came from. Social services actively worked to prevent reunification.8
Because my mother could remember where she was from, she would ride her bike the 40 kilometres back to the community to visit. I was told stories of how my mother, at the age of ten, would show up unexpectedly at my great grandparents’ home on White Bear. She would spend the day with the family, but they would inevitably have to send her back by day’s end. My mother would plead and weep to stay, a heart-wrenching scene for the family. They missed her and wished she could stay, but recognized they held no legal rights to her custody. The genuine threat of the RCMP arresting them on kidnapping if she remained at the home too long was all too real. Even if they had had the financial means, the Indian Act restricted First Nations from retaining legal representation until 1951.9 The barriers were tangible and my great grandparents lacked the resources to challenge the system to retain her custody.
Once a child was apprehended, the likelihood of their return home was exceedingly low.10 They were placed in predominantly white middle-class homes across North America, and sometimes even as far away as Europe. The Sixties Scoop saw an estimated 20,000 children removed from their homes and communities.11 This was done to children across the country – from newborns being taken from their mothers immediately following birth to teenagers, Indigenous children were targeted and removed from their families. These children were placed in environments that were completely foreign to them, and they were forced to assimilate. Unlike residential schools, they did not return home in the summer. They were not surrounded by others who were experiencing the same abuse.12 They were completely isolated. They had no opportunity to learn their culture for other children or connect to their families. They were conditioned to believe that their families were inadequate and unable to care for them or that their families just did not want them. The impacts were lasting. Individuals who endured the Sixties Scoop often grapple with issues of trust,
KaThleen mCarThur a few monThs before apprehension (my mom).
abandonment, addiction, difficulties in forming healthy relationships, and a pervasive sense of isolation in the world, leading to psychiatric issues, suicide, and other mental health issues.13
My mother grew up as the sole Indigenous individual in that small town. She expressed feelings of isolation, loneliness, and a perpetual sense of not fitting in. As an Indigenous child with darker skin and black hair, she stood out in the predominantly white community and had to confront racism on a regular basis. She never experienced genuine acceptance as a part of the family or the community. Eventually, at the age of 15, she decided to run away. She wandered around North America trying to find a place where she belonged. She never found that place out there in the world but gave birth to me during that journey.
In her thirties, my mother finally began her return to the reserve with me in tow. I watched as she struggled with her identity during this time. She had spent her life fruitlessly working to be accepted by her white foster family, but she never felt that sense of acceptance. Conversely, while some of her relatives on the reserve remembered her, their bonds lacked the depth of growing up and living together as a close-knit family. There were no shared childhood memories or experiences. The struggle to belong persisted.
Initially, my mother lacked understanding of her Indigenous identity and struggled to reconnect culturally. Her foster family opposed her desire to embrace her heritage, failing to comprehend her choice, given the option of assimilation into a respectable white family. They were hurt that she was not simply grateful for them saving her. This difference of viewpoints eventually led to the erosion of her relationship with most of
her foster family. Consequently, the people I had grown up with as aunts, uncles, and cousins are now no longer a part of my life either. Through this process and during this time, we struggled to connect to either family.
Thankfully her Indigenous family welcomed her with open arms. They did their best to re-establish their kinship ties and to teach her the culture. She still struggled with her identity but took every opportunity she could to learn and live as an Indigenous woman. I am proud to say that she was successful in her endeavours to reconnect. Towards the end of her life, she had forged new connections with the family, participated in traditional ceremonial practices, and contributed to the community. She even became a social worker for the local reserves, working to try to prevent what had happened to her from ever happening to another child. Unfortunately, she had the weight of the law and those who uphold and enforce it working against her in achieving that goal.
Upon her passing, it was her Indigenous family who stood by her, bidding her farewell as she transitioned to the next realm. They cherished her, just as they would any other family member. I consider myself fortunate to have accompanied her on her journey of homecoming and discovery. She ensured that my sister and I were well aware of our origins and the true identity of our family. Our family loves us, and we love them. It is not perfect, but we are lucky to have reconnected with our family.
Current Issues with Child
Protection
Through residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and now the Millennium Scoop, the
government has used the law to intrude upon Indigenous children and families for over a century.14 In recent years, the federal government began to withdraw from this intrusion by implementing Bill C-92 - An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth, and families. 15 Bill C-92 is a federal Act that affirms the rights of Indigenous people to establish their own child and family services, rather than granting the provinces exclusive authority over these matters.16 This move was met with resistance by some of the provinces who challenged the constitutionality of Bill C-92 at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Bill C-92, born out of a commitment to reconciliation and acknowledgment of the damages resulting from governmentdriven child welfare and protection policies, granted Indigenous Nations jurisdiction over their own children through selfgovernance.17 This development prompted the province of Quebec to effectively, cloaked under labyrinthine legalese, challenge the notion of whether Indigenous people possess an Aboriginal right under section 35 of the Constitution Act to care for their children.18 It is distressing to have the basic right to care for one’s own children questioned in such a way and it underscores the historically paternalistic outlook and attitudes that Canada and the provinces have maintained toward Indigenous families since the inception of the Indian Act. 19
As we await the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the constitutionality of Bill C-92, my wish is that the legal profession
begins to recognize legal issues like this for what they really are: systemic racism. No other ethnic group in this country must fight with the government to protect their children from wide-spread apprehension and assimilation tactics. Any other attempts to take children from their families in this manner would be met with wide-spread outrage and criticism. Yet, the plight of Indigenous families in these situations is accepted as common and acceptable.
My intention in writing this article is for people who are either entering the legal profession or currently working in the field to recognize that not all laws are made to protect people—nor are all laws just. Canada has a long history of using the law as a weapon to oppress Indigenous people and other people of colour. As professionals working to uphold the law, critical thought regarding the true rationale behind those laws is imperative. Compliance with laws meant to oppress people based on race, sexual orientation, gender, or any other protected human right only contributes to the problem. It all starts with awareness of the impacts of the laws and people with power being brave enough to challenge them as patently unfair. Blind acceptance of unhealthy, oppressive laws works to support a legal system riddled with systemic racism. So, please be careful and aware of the potential harm the law may be causing. If the legal community continues this path of upholding law without any question, the future of all the peoples living on Turtle Island can never truly be harmonious or reconciled.
ENDNOTES:
1. See e.g. Raven Sinclair, “Identity lost and found: Lessons from the sixties scoop” (2007) 3:1 First Peoples Child & Family Rev 65 at 65-66.
2. Constitution Act, 1867 (UK), 30 & 31 Vict, c 3, s 91(24), reprinted in RSC 1985, Appendix II, No 5.
3. Sinclair, supra note 1 at 66.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Dale C Spencer, “Extraction and pulverization: a narrative analysis of Canada scoop survivors” (2017) 7:1 Settler Colonial Studies 57 at 58.
7. Sinclair, supra note 1 at 65-66.
8. Suzanne Fournier & Ernie Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997) at 81.
9. Indian Act, 1951, c 29, s 141, as amended by Indian Act, RSC 1985, c I-5.
10. Christine Davies, “Native Children and the Child Welfare System in Canada” (1992) 30:4 Alta L Rev 1200 at 1207.
11. National Film Board, “Tasha Hubbard - Birth of a Family” (2017) at 00h:00m:26s, online: <www.nfb. ca/film/birth_of_a_family/>.
12. Fournier & Cray, supra note 8 at 81.
13. Sarah Wright Cardinal, Beyond the sixties scoop: reclaiming indigenous identity, reconnection to place, and reframing understandings of being indigenous (PhD Dissertation, University of Victoria, 2018) [unpublished].
14. Kirsten Douglas, “Assimilation through Canadian Child Welfare Policy” (2022) 5:2 Soc Work & Pol'y Studies at 2.
15. An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, SC 2019, c 24.
16. Ibid
17. Reference to the Court of Appeal of Quebec relating to the Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, 2022 QCCA 185.
18. Constitution, supra note 2.
19. Davies, supra note 10.
aCCepTing differenT undersTandings of Kinship: a refleCTion on mohawK Kinship perspeCTiVes
By Brandon Bonspiel
Brandon Bonspiel—a Mohawk from Kanehsatake—is currently making strides in his third year of Law school at McGill University. Before law, Brandon earned his bachelor’s degree in political science, accompanied by a minor in Law & Society from Concordia University. His commitment to community service is evident through his role as a board member at First Nations Paramedics, an ambulance company servicing his home territory. Currently, Brandon is refining his legal expertise at the Law office of Fasken in Montréal. A consistent thread weaving through his academic and professional journey is his dedication to approaching law from an indigenous perspective.
People inherently crave a sense of connection and belonging within a community. Although a community’s composition may take various forms dictated by specific constructs, I argue that kinship persistently remains the underlying theme. According to Marshall Sahlins, kinship is “‘the mutuality of being’: kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another.”1 It is my understanding that kinfolk share values and culture, easing cooperation within a community. I will expand on this idea by reflecting on my Mohawk interpretation of kinship.
I was born and raised in the Mohawk community of Kanehsatake, located 45 minutes west of the city of Montréal. From a young age, I was introduced to numerous forms of kinship. I played on the local lacrosse team as a child, went to elementary school in the community, attended community events, and so on. Put simply, I was and remain an active member of my community. I may not have realized it when I was younger, but the Mohawk nation actively promotes a strong sense of kinship in numerous forms. During my childhood, it was not uncommon to enjoy lunch or supper at a friend or relative’s house, nor was it uncommon to welcome friends and family over to our home regularly. Today, with some reflection, I notice and appreciate the strong sense of community Kanehsatake demonstrates. Members of the community are encouraged to help raise all Kanehsata’kehró:non children. This practice widens the conventional structure of a family to include members of the community more broadly.
Mohawk culture is organized in a clan structure, with community members belonging to one of three clans. Depending
on your clan, you have specific duties and responsibilities to the community at large. Members of a clan are considered to be relatives to all other members of that clan, strengthening the notion of kinship within the community. This perspective is innate to all Mohawks, myself included.
We are taught to always consider the coming seven generations. This principle highlights the crucial importance of considering the effects of decisions made today on the coming seven generations of tomorrow.2 This principle also teaches us about the significance of prioritizing our kinfolk over ourselves. As a Mohawk man, I believe strongly in this conceptualization of kinship and will continue to live harmoniously with it. I understand that other cultures may differ from my own, and I do not wish to change them. However, this opinion is not shared by everyone. I was reminded of this reality while interning at the Akwesasne Justice Department during the summer of 2022.
I was fortunate enough to be selected as part of the McGill Faculty of Law’s International Human Rights Internships Program and placed at Akwesasne’s Justice Department. Akwesasne is one of Kanehsatake’s sister communities. I have plenty of friends and family residing there, which eased my transition to the community. During my time at the Justice Department, I was tasked with numerous exciting and challenging mandates, but none intrigued me more than the creation of a Child Rights and Responsibility Law. In my very first summer of law school, I was being given the opportunity of a lifetime; I was contributing towards developing legislation and I was able to do so with my people. This was a perfect intersection between my professional ambitions and my personal values. As expected, a strong
sense of kinship was present. My colleagues at the Justice Department treated me well, inviting me to numerous longhouse rituals, community events, and even family suppers. Even though I was not in Kanehsatake, I felt at home in Akwesasne. This was precisely a product of Mohawk kinship. Regrettably, this approach was challenged when developing the legislation.
Creating the Child Rights and Responsibility Law was made possible by the enactment of Bill C-92: An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth, and families. 3 The Act sets out the framework for Indigenous nations in Canada to create their own child welfare service legislation. While creating the Akwesasne Child Rights &
an adult belonging to the same Indigenous groups; 4. with an adult belonging to any Indigenous group; and finally, 5. with any other adult, Indigenous or not.4
Although this order may seem to be reasonable to most, the issue lies not in the order of placement, but in the fact that a generalized order exists at all. For numerous Indigenous communities, especially the Mohawk, respecting the order set forth in the Act would counter inherent values of kinship. The Mohawk nation is matriarchal and does not operate in a way that would make the pre-established order possible. For instance, children are part of the same clan as their mother unless they are adopted into another clan. If children are to be removed
“I hope that one day the Mohawk vision of kinship will be respected in a way that enables the nation to thrive on their own terms.”
Responsibility Law, the Justice Department had no choice but to respect the guidelines set forth in C-92. Compliance was and still is mandatory if an Indigenous community wishes to enact its own legislation. My mandate focused on analyzing the entirety of the Act and then summarizing it for the community.
The Mohawk notion of kinship is challenged by section 16 of the Act. The article sets a priority placement order if ever an Indigenous child needs to be removed from a home and placed into the custody of someone else. The order laid out by the Act is the following: 1. with one of the child’s parents; 2. with another adult family member; 3. with
from their home, they must remain within the mother’s side of the family. Although an exact placement order does not exist, it would more than likely resemble the following: 1. with the mother; 2. with the mother’s mother; 3. with the mother’s sister; 4. with the father’s mother, 5. with the father’s sister, and so on. It is important to note that before determining any of these steps, it is usually the responsibility of both family elders and community elders to decide what is in the best interest of the child. Even though this order is more representative of Mohawk values, it cannot be included as part of a developing legislation since it does not coordinate with the order established within the Act. For these reasons, the
compulsory priority placement order established by section 16 is controversial.
The Act’s somewhat controversial nature amplifies when we consider its underlying purpose, which is to promote Indigenous self-governance. The guidelines of the Act –including section 16 – must be respected if an Indigenous community wishes to enact their own family services law. Unfortunately, for many nations this means that if a community desires to develop its own Law, it must also to an extent abandon part of its values. A matriarchal nation like the Mohawk, would have to forfeit their ideals in order to practice self-governance. The matriarchal structure is fundamental to the nation: forfeiting this way of life is simply not an option. The Akwesasne Child Rights and Responsibility Law has yet to be passed, but
ENDNOTES:
one thing is certain: it will more than likely reflect the true Mohawk values of kinship.
Kinship has many different meanings and interpretations. The Mohawk see kinship as a cultural principle, while non-Indigenous government authorities may see kinship simply as a biological principle. Regardless of divergent perspectives, we must focus on honouring and respecting all views on kinship. By allowing the Mohawk nation to set their own priority placement order, Canada would reinforce the acceptance of diverse kinship systems, honouring Indigenous communities’ right to govern themselves according to their own values. I hope that one day the Mohawk vision of kinship will be respected in a way that enables the nation to thrive on their own terms.
1. Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is-And Is Not (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) at ix.
2. Kayanesenh Paul Williams, Kayanerenkó:wa The Great Law of Peace (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018) at 357.
3. SC 2019, c 24 [Bill C-92].
4. Ibid, s 16(1).
a ConsideraTion of R v Desautel and The poTenTial of shelTering
By Josh Favel and Leslie Anne St. Amour
Josh Favel (he/him) is a member of Poundmaker Cree Nation. He pursued his studies in classics and philosophy at the University of British Columbia before obtaining his JD from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law. Following his experience practicing law with a national firm, Josh continued his education at the University of Cambridge as a Paul Martin Sr. Scholar, earning his Master of Law degree. Currently, Josh serves as a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Law.
Leslie Anne St. Amour (she/her) is a member of the Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation, located in Eastern Ontario and of mixed Algonquin and settler heritage. Leslie Anne completed her BA at McGill University in Political Science and a minor in Indigenous Studies, before spending a year as a Pathy Foundation Fellow working in her home community. A lawyer by training, Leslie Anne completed her JD at the University of Toronto and worked in private practice for two years before joining RAVEN as Campaigns Director. When not working, Leslie Anne can be found diving, camping, canoeing, or beading and scheming up her next trip.
Background
In R v. Desautel, 1 the Supreme Court of Canada considered for the first time the scope of the phrase “aboriginal peoples of Canada” within s. 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. 2 Specifically, the Court had to determine whether the phrase was broad enough to include a people whose members were neither Canadian citizens nor residents.3
The question arose in the context of an Aboriginal rights test case brought by Mr. Richard Lee Desautel, a citizen and resident of the United States and member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
In October 2010, after legally crossing the border, Mr. Desautel shot and killed an elk without a hunting licence near Castlegar, British Columbia, contrary to the Wildlife Act. 4 Mr. Desautel advised the British Columbian authorities that he had done so, and he was charged accordingly. Mr. Desautel’s defence at all levels of the proceedings brought against him was that he was exercising an Aboriginal right protected by s. 35(1) to hunt the elk.
As a member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Mr. Desautel was found at trial to be a member of a successor group of the Sinixt people, an Indigenous people whose ancestral territory included land in what is now Canada and the United States.5 The ancestral territory of the Sinixt people, at the time of European contact in 1811, ran southwards from near Kettle Falls in Washington State to north of Revelstoke in British Columbia.6 The location where Mr. Desautel shot the elk was within this ancestral territory.
In the decades after first contact with
Europeans, most of the Sinixt moved southwards out of the northern portion of their ancestral territory.7 A small number of the Sinixt remained on an Indian reserve in what is now British Columbia, but by 1930 there was only one person listed on the membership rolls of the band. Following her death in 1956, the government of Canada declared the band extinct.8 As a result of this declared extinction, the band’s reserve lands reverted to the provincial Crown.9
At trial, Mrozinski J. of the Provincial Court of British Columbia found that the Lakes Tribe remained connected to the northern part of their traditional territory, noting that “the connection to the land was still present in the minds of the members of the Lakes Tribe.”10 He also found that until 1930, members of the Lakes Tribe continued to hunt in British Columbia despite impediments like living in Washington State, the imposition of an international border, and the outlawing of their hunting by British Columbia.11
Mr. Desautel argued that as a member of a successor group to the Sinixt he was entitled to exercise a s. 35(1) right to hunt within the Sinixt’s traditional territory, notwithstanding the fact that he was neither a Canadian citizen nor resident. The Supreme Court of Canada, in a 7-2 decision, agreed with Mr. Desautel. The majority held that the phrase “the aboriginal peoples of Canada” includes all modern-day successors of Indigenous societies that occupied Canadian territory at the time those Indigenous societies made initial contact with Europeans.12
The full implications of Desautel will likely not be felt for some years to come. As a result of the decision, it is now open to Indigenous communities outside of Canada to assert and prove that they are successor groups to the Indigenous societies that occupied
Canadian territory at the time of European contact. If these Indigenous communities can establish that they are successor groups, they may be entitled to benefit from constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights in Canada. Importantly, these Aboriginal rights could include claims to Aboriginal title and could lead to competing title and rights claims with Indigenous communities located in Canada where there is territorial overlap for the rights asserted.
The central issue before the Court was a constitutional question raised by the Crown in Right of British Columbia (the “Crown”). The question asked whether the provisions of the Wildlife Act under which Mr. Desautel was charged were of no force or effect with respect to Mr. Desautel because, as a member of the Lakes Tribe, he was exercising an Aboriginal right protected by s. 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982.
In order to answer the constitutional question, the Court needed to determine first the threshold question of whether an Aboriginal people located outside of Canada, such as the Lakes Tribe, could assert Aboriginal rights.
Majority Reasons
Justice Rowe, writing for the majority, approached the threshold question purposively, in line with the Court’s wellestablished approach to Aboriginal rights.13
Rowe J. identified the two purposes of s. 35(1) as:
i. The recognition of the prior occupation of Canada by organized, autonomous Aboriginal societies; and
ii. The reconciliation of these organized, autonomous societies with the Crown’s assertion of sovereignty over them.14
He noted that these two purposes underlie the test for Aboriginal rights set out in Van der Peet; courts first look back to the historic practices of Aboriginal societies that existed in Canada prior to contact and then recognize those practices as Aboriginal rights held by the modern-day successor of such societies within the Canadian legal order.15
Approaching the threshold question, and distilling the purposes of s. 35(1) in this fashion, Justice Rowe emphasized that the foundation upon which a claim for an Aboriginal right exists is the prior occupation of Canada by Aboriginal societies. Therefore, he concluded that the Aboriginal peoples of Canada under s. 35(1) are the modern successors of those Aboriginal societies that occupied Canadian territory at the time of European contact, and that this may include Aboriginal groups that are now outside of Canada.16
The majority added that an interpretation of “aboriginal peoples of Canada” that includes Aboriginal peoples who occupied what is now Canada when Europeans arrived and who later moved, or were forced to move, or on whom international boundaries were imposed, reflects the purpose of reconciliation.17 Otherwise, the court would risk perpetuating the historical injustices suffered by Aboriginal peoples at the hands of colonizers.18
Additionally, an interpretation that limits the protections that s. 35(1) provides to only those Aboriginal peoples who were located in Canada in 1982 would wrongfully treat s. 35(1) as the source of Aboriginal rights.19
Having settled the threshold question that the Aboriginal peoples of Canada could include Aboriginal groups not located in Canada, Rowe J. turned to consider the constitutional question.
Justice Rowe was cautious to not outline set criteria for determining the successorship of Aboriginal communities within the context of s. 35(1) in the abstract.20 He did however outline some of the challenges in determining successorship. He noted that in determining successorship, consideration would need to be given to the possibility that a community had split over time, that multiple communities had merged from an originator, as well as how the significant factors such as ancestry, language, culture, law, political structure, and territory interplay in connecting a modern community to a historic predecessor.21
In this case, the trial judge had determined, based on the evidence before her, that the Sinixt people had occupied territory in what is now British Columbia and that the Lakes Tribe was a modern successor of the Sinixt.22 Justice Rowe deferred to this factual finding.23 He then considered whether the test for an Aboriginal right should be the same whether the claimant is inside or outside of Canada.
The intervener Attorney General of Canada proposed that in order for an Aboriginal claimant who is not resident of Canada to exercise a s. 35(1) right, the claimant would need to find a connection with a contemporary Aboriginal collective resident in Canada, and obtain recognition and authorization by that collective to exercise the right claimed.24 This proposal was built off of the approach the Court took in Powley with respect to “determining membership in the Métis community in the absence of formalized procedures”25 as well as case law that dealt with whether an Aboriginal
person can exercise treaty rights under a treaty they are not a signatory to, a process that has come to be known as “sheltering.”26
The majority rejected this proposal, holding that it would be unfair to require presentday communities located outside of Canada to not only establish that they are a successor group to an Aboriginal society that existed at the time of European contact, but to also seek the consent and recognition of another Aboriginal community in Canada.27 Adopting the Attorney General of Canada’s proposal would, per Rowe J., create significant practical difficulties, including identifying which Aboriginal group in Canada was the proper one to provide such recognition and what would happen if there was no related modern collective residing in Canada.28 Notably, both of these practical difficulties would have been faced by Mr. Desautel.
Justice Rowe concluded that the test for an Aboriginal right is the same whether the claimant is from an Aboriginal group located inside or outside of Canada.
One issue facing Mr. Desautel was the fact that the Lakes Tribe had not maintained an ongoing presence in the lands over which the Aboriginal right was asserted. Rowe J. noted that continuity has never been a requirement for an Aboriginal right, and that there is no basis for adding it to the test when the claimant is outside of Canada.29
Justice Rowe rejected two avenues of argument made by parties. First, the Crown’s argument that Mr. Desautel’s claim, even if it meets the requirements for establishing an Aboriginal right, should be rejected because its exercise would be incompatible with Canadian sovereignty. His rejection of this argument left undecided the substantive point raised by the Crown.
He noted that the right Mr. Desautel claimed would be solely “incidental.”31
The majority also rejected the Crown’s argument that Mr. Desautel should be recognized as only having common law Aboriginal rights. Rowe J.’s conclusion that Mr. Desautel had a s. 35(1) Aboriginal right to hunt made it unnecessary to further address the common law Aboriginal right argument.32
Justice Rowe concluded that the constitutional question should be answered in the affirmative: the provisions of the Wildlife Act under which Mr. Desautel had been charged should be treated as lacking force and effect in his case.
Sheltering, Indigenous Law, and Kinship
While Justice Rowe rejected the idea that an Indigenous group located outside of Canada could be required to shelter under the rights of an Indigenous group in Canada in order to exercise an Aboriginal right, such an approach is worth further consideration in the context of other Aboriginal rights.
For Indigenous groups outside of Canada whose traditional territory is within Canada but who cannot meet the burden of establishing a s. 35(1) right, sheltering may allow such nations recourse to maintain relationships with neighbouring Indigenous nations, travel along their traditional routes, and engage in some of their traditional practices.
In addition, sheltering provides a prime opportunity to incorporate Indigenous legal traditions into Canadian law in a manner that reconciles Indigenous people not only with the assertion of Crown sovereignty,
but reconciles different Indigenous peoples and their competing rights. The process by which one Indigenous group would seek permission from another to exercise rights on territory demonstrated that the latter group has a recognized right and provides an opportunity for Indigenous laws to be employed. Sheltering, if done in a manner that accords with the laws of the Indigenous nation under whose rights another nation shelters, can be an empowering method through which the ability of Indigenous nations to govern their lands and territories can be recognized in a manner that Canadian sovereignty accommodates.
Indigenous nations have always had laws and protocols that dictated interactions between each other and the boundaries of their territories. This has been recognized in Canadian case law on sheltering. In R v. Meshake, 33 the Court of Appeal for Ontario held that Mr. Meshake, an Indian not party to Treaty 3, was entitled to shelter under Treaty 3 due to his acceptance of a community invitation, originating from his marriage to a member of the Lac Seul First Nation, a Nation part of Treaty 3, to hunt within the territory.34 Through his common law marriage to his spouse and through his practice of hunting with his spouse and her family in accordance with his spouse’s community practice, Mr. Meshake argued that he was within the protection of Treaty 3 against hunting regulations.35 He argued that Treaty 9 includes a “kinship right” that permits him, in certain circumstances, to exercise his Treaty 9 right to hunt outside Treaty 9 territory.36 The Court of Appeal for Ontario did not address this argument, preferring to resolve the appeal on the basis of whether Mr. Meshake could shelter under the rights afforded by Treaty 3 itself.
This decision relied upon an interpretation of Treaty 3 which considered the historical and cultural context of individuals marrying into other nations and engaging in hunting within their new communities.
Similarly, in R v. Shipman, the RobinsonSuperior Treaty right to hunt as the treaty signatories “have heretofore been in the habit of doing” was held to include the sharing of resources between Indigenous nations and the customs of reciprocity around hunting that had existed in Ojibway culture.37 Such customs were held to include granting permission to other First Nation groups who wished to hunt for food purposes within their territory. However, this decision only considered groups within the colonial borders of Canada.
Justice Rowe in Desautel found as a general matter that there would be practical difficulties with adopting a sheltering approach, including identifying which Aboriginal group in Canada was the proper one to provide recognition and what would happen if there was no related modern group residing in Canada.38 Other issues with
ENDNOTES:
1. R v Desautel, 2021 SCC 17 [Desautel].
a sheltering approach could also arise if several Indigenous nations have treaty rights over the same defined territory; disagreements could arise between nations under the same treaty as to the impact that sheltering other non-treaty nations could have and there could be opposition to sheltering by some treaty nations where others are in favour of doing so.
Notwithstanding the fact that in Mr. Desautel’s case, the majority held that he did not need to consider a sheltering approach, on a differing factual matrix adopting a sheltering approach to the exercise of Aboriginal rights in Canada may be applicable and useful. Where the application of Canadian law denies an Indigenous group s. 35(1) protections for a given practice or custom, sheltering could be an alternative that acknowledges the viability of an approach based in Indigenous laws. One should not read Justice Rowe’s nonapplication of a sheltering approach as a broader rejection of the idea of sheltering as a means of determining other fair approaches to the exercise of Aboriginal rights in Canada.
2. Constitution Act, 1982, s 35, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11.
3. Desautel, supra note 1 at para 19.
4. Wildlife Act, RSBC 1996, c 488, ss. 11(1), 47(a).
5. Desautel, supra note 1 at para 4.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid at para 5.
8. Ibid at para 6.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid at para 8.
11. Ibid at para 6.
12. Ibid at para 1.
13. Ibid at para 21, citing R v Sparrow, 1990 CanLII 104 (SCC) at p 1106; R v Van der Peet, 1996 CanLII 216 (SCC) at paras 21–22; Manitoba Metis Federation Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2013 SCC 14 at para 76.
14. Ibid at para 22.
15. Ibid at para 27.
16. Ibid at para 31.
17. Ibid at para 33.
18. Ibid, citing R v Côté, 1996 CanLII 170 (SCC) at para 53.
19. Ibid at para 34.
20. Ibid at para 49.
21. Ibid at para 29.
22. Ibid at para 48.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid at para 56.
25. Ibid at para 57.
26. Ibid at para 58.
27. Ibid at para 60.
28. Ibid at paras 59–60.
29. Ibid at para 63.
30. Ibid at paras 65–66.
31. Ibid
32. Ibid at para 70.
33. R v Meshake, 2007 ONCA 337.
34. Ibid at para 19.
35. Ibid at para 9.
36. Ibid at para 16.
37. R v Shipman, 2007 ONCA 338 at para 11.
38. Desautel, supra note 1 at para 60.
Through wahKohTowin: refleCTions on relaTional indigenous law
learning from The wahKohTowin inTensiVe Course1
By Hadley Friedland and Casey Caines
Hadley Friedland is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on Indigenous law, Aboriginal law, Family law and Child Welfare law, Criminal Justice, Therapeutic jurisprudence and Community-led research.
Dr. Friedland holds a Child and Youth Care diploma from MacEwan University, an LLB from the University of Victoria, and an LLM and PhD from the University of Alberta. She received a Governor General gold medal for her doctoral dissertation and was the inaugural SSHRC Impact Talent Award recipient. She currently holds a Killam Accelerator Research Award. Dr. Friedland helped establish the Indigenous Law Research Unit [ILRU] at the University of Victoria and was its first Research Director. She has had the honour of working with Indigenous communities across Canada to identify and articulate their own laws. She has published numerous academic articles as well as collaboratively produced accessible Indigenous legal resources with and for Indigenous communities. Since 2019, Dr. Friedland has worked extensively on public and continuing legal education related to Bill C92, the Canadian federal Indigenous child welfare act. She is author of the book, The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization, University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Dr. Friedland is Academic Director, Principal Investigator and Co-founder of the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge, a dedicated research initiative developed to uphold Indigenous law through supporting community-led research.
Casey Caines is a Cree and Dene iskwew and Juris Doctor graduate from Fort Nelson First Nation raising her two young daughters alongside her husband in Edmonton, AB. She began and will finish her articles with Wahkohtowin Law & Governance Lodge, with clerkships at the Alberta Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada in between.
“I felt rain drops and the burn of my muscles working on the hide, heard the wind in the trees and the rushing of the creek, laughter and children playing, the sounds of singing and drums, saw the green around me and the sky overhead, smelled the plants and the fresh air and the hide and the food we all shared together, tasted bone marrow for the first time and some of the best bannock ever; all while participating in legal learning, learning from teachers young and old, and building relationships with the people and land and the moose.”2
- Siobhan Washburn, third year University of Alberta Law Student
Introduction
Law students in Canadian law schools are expected to learn the common law and civil law disconnected from their kinship networks. In order to learn law, students who have young children must obtain childcare, and all parents spend long hours away from their children in classrooms and studying. Students in marriages or cohabiting relationships also spend long hours learning apart from their life partners. Indigenous students must learn away from their communities and most often their territories.3 Their law teachers must also disconnect in a similar way to instruct them in law.
How we typically learn law and teach in Canadian law schools today mirrors many of the background norms and assumptions embedded in state legal systems. With rare exceptions, the common law and civil law imagine individuals as atomistic agents and independence is valorized. Detachment, objectivity, and neutrality become virtually synonymous with, or at least conditions precedent for, fair process, and good judgment. Law is then practiced as it is learned—detached from our kinship relationships and communities.
In contrast, Indigenous laws are often learned
through relationships. As Anishinabek legal scholar John Borrows notes, Indigenous laws may be taught and practiced through “Elders, families, clans, and bodies, within Indigenous societies.”4 Cree legal scholar Darcy Lindberg speaks about learning, and developing, legal relationships with grandparent stones through his personal relationship with a respected lodge keeper, Ron Marshall.5 Dene Elder, George Blondin shares that, in the old days, the duty of every grandparent was to tell stories every day, to pass on traditions to grandchildren.6 Cree/Gitxsan legal scholar Val Napoleon discusses how some Gitxsan laws are recorded in “specific kinship relationships.” She talks about Gitxsan legal education beginning in infancy, and gives
neal ruTh, "2023 wahKohTowin moose hide Camp," mosaiC arT rendering
the example of Tenimgyet, Art Mathews, who as a small child, was taught by his grandparents to stand up and “fully recount his day” to them, which taught him attention to detail, memory capacity, and skills as an orator, all critical Gitxsan legal skills for his role as an important hereditary chief.7 Metis legal scholar, Anna Corrigal-Flaminio, defines “kinship-visiting” as a key legal procedure in Metis and Cree legal traditions.8
How Indigenous laws are taught and learned mirrors many of the background norms and assumptions embedded in Indigenous legal orders. To take Cree laws as an example, the late Cree leader and lawyer Harold Cardinal defined wahkohtowin, the Cree concept of kinship and inter-relatedness, as the “fundamental Cree doctrine of law … the laws governing relationships,”9 saying “it is one of the most comprehensive doctrines of law among the Cree people and contains a whole myriad of subsets of laws defining the individual and collective relationships of Cree people.”10
With rare exceptions, Cree laws imagine individuals as agents living in relation with all of creation and interdependence is valued.11 Proximity, deep knowledge of the people involved, compassion, and understanding are virtually synonymous, or conditions precedent, for fair process, and good judgment.12 Law is then practiced as it is learned—rooted in our kinship relationships and communities.
Wahkohtowin is a Cree legal concept that can be translated into English as kinship or relatedness.13 However, Métis Elder and writer, Maria Campbell explains it means
more than just “family as in human family.”14 Rather, “at one time, from our place it meant the whole of creation. And our teachings taught us that all of creation is related and inter-connected to all things within it.”15 Cree political theorist, Matt Wildcat, has drawn on Campbell’s explanation to describe wahkohtowin as a worldview “based on the idea that all of existence is animate and full of spirit. Since everything has spirit it means we are connected to the rest of existence and live in a universe defined by relatedness.”16 Wahkohtowin, then, is a truth claim. It speaks to the inspirited17 and the related nature of all existence. Wahkohtowin also speaks to people’s legal obligations. David MacPhee, President of Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, explains that it “is critical to recognize there is also responsibility as part of relationships.”18 Campbell stresses that: "Wahkohtowin meant honoring and respecting those relationships [with all creation]. They are our stories, songs, ceremonies, and dances that taught us from birth to death our responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to each other. Human to human, human to plants, human to animals, to the water and especially to the earth. And in turn all of creation had responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to us."19
Wahkohtowin
Campbell’s words bring us full circle back to the how of learning the legal relationships and responsibilities that stem from wahkohtowin. It makes sense that we will learn wahkohtowin best through wahkohtowin.20
The Wahkohtowin Intensive: Miyowîcêhtowin Principles and Practice Course
The Wahkohtowin Intensive: Miyo-wîcêhtowin Principles and Practice Course [ Wahkohtowin Intensive is a course that invites students to learn about Cree legal principles in a rooted and related way.21 The Wahkohtowin Intensive is a for-credit landbased experiential seminar offered through the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, in partnership with a grassroots team of community instructors in the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation.22 This unique intensive course introduces students to sources and resources for engaging with Indigenous— particularly Cree—legal concepts from an immersive relational, language, and landbased perspective. Students start out in a conventional law school classroom for the first part of the course, but then are welcomed into community, and experience a completely different kind of teaching and learning, through the central activity of hometanning a moose hide. It is a course that requires “intentional engagement with Indigenous legal concepts,” and for some students “requires taking a further step out of your comfort zone[...].”23
vision for starting the course. She said it was time to start bringing university students up to the community to learn when her daughter-in-law (Hadley) started a position as a law professor at the University of Alberta.24
The late Adelaide McDonald, Cree Elder, healer, family matriarch, and member of Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, had the initial
The Summer 2023 course was taught by her four living siblings, Philomene Moberly, Mabel Wanyandie, Russell Wanyandie, and Dorothy Karakuntie, as well as ten of her children and children-in-law, Vicky Wanyandie, Robert Wanyandie, Yvonne MacPhee, David MacPhee, Ken McDonald, Marianne McDonald, Danny McDonald, Vivian McDonald, Alice Moberly, and Carol Wanyandie. Adelaide’s grandchildren and great-children were also present throughout, as teachers and learners, with the university students. The creek, where the hides were made for the course, is an active site, where Elders and other community members make hides and visit as part of daily life. Children of all
adelaide mCdonald worKing on a moose hide in 2017
one of The auThors, Casey, wiTh daughTer Teagan, wahKohTowin inTensiVe, July 2023.
(l To r) baCK row: ViCKy, Carol, marianne, Kenny, yVonne, aliCe, ViVian, danny, roberT; fronT row: doroThy, russell, mabel and philomene.
same people as aboVe, wiTh some of The grandChildren and greaT-grandChildren Joining.
Casey, wiTh daughTer Charleigh, wahKohoTwin inTensiVe, July 2023.
ages, from toddlers to tweens to teenagers and young adults, ran around, ate, rested, sat, and listened, visited, showed off their knowledge and community, and helped their older relatives with the hides and with the teaching in what is, essentially, their own very large backyard. For the last two years, some students also brought their own children, again from toddlers to teenagers. There was no need for leaving them or childcare because the children were part of the learning.
Welcoming and Community Dinners were
held on the professor’s (Hadley’s) porch in the community. Students were immersed in the naturally intergenerational, unavoidably relational, environment of a small Cree community, learning law, as Borrows puts it, in “how people live their lives.”25 Hard and fast lines between school and home, student, visitor, teacher, and family, dissolved within the lived and living reality of wahkohtowin. Students learned through relationships, from relationships, with Adelaide’s family members, with each other, with the hide, land, water, and weather.
CloCKwise from Top lefT: ConneCTing aCross generaTions aT The welComing dinner; gaThering around The fire down aT The CreeK; CommuniTy insTruCTors and sTudenTs VisiTing on The porCh aT The welComing dinner; aseniwuChe winewaK naTion youTh danCing.
CloCKwise from Top lefT, some sTages of moose hide Tanning: laying ouT To laCe
To frame, on a rainy morning; sCraping; sTreTChing, made easier by a sunny afTernoon.
Summer 2023 Wahkohtowin
Intensive Student Art and Reflections
This year, for the first time, students were given the option of completing their final assignment for the course through art. In doing so, the course not only transformed the way in which students typically learned and engaged with law but also the way they could choose to express their learning. There is no better way to share the impact of this course on law students’ learning than sharing some of the beautiful art and reflections created by Indigenous and settler
law students who participated in the Summer 2023 Wahkohtowin Intensive.
Guided by professors, elders, and knowledgekeepers both within a classroom in a traditional seminar form and within the community of Aseniwuche Winewak on the land, students explored Cree law, within the framework of moosehide tanning, and the intersecting relationships connected to that activity. As one of the students shared through their art, this work was done “through everyone, through the plants, the animals, the creek.”26 The youth of Aseniwuche Winewak held particular wisdom and knowledge. As second year law student Bex Mitchell shared of her art work, “I added the feet in two different colours to the canvas to represent the colourful and rich
Top:
siobhan washburn, posTer
middle: bex miTChell, Collage
boTTom: Tyler
erminesKin, assemblage
experience I had. The feet are small and meant to represent both the youth in the community, and the connections I made with them, but also the way the Wahkohtowin imagination is created through walking.27 I knew I had to represent the youth in some major way, as they were so important to the experience. Having the feet literally running across the work represents how intertwined they were with the work.”28
Relationships were a focal point of the students’ experience representing the interconnectedness of the law. Law that is both “beautiful and fantastical”29 and deeply rooted in community and love. It is also law that is complex.
The art created during reflection on student’s time in the course engaged law using all of their senses. It required both a presentness to the task at hand and the relationships being formed within the community while holding close connections to one’s lived experience and legal education. As third year student Megan Reti shared, “The sticks I used came from the lilac bush in my backyard. By using materials from a plant and place that I am interrelated with and have obligations to, I am carrying the lessons I learned about Wahkohtowin and Miyo-wîchêtowin beyond the course, into my own life both in and out of law.”30
This circular connection reflects the value of learning Indigenous law both through robust academic engagement and equally robust community centered learning. Third year student Jay Koller echoed this in his hand painted art submission explaining, "The canvas’ circular shape and the bold black borders running throughout the painting represents the reciprocity and interconnectedness of all my experiences.”31 Both the classroom seminar that takes place the week before the on the land learning as well as the community learning allow students to create a framework for themselves for engaging with Indigenous law.
As second year law student Connor Meeker shares in relation, as “legal practices, aesthetic performances, such as through ceremony, story, and song, are ways of doing law. They can be performative in the sense that they constitute rather than just describe legalities (norms, obligations, facts)... [Considering aesthetic dimensions of] common law practices…destabilize[s] the dichotomy that can form between: 'rational' common law systems and 'irrational' Indigenous legal orders. It offers a way to think about the notion of legal legitimacy as historically and socially contingent.”32
Through the practice of aesthetics, both during their time on the land, in the classroom and within their own submissions to the course, students work towards critically analyzing not only the way they engage with Indigenous law but what it means to engage with Indigenous law within the relationship between Indigenous law and the Canadian state legal system. As fourth year Native Studies Honours student Marc Jr. Doire shared, “This was the longest process, but it flew by as I experienced what Dwayne Donald calls the “wahkohtowin
imagination”—making our relationality more apparent—through my work. I began to think about how the course shaped my Aseniwuche Winewak ontology.”33
As an Aseniwuche Winewak community member himself, Marc’s reflections position the course to further look at relationality and
KirsTen samson, painTed magazine/ booK raCK (side Two)
KirsTen samson, painTed magazine/ booK raCK (side one)
Jay Koller, painTing
the ways in which the course creates space for students to explore Indigenous law, like art, through “the lens of memory, where the boundaries between distinct stories and events might be blurred and blend together, and detail gives way to mood and atmosphere.”34
While only one course, it is clear that the impact of learning law in this way is profound. As Megan Reti shared of her art, “the red beads in the bottom left corner are soap berries and they represent the lesson that knowledge is out there to be shared if you seek it out.”35 That knowledge is woven through the ways in which students are given opportunities to engage.
For some students, the impacts will continue to reverberate through the legal profession. As one student shared, “One of my favourite memories was when Kirsten, Meghan and I took little Ezra and Chloe up the hill to pick strawberries. Ezra and Chloe sat down in the grass while we picked strawberries and I put little yellow flowers in their hair. They were so happy and yet I was a complete stranger to them. Still, these two were the first to trust me and allowed me to join in. Ezra and
Chloe, just as I tried to keep you safe and happy at camp, I vow to always do work as a lawyer that promotes your wellbeing too.”36
Concluding Thoughts
The students’ beautiful artwork and written reflections capture the core of the Wahkohtowin Intensive’s transformative potential. Borrows points out that the fact Indigenous laws are taught, learned and practiced through kinship relationships actually contribute to their strength and resiliency.37 Lindberg has argued eloquently and persuasively about the “functional aspects of beauty” and the role of aesthetics in Cree legal pedagogy as well as its necessity for the “protection, survival, and revitalization” of Indigenous laws.38 In fact, he argues, “beauty is essential.”39 As anyone with a family knows, the realities of our kinship relationships can be difficult, painful and messy. However, they can also be beautiful, sometimes all at once.
The Wahkohtowin Intensive is an Indigenous law course rooted in relationships,
megan reTi, mixed media painTing
marC Jr. doire, hand-made hide frame
ENDNOTES:
to experience the learning and practice of Indigenous law in a grounded, immersive way that reflects the rooted reality of its relational principles and its immense strength and beauty.
1. Many thanks to all the people who helped make this piece possible. Thank you to Alice Moberly and Carol Wanyandie, the community coordinators for the Wahkohtowin Intensive, all the community and university instructors and support staff, all the students who have generously contributed their reflections, as well as Koren Lightning, Hero Laird and Michael McInnis, who assisted with this article.
2. Siobhan Washburn, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors].
3. For a poignant discussion of this issue, see Casey Caines, “'Leaving Your Heart in the Homeland:' Indigenous Land Connections and the Extractive Industry of Law Schools” (2022) [unpublished, on file with authors].
4. John Borrows, Canada’s Indigenous Constitution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) at 179.
5. Darcy Lindberg, “Miyo Nêhiyâwiwin (Beautiful Creeness): Ceremonial Aesthetics and Nêhiyaw Legal Pedagogy” (2018) 16/17:1 Indigenous LJ 51 at 57-58.
6. George Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene (Yellowknife: Outcrop, 1990) at i.
7. Val Napoleon, “Did I Break It? Recording Indigenous (Customary) Law” (2019) 22 PER/PELJ 1 at 14.
8. Anna Corrigal Flaminio, “Kinship-visiting: Urban Deliberative Space” in Karen Drake and Brenda L Gunn, eds, Renewing Relationships: Indigenous Peoples and Canada (Saskatoon: Wiyasiwewin Mikiwahp Native Law Centre, 2019) 143.
9. Harold Cardinal, “Nation-Building: Reflections of a Nihiyow (Cree)” in Paul W DePasquale, ed, Natives and Settlers, Now and Then: Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada, 1st ed (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007) 65 at 74.
10. Ibid at 75.
11. Maria Campbell, “Human Rights Conference November 1, 2007”, Eagle Feather News, online: <www.metismuseum.ca/media/document.php/11751.maria%20column%20November%202007. pdf>.
12. For the importance of kindness and compassion in Cree legal decision-making, see e.g. Nigel Baker-Grenier, “Kitamahkinawow Ekwa Kitimakisin: Pity and Compassion in Cree Law” (2021) 11:1 Western JL Studies 23.
13. Nancy LeClaire & George Cardinal, Alberta Elders' Cree Dictionary/alperta ohci kehtehayak nehiyaw otwestâmakewasinahikan, ed by Earle H Waugh (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002). There, it is defined as “the act of being related to each other.” See also Johanne Johnson and Aseniwuche Winewak Nation Elders, "Wahkotowin Language Bundle", online: <www.aseniwuche.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/wahkotowin_bundle.pdf>.
14. Campbell, supra note 11.
15. Ibid. that welcomes learners into relationship with a family, people, and land. It invites connection, visiting, expression and aesthetic practices as ways to deeply engage with Indigenous law. By teaching wahkohtowin through wahkohtowin, law students get
16. Matt Wildcat, “Wahkotowin in Action” (2018) 27:1 Constitutional Forum constitutionnel 13 at 14.
17. Darcy Lindberg refers to Cree laws as being “epistemologically rooted in nêhiyaw conceptions of the inspirited nature of human and non-human beings” in his short online article, Darcy Lindberg, “Wahkotowin, Corporate Separateness and Potential Futures for Indigenous Laws”, Centre for International Governance Innovation, Environmental Challenges in Indigenous Lands Series (4 July 2019), online: <www.cigionline.org/articles/wahkotowin-corporate-separateness-andpotential-futures-indigenous-laws/>.
18. David MacPhee, quoted in Hadley Friedland & Lindsay Borrows, Creating New Stories through Indigenous Law: Indigenous Legal Principles of Reconciliation (2014), online: <keegitah. wordpress.com>.
19. Campbell, supra note 11.
20. I say something similar in Shalene Jobin et al, "Wahkohtowin: Principles, Process, and Pedagogy” (2021) 9 Can Leg Education Annual Rev 51 at 59, that the goal was "to recognize and rebuild wahkotowin through wahkotowin."
21. Miyo-wîcêhtowin is a closely related concept to wahkohtowin, that refers to building and maintaining good relations: see Johnson, supra note 13. To learn more, there are seven Cree principles shared through the language bundles project on the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation website, online: <www.aseniwuche.ca/7-cree-principles/>.
22. For a more detailed exposition of this course’s origins and first iteration, see Jobin et al, supra note 20. For more information about the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, see online: <www.aseniwuche. ca/>.
23. Roscoe Gee, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 1 [unpublished, on file with authors].
24. Friedland in Jobin et al, supra note 20.
25. John Borrows in Law Commission of Canada, Justice Within: Indigenous Legal Traditions, DVD (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 2006).
26. Washburn, supra note 2 at 2.
27. Referring to Dwayne Donald, “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wahkohtowin Imagination” (2021) 18:2 J Can Assoc for Curriculum Studies 53 at 59–60.
28. Rebekah [Bex] Mitchell, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors].
29. Lindberg, supra note 5 at 53.
30. Megan Reti, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors].
31. Jay Koller, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 1 [unpublished, on file with authors].
32. Connor Meeker, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 4 [unpublished, on file with authors].
33. Marc Jr. Doire, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors], referring to Donald, supra note 27.
34. Grace Lo, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors].
35. Megan Reti, Wahkohtowin Final Reflective Assignment at 2 [unpublished, on file with authors].
36. Koller, supra note 31 at 2.
37. Borrows, supra note 4 at 179.
38. Lindberg, supra note 5 at 53.
39. Ibid.
indigenous Taino people exisT— and so do Their Kinship laws: nurTuring fuTure generaTions by honouring anCesTral legaCies
By Erica Neeganagwedgin
Erica Neeganagwedgin, Ph.D. (Taino), is an Associate Professor in Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies at Western University’s Faculty of Education. Her teaching and research interests include Indigenous knowledge systems and Intellectual Traditions, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous history and educational policies, history of Indigenous Education in North American contexts, and Indigenous Research Methodologies.
Introduction
Kinship is connected and centred within relationships. These kinship relationships are of central importance to me as a Caribbean Taino person. I draw on the existing literature and my own experiences and understanding to illustrate Taino kinship. Specifically, I highlight the significance of ancestors and the land to Taino kinship systems, both of which are essential, indivisible principles of wholistic1 Taino legal traditions.
Kinship shapes and determines the way in which people relate to one another and to their surroundings by determining people's responsibilities towards each other, the world, and their environment. The creation and maintenance of a cohesive and harmonious community is at the core of kinship.2 This includes love for the land, community, people, and all living beings. Kinship is based on Taino law. The importance of kinship is embedded in the term “Taino,” which means “relative.”3 In a Taino world, biological relationship does not equate to being a relative because everyone is related: Taino is kin.
European colonization disrupted, but did not destroy, Taino kinship systems. Regardless of geography, our Taino Yukayekes are kinbased cultures and communities. Today, Taino people everywhere continue to practice and honour our kinship ties through our arts and by celebrating our ancestors and our communities. The arreytos is a celebration and commemorative act of passing on Taino history and culture.4 It is a time for us to gather, sing, dance, drum and honour who we are as Caribbean peoples. These ceremonies are significant to Taino peoples’ lives because we are transmitting and maintaining our cultures
after five hundred and thirty-two years of the constant reproduction of ideologies that tell us we do not exist. Patricia Dudgeon and Abigail Bray highlight the wholistic scope of “Indigenous kinship systems “encompassing complex relationships with place, with the land (earth, waterways, sky), and the more-than-human (animal, plant, and spirit).”5 Taino celebrations honour ancestral pedagogies, are relational and interconnected with every aspect of life.
Settler colonialism works to separate Indigenous people from the land, water, flora, fauna and each other by systemically erasing and disconnecting kinship relationships. The aggressive colonial acquisition of Indigenous territories in the Caribbean is a key part of the colonial attack on kinship relationships.6 Historically and currently, Caribbean Indigenous lands have been at the centre of insatiable colonial desire and exploitation. Taino people have lived in the Caribbean for centuries before the arrival of Europeans and still do. They have influenced (and been influenced by) the lands through their lifeways, worldviews, and relationships. These influences continue today.
Indigenous knowledge systems, values, and ways of being are understood and enacted within socio-ecological systems grounded in reciprocal kin relations. How Indigenous people live with other people and all living beings is a significant aspect of their knowledge systems.7 Kenneth Townsend points out that Columbus’s description in his journal of Taino people's willingness to trade “everything they had” was a misunderstanding and oversimplification of the Taino economy of reciprocity: "Reciprocal exchange created networks of obligation and kinship between Taino Islanders. Tainos on the Gonáve Island, off the West Coast of Haiti,
for example, made the finest wooden bowls, and Tainos from other islands travelled to trade for them."8 This misunderstanding signifies the danger when Taino people do not get to interpret their own worldviews. Taino people continue to uphold their traditional laws of reciprocity and kinship. They build and maintain strong networks with one another, both in-person and virtual, through travel and communication. Taino people engage in a range of support for each other in a spirit of respect and affinity, sometimes founded on unspoken and unwritten commitments. The Taino Island kinship is strong both across the Caribbean and the diaspora, with members from different regions and Yukayekes visiting and maintaining relationships with each other. Taino kinship precedes 1492 and remains unbroken and instrumental. Alaí Reyes-Santos discusses transcolonial kinship narratives as a subversion of the exploitative and dehumanizing social relations that characterize European domination and the Eurocentric construction of “history, knowledge, power, citizenship, and humanity.”9 Taino, by sustaining “kinship communities on small farms, and despite local migrations, preserved their human memory and social value.”10
Ancestors
Taino kinship practices are a powerful representation of ancestral Taino law in action. Taino ancestors are critical to their kinship systems. In the opening remarks at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ 2022 session, Darío José Mejía Montalvo asserted that ancestors have rights, including the right to continue to exist because their task is to preserve life.11 Taino people
gain guidance, protection, and direction from their ancestors. Being an ancestor does not end the relationship. Instead, according to Taino law, it is strengthened.
Taino activist and scholar DeAnna Rivera states: "To remember, we need to maintain our relationships with our ancestors so they will continue to share the stories. To continue those relationships, we must respect the remains of our ancestors, preserve the sites where they are buried, protect their ceremonial items from tourists and museums, and maintain the sanctity of sacred sites throughout the Island.”12 Taino people knew about the Caribbean seas' winds and currents before Europeans arrived in Caribbean Indigenous territories.13 Taino people made canoes from the Ceiba cotton tree, and they made fire and tools from shell or stone.14 UN Permanent Forum Chair Darío José Mejía Montalvo explains that the knowledge held within ancestral practices is structured within the deeper task of maintaining life in all its forms and with dignity. Ancestral practices are consistent with the understanding that no cosmic divisions exist on Earth or in the hearts of plants, insects, rivers, and seas.15
Before European contact, Taino life and cultures were adapted to their environment. Taino kinship laws meant that everyone had the right to access food. This included the community caciques and behiques, who were known for their medicinal practices but also participated alongside other community members in tasks like planting, hunting, and fishing.16 These caciques and behiques are our leaders and Medicine people, whose unique knowledge continues to guide their communities in contemporary times. Taino people in many parts of the Caribbean or Antilles continue building
reciprocal relationships with their lands.
Author Marianela Medrano-Marra recounted her experience visiting her family's Taino ancestral home in 2009. She wrote, “I was able to see how my ancestors left in those caves, their rubrics, indelible traces of their communion with nature and their holistic approach to life in general and to spirituality in particular. Visiting the caves was a journey into the core of ancestral spirituality, a journey that lit up the eyes of my inner child, still gazing at the chain of mountains.”17
I had a similar experience when I visited an ancestral cave in my community. I took a trip to the Island with the intent of going to the cave to visit and sit in the sacred place where my ancestors spent their time and, in many cases, hid from colonizers. I understand what it is like to climb up into the mountains, surrounded by bush, trees on ancestral lands. I had no protective equipment, yet I felt protected and could feel my ancestors’ presence. The cave is a place of spiritual significance and was an important site of activities for our Taino ancestors. The Taino heartland, including the Greater Antilles Islands, has many caves that are significant to the Taino people and are an important part of our origin stories. Taino people have their own stories, spirituality and relationship with the earth and ancestral lands.18
Kinship binds together families, communities, and all extended human and more-than-human relationships:19 “there is no distinction between relationships that are made with other people and those that are made with our environment.”20 My family recently experienced the importance of ancestral relationships and kinship when two young relatives visited our ancestral Island home and shared pictures of the land with me. These included pictures of the
graves of our maternal grandparents, greatgreat-grandparents, and generations of family members buried there. The memories and stories of our ancestors continue to play a significant role in how we and our relatives live, because ancestral ties are firmly within the land. Receiving these images was significant to me, and I viewed them repeatedly. In Taino kinship systems, understanding ancestral law is crucial, and their teachings play an important and relevant role in contemporary Taino life.
Land
The land is a significant part of Taino life. The land protected and still protects. It provides food and shelter and is a major part of our spirituality. This significance and relationship that we have with the land is not necessarily always written. It is structured in the way we live: “Land is where ancestors are buried and where sacred places are visited and revered.”21 The visiting and feasting of the ancestors cannot be ignored. For Taino people, our lands and lifeways are centred around our stories about living Taino life even today, and our arreytos symbolize these relationships.
Living with, and as, kin is a core value for Indigenous peoples and drives how positive learning environments are established. Living and learning in kinship is interrelated with land, water, and place.22 Marianela Medrano-Marra explains that “a culture cannot be exterminated because the subjective elements, such as oral history, beliefs, language, and memory, cannot be easily killed.”23 Dudgeon and Bray explain that many forms of Indigenous governance, including Indigenous axiologies or ethics, are based in kinship relationships with the land.24
The understanding of Indigenous peoples' lives, cultures, and identities as intertwined with the land underlies the struggle to defend ancestral territories and natural resources against governments implicated in their theft.
Deforestation is evident on many Caribbean islands. According to Mimi Sheller, clearing land for agriculture displaced Indigenous rights, needs, and forms of knowledge: "Trees have been used to identify, symbolize, demarcate, and sustain various Caribbean places' meanings and lives.”25 Marie Battiste and Sákéj Henderson emphasize that ecological teachings are key in generating and maintaining the values and responsibilities at the core of Indigenous kinship orders that sustain relationships with ecosystems.26 The colonial acquisition of Indigenous territories in the Caribbean region was followed by the imposition of plantations, European land law and official land tenure regimes, which obliterated subsistence economies and engrossed Caribbean land.27 Indigenous ancestors are linked to all living beings, through their governance practices, their knowledge of healing, and above all, reciprocal relationship with the land connected to reverence and love.28 Kinship is immersed with the land and ancestors. Despite repeated violent attempts to
ENDNOTES:
obliterate the Taino people, we persevere.
Conclusion
Taino resurgence is a global movement that is driven by our relationship to each other regardless of the territories where we come from. Taino life is everywhere on the lands of the ancestors. Our knowledges are in the lands and in our hearts. We as Taino continue to embrace and reclaim our lives.
Taino ancestors, histories, and voices are encapsulated in the land and rooted in reciprocal kinship relationships. DeAnna Rivera explains that a “principal obligation is to ensure that our stories, customs, dances, and songs, remain even after five hundred years of different colonizing voices trying to erase our cultural traditions.”29 Taino people continue to embrace our responsibility to live according to the unwritten code and way of life of Taino kinship. We are responding to these obligations by drawing on our uniquely Taino knowledge systems given to us by the land and our ancestors. We continue to manifest and express our legal codes of living in kinship.
1. I have chosen to use the term “wholistic” instead of “holistic” to embody the totality of Indigenous relationships and worldviews.
2. “The Role of Family & Kinship in Aboriginal Culture”, Watarrka Foundation (2023), online: <watarrkafoundation.org.au/blog/the-role-of-family-kinship-in-aboriginal-culture>.
3. Jorge Estevez, Rene Pérez de Liciaga & Keisha Josephs, “Origins of the word ‘taíno” (3 March 2016), online: <researchgate.net/publication/296694496_Origins_of_the_word_Taino>.
4. Jowen H Ortiz Cintrón, “Taínos: A Culture to Remember”, Medium (8 August 2018), online: <medium.com/@viewpr/ta%C3%ADnos-a-culture-to-remember-b109a460880b>.
5. Patricia Dudgeon & Abigail Bray, “Indigenous Relationality: Women, Kinship and the Law” (2019) 3:2 Genealogy, DOI: <10.3390/genealogy3020023> at 2.
6. Jean Besson, “History, Land and Culture in the English-Speaking Caribbean”, (24 April 2003),
online: <pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnadc122.pdf> at 4.
7. Anna Lees & Megan Bang, “Indigenous Pedagogies: Land, Water, and Kinship” (2023) 49 Occasional Paper Series 3, DOI: <10.58295/2375-3668.1500>.
8. Kenneth Townsend, First Americans: A History of Native Peoples, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2019) at 34.
9. Alaí Reyes-Santos, “Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles” (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015) at 8.
10. José Barreiro, “Taíno: Valuing and Visibilizing Caribbean Indigeneity”, Smithsonian Magazine (28 August 2018), online: <smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-latino-center/2018/08/28/tainovaluing-and-visibilizing-caribbean-indigeneity/>.
11. “Extraction Operations on Indigenous Peoples’ Land without Consent Cause Irreparable Harm, Speakers Stress, as Permanent Forum Begins Session”, United Nations Press (25 April 2022), online: <press. un.org/en/2022/hr5467.doc.htm> [United Nations Press].
12. DeAnna Marie Rivera, “Taino Sacred Sites: An International Comparative Analysis for a Domestic Solution” (2003) 20:2 Ariz J Intl & Comp L 443 at 443–4.
13. Phillip D Morgan, “The Caribbean Environment to 1850” in Philip D Morgan et al, eds, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) at 23.
14. Ibid.
15. United Nations Press, supra note 11.
16. José Barreiro, “A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?” (1990) 7:3 Northeast Indian Q 66 at 70 [Barreiro, "Note on Tainos"].
17. Marianela Medrano-Marra, “Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminin3e in Taíno Spirituality", Trivia: Voices of Feminism (March 2009), online: <triviavoices.com/canoeing-our-way-back-to-thedivine-feminine-in-taino-spirituality.html>.
18. Barreiro, "Note on Tainos", supra note 16.
19. Erika Campbell et al, “Indigenous Relationality and Kinship and the Professionalization of Maternity Care” (2020) 1:1 Turtle Island J Indigenous Health 8, DOI: <doi.org/10.33137/tijih.v1i1.34016> at 9.
20. Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2008) at 87.
21. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (2009), online: <www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/SOWIP/en/SOWIP_web.pdf> at 53.
22. Dudgeon and Bray, supra note 5 at 5.
23. Marianela Medrano-Marra, “Writing our way to Taíno spirituality: Finding a sense of self” (2009) 22:1 J Poetry Therapy 21, online: <dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893670802707946> at 27.
24. Dudgeon & Bray, supra note 5 at 3.
25. Mimi Sheller, “Arboreal Landscapes of Power and Resistance” in Jean Besson & Janet Momsen, eds, Caribbean Land and Development Revisited (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) at 207.
26. Marie Battiste and James (Sá’ké’j) Youngblood Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2000) at 45.
27. Besson, supra note 6 at 4.
28. Dudgeon and Bray, supra note 5 at 8.
29. Rivera, supra note 12 at 443.
m ayan w omen T oday
By Laura Morales
My name is Laura Morales, I belong to the K’iche’ Maya people in Guatemala. I did my Bachelor’s Degree in Digital Contents: 3D Animation in South Korea, where I lived and worked for about 6 years. I currently work as a UI/UX designer in Germany, and on the side I work the vice-president of a collective of young Mayan women called Colectiva Tuxinem. Our work focuses on strengthening cultural identity through the creation of digital media content, podcast and online forums and courses that are created by and for indigenous young women. As part of a personal project I work as an illustrator. My art is inspired by my Mayan culture and history. Through my work I hope to inspire young Mayan generations to feel proud of who they are and fight institutionalized stereotypes and racism against Mayan people in Guatemala. I am finishing my MA in Animation and Game Direction in Germany, where I developed a tool to innovate education in Guatemala that strengthens cultural identity in Mayan young generations. I wish to keep contributing to our Mayan communities, so that we can live in a place where we can freely live our identity and consequently have better lives and opportunities.
To freely live our identity, we do it together: over the past few years of my twenties, I've had the privilege of connecting with inspiring Mayan young women who have impacted my life. Our shared goal of preserving our cultural identity is no small feat, especially in a society like Guatemala's, which can often be discouraging and, at times, hopeless. However, amidst the challenges, we have discovered strength within ourselves and in each other. Together, we have gained a deeper understanding of our place in the world and have embraced a collective vision for the future, rooted in healing and empowerment.
Supporting our Mayan peers is not an obligation dictated by societal roles or expectations. Rather, our bond is built upon our shared ideologies, commitment, and the intertwining threads of our similar life stories. This powerful connection not only fuels our collaboration, but also nurtures genuine friendships. I believe that by following in the footsteps of our parents, even if we stumble along the way, new seeds of resilience will sprout, guiding us back to our true selves and enabling us to carry forward the fight that was never taught to us intentionally, but that we are passionately dedicated to winning—the fight to freely live our Mayan identity.
r e T ra C ing , r e C laiming , and r ebuilding f amily r oo T s
By Lindy Lemay and Kaelyn Macaulay
Lindy is a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta Region 3. She was born in Edmonton/ Amiskwacîwâskahikan and raised in Calgary/Otos-kwunee. Lindy attended St. Mary's High School and completed courses in Business Administration at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. She has worked for the Calgary Board of Education for over 45 years as a School Secretary, Administrative Assistant and Transportation Coordinator. She is a mother to two children and a grandmother to six grandchildren.
Kaelyn is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3. She was born and raised in Calgary/Otos-kwunee and earned her Bachelor's degree in English, with distinction, from the University of Calgary. She has worked as a research assistant for feminist projects on a range of historical, legal, and social issues. She obtained a Juris Doctor and Bachelor of Civil Law degree from McGill University and is currently completing her articles at a national law firm. She was an editor of the Rooted Constitutionalism and Land Back issues of Rooted, and she was Co-Executive Editor of the Resurgence issue.
How do you nurture the cultural roots of a family tree back to the point of thriving after decades of neglect? We do not claim to have the answers, but we believe it relies on a process of retracing family history, reclaiming cultural identity, and rebuilding the store of traditional and cultural knowledge lost to generations of colonial pressure. This article will speak to the barriers that we have faced as a family while undergoing this process. Lindy, along with her children Jenica and Jeremy and her grandchildren Kaelyn, Karly, Ky, Alexandria, Brooke, and Lanah, represent the first branch of our family tree to embark on this journey.
Around 2019, our family took the first steps to register as citizens with the Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA).1 This decision was not an easy one. Not all of us agreed to move ahead with the application at first, and we have since encountered a considerable amount of negative stigma around claiming Métis status. This stigma is so deeply embedded in Canadian society that it has been internalized by entire generations of our family. Individually, we have struggled to feel a sense of belonging due to our lack of exposure to the Cree and Métis cultures of our family tree. Interpersonally, we have faced criticism and doubt—mostly from other members of our family—who do not agree that we should participate in this form of Indigenous reclamation. We believe that these different sources of negativity originate from the same place: the social impressions left behind by a legal regime of persecution and eradication. The legal regime may be changing for the better, but the underlying attitudes of colonial supremacy will not be easily reversed. We hope that shining a light on these modern manifestations of colonial attitudes will help to break down some of the barriers that other Métis people may
experience in their journey to reclaim their identity, even though we are only speaking from our own experiences.
Canada has not been a safe place for Indigenous people to exist. Indigenous cultural practices have been systematically stigmatized, outlawed, stripped away, or violently suppressed since before Confederation.2 The Canadian government has had the explicit goal of eradicating Indigenous Peoples in order to appropriate the land and natural resources that have sustained them for time immemorial.3 Family is the cornerstone of many Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews, and it is no coincidence that many government initiatives targeted the integrity of Indigenous family relationships. According to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada:
Children were taken far away from their families, married women were stripped of their status, and access to communities on reserves was heavily controlled and [Indigenous children] were victims of a system intent on destroying intergenerational links of memory to their families, communities, and nations. The process of assimilation also profoundly disrespected parents, grandparents, and Elders in their rightful roles as the carriers of memory, through which culture, language, and identity are transmitted from one generation to the next.4
My personal relationship with my Indigenous identity has changed significantly in my later years. I was raised white and didn't even know the term “Métis” the official term back then was half-breed. Although aware I had Indigenous heritage, it was always hidden. The effort to hide our Indigenous heritage goes way back. My paternal grandmother's birth certificate did not acknowledge her Cree heritage. I knew she was an "Indian", but my father only ever mentioned his paternal French heritage. I know that my father lived on a reservation as a young boy—but his experiences were never shared or discussed. My paternal grandparents eventually moved to the town attached to the reserve and although I still had aunts, uncles, and cousins living on the reserve, we never visited them there. As a young girl, I thought living on the reserve meant you lived in teepees!
- Lindy Lemay
restricted.5 With these threats looming over Indigenous families, it is little wonder that many people chose to conceal their cultural identity, including people in our own family. But even after residential schools stopped operating, the Indian Act underwent reform, and the pass system was abolished, an attitude of white supremacism remained—and remains—in Canadian attitudes towards Indigenous identities.
In the post-war era of liberalism, both government and civilian committees likened the separate status of Indigenous Peoples to apartheid, advocating for all Indigenous Peoples to be granted full citizenship rights.6 Underlying this call to action was the paternalistic belief that Indigenous Peoples were being hindered by government handouts, and that they should assimilate to the Canadian way of life rather than try to preserve their dying cultures. This belief aligns with “the settler logic of elimination,”7 where integration requires the surrender of any meaningful Indigenous cultural distinction.
Discussions around Indigenous rights in Canada are still plagued by the presence of stereotypes about alcoholism and drug addiction, laziness, and especially welfare handouts.8 Many Canadians do not believe that this has anything to do with racism— one of our non-Indigenous family members, in referring to their beliefs in these stereotypes, claimed they are simply concerned about the unwise spending of Canadian tax dollars. Sometimes, much like the overzealous social workers of the Sixties Scoop, these well-meaning Canadians believe that they want what is ‘best’ for Indigenous Peoples, as if these nations are not capable of determining their own ‘best’ path.9
Our own family is not immune from these harmful beliefs; in fact, they played a large role in delaying our application for MNA citizenship. Lindy’s mother discouraged her children’s attempts to connect to their father’s culture because to her, being Indigenous meant asking for government handouts. There has been some fallout with one of Lindy’s siblings over the view that claiming status is disrespectful to the wishes of their late mother. However, Lindy believes that her mother
would have supported reconnecting with cultural traditions if she had understood them better. Similarly, Kaelyn and her siblings regularly receive comments from their paternal family about how they do not have enough Indigenous blood to warrant their citizenship. These sentiments are founded in a deep misunderstanding of what it means to claim Métis status—to us, it has been a means to reconnect with a vibrant community and learn traditional teachings that were lost to our colonial upbringing.
So what does it mean to have Métis citizenship? The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples accurately summed up the issue of Métis identification as “the subject of much dispute,”10 but the requirements for MNA citizenship are selfidentification, ancestral connection to the historic Métis community, and community acceptance.11 These elements were reaffirmed by the Canadian judicial system in R v. Powley. 12
Ancestral connection and community acceptance are relatively straightforward
matters of fact. Our application process required us to provide a family tree demonstrating our relation to a Métis ancestor who was granted scrip. This genealogical exploration helped to reconnect us to family members across the province; Lindy and her daughter honoured one National Day of Truth and Reconciliation by visiting an aunt who was able to share some valuable insight into our family history. Community acceptance came in part with our successful application, as we became recognized Métis citizens, and we were able to vote for the ratification of the MNA Constitution as a crucial step towards our community’s right to self-determination.
Self-identification is a more difficult hurdle to clear. In addition to the pressures outlined above, questions of blood quantum can promote the sense that our perspective is inferior to those of Métis people with stronger family connections to their community, and to those of First Nations and Inuit peoples.
We have had to remind ourselves that just
I was one of the last ones in our family branch to apply for my status, because I was worried I didn’t have a strong enough connection to the Métis community to justify it. Going through law school is ultimately what changed my mind. I learned more about Canada’s legal history of discrimination and betrayal, about Indigenous constitutions, and about the issues still faced by Indigenous communities. I realized the only reason I did not feel connected to my community was because colonialism had severed that connection, and I felt like it was up to me to start rediscovering the knowledge my family had lost. I lived with my grandparents and Métis great-grandpa for a period of my childhood, and we have an incredibly close connection. And yet, I had no idea that my late great-grandpa had ever been on a reserve, let alone grew up on one, until we started working on this article.
- Kaelyn Macaulay
There are profound and persistent misunderstandings about Métis people, misunderstandings that extend to both the identity of Métis people and their rights as Aboriginal people. In some cases, they have even been subject to misunderstanding or rejection by other Aboriginal people.13
- Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996
because we are expressing our identity does not mean that we are trying to speak over other Indigenous voices—we believe that every perspective is valuable in the effort to decolonialize (and re-Indigenize) Turtle Island. Indigenous identities are as diverse as the people who carry them, and they
ENDNOTES:
cannot be reduced to one perfect model or ideal. Our family has been exploring classes on beading, language, and history to learn more about Métis cultural practices. Kaelyn and her sister Karly wore custom ribbon skirts at their respective university convocations. For us, it is important to share stories of Indigenous resistance and success, to help reverse the prevalence of negative stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples in Canada. This modern form of Métis resistance relies on a series of affirmations: you belong here, your voice matters, and you deserve to celebrate your history. These are sentiments that are sorely lacking in the way many Canadians view Indigenous status, but also in the way that many Métis individuals seem to view themselves. It is our hope that the social stigma left behind by harmful colonial regimes of the past will continue to recede, and more Métis families will feel empowered to confidently explore their cultural identities.
1. Pursuant to the ratification of the Otipemisiwak Métis Government Constitution and the 2023 General Election, the Métis Nation of Alberta has since began its transition to the Otipemisiwak Métis Government.
2. See e.g. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Looking Forward, Looking Back, vol 1 (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1996) at 137-138 for a summary of pre-Confederation enfranchisement initiatives such as the 1857 Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province; “Potlatch Ban”, Living Tradition, online: <umistapotlatch.ca/ potlatch_interdire-potlatch_ban-eng.php> [RCAP vol 1].
3. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), online: <ehprnh2mwo3. exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf> at 1.
4. Ibid at 271.
5. RCAP vol 1, supra note 1 at 169-171; Lenard Monkman, “Historical Ban on Potlatch Ceremony Has Lingering Effects for Indigenous Women, Author Says”, CBC News (25 March 2017), online: <cbc. ca/news/indigenous/historical-ban-spirituality-felt-indigenous-women-today-1.4036528>.
6. Margaret Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln, US: University of Nebraska Press, 2014) at 173; “Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence” vol 1 (Ottawa: Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House
of Commons, 1947) at 155; Patrick Johnston, Native Children and the Child Welfare System (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1983) at 3.
7. Jacobs, ibid at 179.
8. Focus Canada, Canadian Public Opinion about Indigenous Peoples and Reconciliation (Fall 2021), online: <www.environicsinstitute.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/fc2021indigenous-peoples-final-sept-29d44baa3c6d8147c787937fa72130c28b.pdf?sfvrsn=c6caed70_0>; Assembly of First Nations, Views of Canadians on Indigenous Issues (April 2020), online: <www. afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020-1579-AFN-Populated-Report-with-Tabs.pdf>.
9. Allyson Stevenson, Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021) at 4.
10. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Perspectives and Realities, vol 4 (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1996) at 191 [RCAP vol 4].
11. Metis Nation of Alberta, “Metis Identity”, online: <albertametis.com/metis-rights/metisidentification/>.
12. R v Powley, 2003 SCC 43 at para 30.
13. RCAP vol 4, supra note 9 at 4.
( r e ) p rodu C ing
r ela T ions : p erspe CT i V es on m é T is K inship and i den T i T y
By Terry Beaulieu
A descendant of the Red River Metis, Dr. Terry Beaulieu is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Prior to relocating to Mik’ma’ki Terry received his Doctorate in Anthropology and Archaeology from the University of Calgary. His archaeological research involves applying Indigenous perspectives to disciplinary practices that have historically been approached from a primarily Western viewpoint.
The only memory I have of my grandfather was when I was six years old. He had travelled across the country to visit and was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house talking with my mother when my father walked into the room.
“So, dad,” interjected my father, “what do you know about the story of ‘Indian blood’ in the family?”
Upon hearing my father’s query my grandfather clenched a thick, meaty hand into a massive fist that he then brought down with a crash onto the counter.
“There is NO Indian blood in us,” he bellowed, “we are French, through and through, we are NOT Métis!”
And that was it, my grandfather would entertain no further discussion on the topic. I did not see my grandfather again after that visit. He died a few years later, and a few years after his death, my father too died—without ever knowing the truth.
More than a decade later, I was conducting genealogical research when I stumbled across my grandfather’s name in the 1901 Canada Census. Two of the column headings caught my attention. One, titled “Colour,” was filled in for his family with the letter “R;” and the other, titled “Racial or Tribal Origin,” was completed with the cryptic letters “FB.”1 Unsure of the meaning of those labels, I continued digging until I found a companion document: the 1901 “Instructions to Chief Officers, Commissioners, and Enumerators.”2
Those instructions included the explanations for the cryptic labels. The letter “R” stood for, as suspected, “red.” While that seemed a bit odd, it was the description of the “FB” that really set me back. It read: “Persons of mixed white and red blood—commonly known as ‘breeds’—will be described by
addition of the initial letters ‘F.B.’ for French breed….”3 My grandfather had always been a mystery to me, someone I knew mostly from stories told to me by others. Now, with the discovery that the government had categorized him and his family as “Red French breeds,” that mystery only deepened.
Accepting the possibility of my Métisness was challenging. I vividly remembered my grandfather’s outburst, but now this census document...if what he had said were true, why did the census say otherwise? I was confused about who I was. Even when I tried to accept being Métis I felt like an imposter, like somebody pretending to be Indigenous. Even when one of my dad’s older brothers took my brother and me to get our Métis cards a few years later, I still felt uneasy. For our uncle there was no question about our Métisness, and he proudly—and boisterously—presented the two of us to the local Métis office to secure our Métis cards. There was clearly no doubt in his mind. Every time I thought about the issue, though, and every time I looked at that card, my mind raced back to my parents’ kitchen. If the card were true, why would my grandfather so forcefully say otherwise? Why would he lie about something like that? It was something I simply could not reconcile. For years, I remained unsure and confused about my heritage. Then, one afternoon, I was flipping through the pages of an interestinglooking book when I stopped in my tracks. There was a picture I had seen before. It was a photograph of my great grandparents— my dad’s grandfather and grandmother. I read the caption. It identified them as the people I knew them to be, but more than that, it identified them as the author’s greatgrandparents. The author, it turned out, was one of my cousins (well, second cousin, technically speaking). I was particularly
struck by one section detailing what happened after the death of the author’s grandmother. She had denied having Métis heritage, but upon her death, people around her revealed that of course she was Métis— all her relations were. It was a revelation for my cousin that his grandmother—and consequently he as well—was Métis. The most interesting thing for me, however, was who his grandmother was. She was my grandfather’s older sister, and it was her name that had been scratched into that early census document on the line directly above his. She too had been labelled a “Red French breed” by the government, and it seemed she too had attempted to hide her Métis heritage later in life.
This revelation certainly seemed to add credence to the idea that my father, and I, do indeed have Métis heritage. But I could not get my grandfather’s declaration out of my mind. The last thing I wanted was to be a fraud. I was spurred on to do more research and dove into Métis Scrip records. There I found record after record of my ancestors’ applications for Métis Scrip, Scrip affidavits, and the Scrip coupons issued in their names. My Métis ancestry was clear. My uncle had not been wrong when he escorted my brother and me into that local Métis office.
When reflecting upon what I had learned, though, I became more and more perplexed— why would both my grandfather and his sister hide the fact they were Métis? The more I pondered the question, the angrier I became with my grandfather. His refusal to acknowledge his ancestry had robbed my father of knowing his heritage, and it had robbed his grandchildren—me and my brother—from growing up knowing who we are. What, I pondered, gave him that right?
I became involved with the local Métis
community, started attending Métis gatherings and meetings, and forged relationships with other Métis individuals. I was surprised to learn my experience was not unique, and that many people shared stories similar to mine—they were just discovering their Métis heritage after having recently learned their grandparents had hidden their Métis ancestry from them. What, I wondered, had led so many from earlier generations to hide their Métis heritage?
The answer to that question has its origins in events that happened over a century ago, after the Canadian Militia overran the vastly outnumbered Métis forces at Batoche during the waning days of the 1885 Métis Resistance: “After the Battle of Batoche the Métis were quite simply an unwanted people.”4 Without title to their lands, they were swept away by a tide of immigration, and, in an effort to survive, most Métis adopted one of three survival strategies.5 They attempted to join a First Nations group, opted to continue traditional lifeways, or tried to assimilate into Euro-Canadian society.6 None of those options were without cost. Most who endeavoured to join First Nations groups were denied government services by the Department of Indian Affairs and thus fared even worse than their First Nations brethren.7 Despite being landless, others tried to continue their traditional lifestyle but soon found themselves “on the fringes of Indian reserves and white communities, or on road allowances,”8 “occupying quicklyconstructed shantytowns…many of which quickly deteriorated into Canada’s first 20th century slums.”9 Some tried to avoid the stigma and prejudice of being identified as “Road Allowance People” by giving up or denying their Indigenous roots in order to become accepted into white society, at
the expense of their historical identity,10 as “there was little advantage to claiming Métis heritage and much to be lost.”11
A Métis dark period persisted well into the middle part of the 20th century; “by the 1950s the term ‘Métis’ was a dirty word in the Prairies.”12 From as early as the 1896 creation of St. Paul des Métis, church and government administrators referred to Métis less as an ethnic group than as a social problem, defining them as ‘poor’ and ‘landless.’13 That phenomenon, of characterizing Métis as pathology and problem, persisted well into the 20th century. Numerous government studies from the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s were created to examine the conditions of Métis, and virtually all continued to reify perceptions of Métis as pathology and problem with terms such as ‘maladapted’ and ‘poverty-stricken.’14
The more I learned, the more my position about my grandfather softened. He lived and grew up through the worst of the Métis dark period. I would never know what, or how many, racist encounters pushed him to make the choices he made. How could I judge him for those choices? How could I criticize him for how he determined to best deal with the societal prejudices and discrimination he faced?
In 2021 I had a version of this story published and soon afterward received a phone call from one of my cousins about the article.15 I was taken aback when she began our phone conversation with “Oh boy, you have really pissed off some of our cousins!”
“Why?” I wondered.
“How dare you portray our grandfather like that,” she lectured.
I was perplexed. I thought I had portrayed
him in a very positive light—as a man caught in circumstances beyond his control doing his best to ensure his family’s survival. His approach has been described as the most successful strategy for dealing with the conditions Métis faced throughout that time.16
As our conversation unwound, the mystery of my grandfather grew. While my memory of him centred around a demonstrative statement of his Frenchness, my cousin’s included fond memories of him embracing his Métisness. She never recalled him denying he was Métis. My cousin’s experiences with our grandfather, it turned out, were very different from my own.
Why did my grandfather embrace his Métis heritage with some of his grandchildren, but not with others? I may never know the full answer to that question, but I suspect it revolves around intersections between kinship and prejudice, and between identity and politics. While my cousins and I have the same grandfather, we do not share the same grandmother. My cousins’ grandmother hailed from a well-known Métis family, which was not the case for my grandmother. With his second marriage— to my grandmother—it could be that our grandfather saw the opportunity to construct an identity he hoped would enable his family to move beyond the racism and prejudice directed towards Métis at the time.
Shortly after his marriage to my grandmother, he appeared to have begun actively constructing his French-only identity. For instance, prior to his marriage to her, the birth places of his parents were recorded in every Canada Census as Manitoba.17 After his marriage to her, however, their birth places were recorded as Quebec.18 It is a small change, but one that seems not to have been an oversight or
clerical error. Rather, it was a deliberate shift intended to support a claim of being “French, through and through.” In deliberately adopting such a position, our grandfather hoped to further his family’s move away from the margins of a Canadian society that systematically and deliberately discriminated against Métis and towards acceptance within the mainstream Canadian milieu.
I have come to understand he made those decisions, not because of a flaw in his character, as I had initially believed, but rather because of the omnipresent weight of colonial forces bearing down on him. Far from a negative characterization of his person, it is a condemnation of the racist society in which he existed, and which in
ENDNOTES:
many respects continues to exist today.
My evolving relationship with my grandfather’s history and narratives has paralleled my evolving perception of Indigeneity and kinship. Colonial understandings of kinship have always preferred a static, reified perspective of relations and kin. Kinship, however, is much more fluid and relational than Western beliefs often want to accept. My grandfathers’ story is a reminder of how structural and systemic forces such as colonialism, with its inherent institutional racism, contribute to (re)constructions and (re)productions of identity and kin affiliations.
1. Canada, Library and Archives Canada, Census Search 1901, The Territories, District number 203, sub-district number X, page 1, Image number z000180498 (Ottawa: Census Office, 2020), online: <www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1901/Pages/1901.aspx>.
2. Canada, Library and Archives Canada, Fourth Census of Canada 1901: Instructions to Chief Officers Commissioners and Enumerators (Ottawa: Census Office, 2020), online: <www.bac-lac. gc.ca/eng/census/1901/Pages/1901.aspx>.
3. Ibid.
4. John W Friesen & Virginia Lyons Friesen, We Are Included! The Métis People of Canada Realize Riel’s Vision (Calgary: Detsilig, 2004) at 97.
5. John Weinstein, Quiet Revolution West: The Rebirth of Métis Nationalism (Calgary: Fifth House, 2007) at 20.
6. See generally John W Friesen, The Riel/Real Story: An Interpretive History of the Metis People of Canada (Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1996) [Friesen, "The Riel/Real Story"]; Friesen & Friesen, supra note 4.
7. D Bruce Sealey & Antoine S Lussier, The Métis: Canada's Forgotten People (Winnipeg: Manitoba Métis Federation Press, 1975) at 147.
8. Weinstein, supra note 5.
9. Friesen, "The Riel/Real Story", supra note 6 at 84.
10. See generally Marcel Giraud, “Western Metis After the Insurrection”, University of Saskatchewan Archives (1956), online: <digital.scaa.sk.ca/ourlegacy/permalink/25675>; Weinstein, supra note 5 at 22; Jean Teillet, The North-West is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, The Métis Nation (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2019).
11. Teillet, supra note 10 at 432.
12. Ibid.
13. Gerhard J Ens & Joe Sawchuk, From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) at 240.
14. Ibid at 241.
15. Terry Beaulieu, "Why My Métis Grandfather spent a Lifetime Denying His Heritage", Huffpost Canada (16 February 2021), online: <www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/metis-culturalerasure_ca_60240096c5b6173dd2fb2d34>.
16. Friesen, "The Riel/Real Story", supra note 6; Weinstein, supra note 5.
17. Canada, Library and Archives Canada, Census Search 1921, Saskatchewan, District number 218, sub-district number 14, page 21, Image number e003118285 (Ottawa: Census Office, 2020), online: <www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1921/Pages/search.aspx>.
18. Canada, Library and Archives Canada, Census Search 1931, Manitoba, District number 51, subdistrict number 184, page 20, Image number e011715214, (Ottawa: Census Office, 2020), online: <recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/Census/Index>.
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