Apitipi Anicinapek Nation gathering brings together Treaty Knowledge Speakers

By Catherine Murton Stoehr

APITIPI ANICINAPEK NATION — It turns out that conversations about “treaties” or “treaty” held on the land in community can have quite a different tone than such discussions generally do in universities or courtrooms.

Tanya Matthews organized the first inaugural Apitipi Anicinapek (formerly Wahgoshig) Treaty Knowledge Speakers’ Gathering to bring knowledge she gained from her time at Nipissing University home for her community to discuss and comment on.

The result was a series of unapologetically blunt talks that pulled no punches about the moral and practical shortcomings of Canada’s treaties with First Nations in the first instance, and Canada’s subsequent breaking of those already unfair agreements.

Apitipi Anicinapek Chief, June Black opened the event.

“I have a problem with the treaty, I don’t recognize it.”

Chief Black told her community members and the speakers assembled both in-person and via Zoom that on a recent visit to the community’s traditional home territory at Low Bush River, she was approached by a stranger who asked what she was doing. As both the Chief and a member of Apitpi Anicinapek, Chief Black was offended to be questioned in that way in that place. She explained to the gathering that not only is it her community members’ right to be at Low Bush River, they have special obligations to the land in their territory including ceremonies they undertake annually that are themselves “the basis of treaty.”

“This is a very important event where we are talking treaty and what we understood the treaty to be and it wasn’t what they (the British/Canadians) put on paper.”

Chief Black pointed out a common Indigenous criticism of Canada’s colonial treaties, and made a critical distinction between sharing land and ceding rights:

“Our people didn’t speak English or understand what they were signing. Our people didn’t have a problem with sharing the land, but they didn’t realize the colonizers were taking rights.”

Blair Beaucage of Nipissing First Nation used Arthur Manuel’s concept of the 0.2 per cent economy to challenge the idea that Canadian treaties are “reciprocal” on a practical level.  Manuel said that all reserve land in Canada comprises 0.2 per cent of Canada’s landmass which is not adequate to support self – sustaining Indigenous economies.

Beaucage made the room laugh saying, “That’s cheap!  That’s real cheap, Canada!”

Jomarie Einish, a Cree Naskapi person from northern Quebec and also a Concordia University student, spoke about the origins of the much-lauded James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.

“The Montreal hydro electric dam people wanted to come in without consultation. People in our region heard about it through the newspapers; no phone call to Council.”

Einish said the communities responded by forming a Grand Council which now ensures that the Quebec Government can’t ignore community rights.

Apitipi Anicinapek is an Algonquin community. Fellow Algonquin Veldon Coburn, a professor at the University of Ottawa and member of Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, shared extensive information about a modern treaty, the ongoing Algonquin land claim.

Coburn described many of the problems inherent in Canadian Treaty-making.

According to Coburn, when the Calder decision made it impossible for Canada to continue ignoring treaty obligations, Algonquin people in Ontario and Quebec researched their traditional territory and submitted a “Petition to the Crown” in March of 1983 asking for acknowledgement of their property, support to remove squatters, and compensation.

After nearly three decades of negotiation, the current agreement proposes to return 476 square kilometres, far less than the 36, 000 claimed by the Algonquin. The returned land is to be held by the Algonquins as regular property with no Indigenous land rights attached to it. Coburn said this arrangement might lead to sale of the new lands because the lack of rights and wide distribution between the parcels reduces their usefulness as a land base.

Coburn explained that the Algonquin’s negotiating power has been diluted by a group with 7,000 members called the Algonquins of Ontario which supports the weakened terms and can easily outvote even the full membership of Pikwàkanagàn. Ontario is now pushing for the agreement to be signed quickly.

Long time Apitipi council member Betty Singer reminded the group of the modern context in which treaties are upheld or ignored when she shared the story of her own life, including several years confined in one of Canada’s Indigenous Child Internment Centres.

Of course, Canada’s breaking of treaties doesn’t mean that treaties in general are bad. Tanya Lukin Linklater, Alutik of Kodiak Island in Alaska from the villages of Afognak and Port Lions, reminded the group that, “Treaties are vows to one another, a covenant relationship and unchangeable in nature.”

Like Chief Black, Lukin Linklater said that treaties emphasize sharing and “cannot be changed or altered.  As promises made to the Creator, they last forever and are not destroyed by practice of being broken.”

Apitipi community member and Athapasca University PhD candidate Denise Nadeau suggested a way forward with the concept of “Kindness accountability”, which she said is “a more Indigenous way of being accountable. We have to have hard and uncomfortable conversations to move treaty processes forward – not just with colonizers, but with our families, too.”

It was also expressed that non-Indigenous people must take the time to learn and speak to their own community about the specific terms of actual historic treaties, strongly making the case that the obligations laid out by treaties are not theoretical or cultural, but material and legally and ethically binding.

Blair Beaucage suggested a strategy that didn’t rely on cooperation from non-Indigenous Canadians.

“Should [Nipissing First Nation] make a government with the other Robinson Huron Nations? They understand us. We won’t rip ourselves off and give ourselves 0.2 per cent. We’ll give ourselves a little better than that. Do we start buying land back? It sucks we have to do it, but which other way do we get part of the economy?”

Beaucage acknowledged the treaties as well.

“Chi-miigwech to our ancestors for what they did signing the treaty that we are backed up by and have protections from. What they did saved our rights to land. Individually, we are pretty rich, we have to figure out how to be rich as nations. Chi-miigwech to our ancestors!”