Tuesday, August 1, 2023

In an opinion published in the Globe & Mail (July 31), Professor Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii), Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the Faculty of Law, writes about the impact of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet shuffle on Indigenous relations. 

Professor Sanderson is Beaver Clan, from the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. His recent book Valley of the Birdtail, co-authored with his former student Andrew Stobo Sniderman (JD 2014), was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize and the winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.

"Now, when we think of treaties with Indian nations, we think of a written document, duly signed – a contract, more or less, that made clear who was giving up what and to whom. But the treaty meetings in Philadelphia were nothing like this. Instead, the treaty was a relationship that changed and adapted to new situations year after year. The relationship became known as the Covenant Chain, and annual treaty meetings were conscious efforts to “polish the chain.”

Today, I am thinking of these meetings, and the connections they fostered over the decades, in the context of the current relationship between Indigenous and federal government leaders. What Franklin recorded in his folios was the essence of a long-term and regularly renewed relationship, not just between nations, but between friends who, over time, came to call one another brothers, and who saw themselves not merely in a political alliance, but a familial one."

Read the full opinion in the Globe & Mail