This afternoon, at the amphitheatre at Fairy Lake, I heard the most remarkable unscripted address from Kim Wheatley, a Shawanaga First Nation Reserve Anishinaabe Ojibway grandmother who carries the Spirit name Head or Leader of the Fireflower and is Turtle clan. 

It must have lasted a good one and a half hours but it flew by.

The audience was transfixed.

She spared no-one. She talked about the horrors of the residential schools. She crucified the Catholic Church and the response of Pope Francis. She lambasted the Federal Government and the Crown. And it was all delivered in a gentle cadence. But inside she was boiling with anger, decribing the pain she felt.

Interwoven into this assault on the institutions of oppression were personal stories drawn from her own experience. She described the traumas that were inflicted on her people – the mindless slights and the deeper institutional racism.

Her speech was moving and profound. 

The Treaties

I don’t know where her narrative will take us. Her description of the Treaty process was fascinating. The treaties were written only in English, their meaning determined by the Courts.

Her people shared their land with the new settlers, negotiating treaties with the Crown but soon the relationship changed. It was no longer a Treaty between equals - two Sovereign nations. It evolved into something very different.

On my bookshelf sits a commentary on the Treaties and the Treaty Relationships.

It starts with this story from Karine Duhamel:

“In October 2017, twenty-one First Nations representing approximately thirty thousand people took the Federal and Ontario governments to Court, alleging that the Treaty commitments made by the man originally assigned to negotiate them in 1850, Special Commissioner William Benjamin Robinson, were due for renegotiation. The case focusses on a central question: How should Treaty terms negotiated nearly 170 years ago be interpreted today?

The First Nations who signed Robinson’s Treaties argue that the Federal and provincial governments have draw considerable resource wealth from their territory without ever renegotiating the terms Robinson made even though Robinson included a clause for renegotiation. The annual annuity to band members remains the same today as it was in 1874 – four dollars per person.”

Discuss.