INDG 201 / CDNST 201 is an introductory survey of the history, cultures, and contemporary circumstances of Indigenous Peoples within the territory currently known as Canada. The course is structured around Lisa Monchalin’s The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Justice in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and is taught at the University of Waterloo, housed in the Indigenous Studies Programme at St. Paul’s University College. The class meets on the Dish with One Spoon Territory — the traditional lands of the Attawandaron (Neutral) Nation, the Anishinaabeg/Anishinabek (Three Fires Confederacy and Mississauga), the Rotinonshón:ni Six Nations Confederacy, and the Wyandot People. The University of Waterloo sits within Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract, land promised to the Six Nations by the British Crown in 1784.

Unit 1: Course Introduction and Instructor Positionality

Who Is Roland Robinson?

The instructor, Rowland Keshena Robinson, opens the first meeting by situating himself clearly within the subject matter. He is a member of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, an Algonkian-speaking Nation closely related to the Anishinaabeg, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Mi’kmaq, Lenape, and other Algonkian-speaking Nations of the Great Lakes, southern Quebec, the American Northeast, and Atlantic Canada. His mother is Menominee; his father is Bermudian. He was born and raised in Bermuda — which was governed by a form of white-minority government until 1998 — and he grew up spending summers on and around the Menominee reservation in northern Wisconsin as well as in Milwaukee. He considers himself both a Native North American and a West Indian person. He arrived in Canada in 2005 to study Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Waterloo, continuing through a Master’s degree in Public Issues Anthropology and a PhD in Sociology, both at Waterloo, which he completed in February 2020.

This act of self-introduction is not incidental. It is a pedagogical practice rooted in the concept of positionality — the acknowledgement that every scholar, teacher, and student comes to knowledge from a specific social location shaped by race, nationality, gender, class, and lived experience. Robinson’s positionality as a Native person, an immigrant, a person who grew up under colonial governance in Bermuda, and a scholar trained in critical Native theory directly shapes how this course is designed and what it foregrounds.

Robinson’s research focuses on critical Native theory, decolonial theory, theories of race and racialization, settler colonialism, semiotics, cultural production, Marxism, political ontology, epistemology, sovereignty, the state, and socio-legal theory. This theoretical breadth means the course is not simply descriptive history — it asks students to think analytically about power, structure, and the processes through which Indigenous Peoples have been governed, dispossessed, and simultaneously continued to resist and persist.

What Is Indigenous Studies?

Indigenous Studies (sometimes called Native Studies or First Nations Studies in Canadian contexts) is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that centres the experiences, histories, cultures, legal situations, and political circumstances of Indigenous Peoples. It draws on history, anthropology, law, political science, sociology, literary studies, and philosophy, but it is not simply a subset of any of those disciplines. Indigenous Studies insists on taking Indigenous perspectives, epistemologies, and political claims seriously — not merely as objects of analysis by outsiders, but as frameworks that can themselves generate knowledge.

In the Canadian context, the term Indigenous is increasingly used as the inclusive term encompassing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples, reflecting the language of the Canadian Constitution Act (1982) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The course uses “Indigenous Peoples” as the primary term, though older legal and political designations — such as “Indian” (as defined by the Indian Act), “Aboriginal,” and “Native” — appear throughout primary sources and must be understood in their historical and legal contexts.

The course description frames its central question clearly: what has shaped, and what continues to shape, the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the broader Canadian state and society? That relationship cannot be understood without sustained attention to colonialism — the specific historical process through which European empires claimed sovereignty over Indigenous territories, restructured Indigenous political, economic, and cultural life, and created the legal and institutional apparatus that continues to govern Indigenous Peoples today.

The Course Structure and Its Logic

The course works sequentially through Monchalin’s The Colonial Problem, which is itself an unusual textbook: written by an Indigenous scholar from the Niagara region of Ontario, it frames crime, justice, policing, and law not as abstract institutions but as instruments and legacies of colonial power. The chapters move from Indigenous worldviews and governance, through the history of colonialism and treaties, through assimilation policies, and into contemporary issues including violence against Indigenous women, corporate-state collusion, land claims, and Indigenous justice alternatives.

Robinson structures the weekly sessions not as traditional lectures but as dialogical discussions, what he describes as “group office hours.” Students are expected to come having done the readings, prepared to ask questions and make comments. This pedagogical choice reflects a principle drawn from Indigenous education philosophies: knowledge is not simply transmitted from an authority to passive recipients but is collectively worked through in community.

A general course content trigger warning applies throughout: the materials include discussions of colonial violence, assimilation policies (including the residential school system and its harms), intergenerational trauma, and violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. Students are encouraged to practice self-care and to communicate with the instructor about alternative arrangements where needed.

Unit 2: Indigenous Worldviews and Ways of Knowing

The Diversity of Indigenous Peoples Before and After Contact

One of the most important correctives offered by Indigenous Studies is the insistence that “Indigenous Peoples” are not a monolithic group with a single culture, language, or worldview. Before European contact, what is now Canada was home to hundreds of distinct Nations with their own languages, governance systems, ceremonies, kinship structures, economies, and cosmologies. In the northwest, Nations such as the Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Nisga’a built complex hierarchical societies organized around the potlatch ceremony and elaborate clan systems. On the Plains, Peoples such as the Blackfoot Confederacy (Niitsitapi), the Cree, and the Nakoda organized their lives around buffalo hunting and elaborate military and diplomatic alliances. In the northeast, the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy), composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later Tuscarora Nations, had developed one of the most sophisticated representative democratic governance systems in the world — one that some historians argue influenced the framers of the American Constitution. In the Great Lakes region, the Anishinaabeg — including the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa — formed the Three Fires Confederacy and occupied territories across what are now Ontario, Manitoba, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In the Arctic, the Inuit developed survival technologies and social practices finely adapted to one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

This diversity is not merely a historical footnote. It means that generalizations about “Indigenous culture” are always approximate at best and distorting at worst. The course repeatedly returns to the specificity of particular Nations and communities while also identifying shared structural experiences — particularly the shared experience of being subjected to Canadian colonial policy.

Indigenous Worldviews: Some Common Threads

While acknowledging diversity, scholars have identified certain broad orientations that appear, with important variations, across many Indigenous worldviews in North America. These are not universal laws but recurring tendencies that contrast instructively with dominant Euro-Canadian epistemological and ontological assumptions.

Many Indigenous worldviews are relational in their fundamental orientation. The world is understood as a web of relationships — between humans and animals, between the living and the dead, between people and land. This is a radically different ontological starting point from the Cartesian dualism (mind vs. body, culture vs. nature, human vs. non-human) that underlies much of Western science and philosophy. In many Indigenous traditions, land is not property to be owned but a relative to be respected, a living entity with its own agency and claims on human behaviour.

Reciprocity is another recurring theme: relationships — whether with land, animals, or other humans — entail obligations. Hunting, for example, is often understood not simply as resource extraction but as a relationship requiring ceremony, respect, and reciprocation. The concept of Mino-Bimaadiziwin in Anishinaabe thought — often translated as “the good life” or “living well” — encapsulates an ideal of balance, harmony, and right relationship with the natural and social worlds.

Oral tradition has been the primary vehicle for transmitting knowledge across generations in most Indigenous societies. This includes not only stories and histories but legal traditions, scientific knowledge (about astronomy, ecology, medicine), and ethical frameworks. Oral traditions are not simply a less sophisticated alternative to writing; they are sophisticated knowledge systems with their own forms of precision, peer review (through communal storytelling and correction), and adaptive capacity. The dismissal of oral traditions as unreliable or mythological by colonial courts and governments has been a mechanism for dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their histories and legal claims.

Ceremony integrates what Western thought separates: politics, spirituality, ecology, and social life. The potlatch on the Northwest Coast, the Sundance on the Plains, the Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society) of the Anishinaabeg, and the condolence ceremonies of the Haudenosaunee are simultaneously religious events, political assemblies, economic redistributions, and occasions for renewing social bonds. Colonial law explicitly outlawed several of these ceremonies — the potlatch was banned from 1885 to 1951, the Sundance suppressed during much of the same period — as part of a systematic effort to destroy the cultural foundations of Indigenous political and social life.

Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk)

One of the most influential contemporary frameworks for bridging Indigenous and Western knowledge systems is Two-Eyed Seeing, called Etuaptmumk in the Mi’kmaw language. It was developed by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall of Eskasoni First Nation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The concept proposes learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges, while using both eyes together for the benefit of all.

Two-Eyed Seeing is not simply “adding Indigenous content” to existing Western curricula. It is a deeper methodological challenge: asking whether the frameworks and questions that structure research and education are themselves adequate to the full complexity of the world. Applied in fisheries science, for example, it has meant taking seriously Mi’kmaw observations about salmon behaviour that Western population models had not captured. Applied in health care, it has meant designing services that honour both biomedical treatment and traditional healing practices.

The concept is important in this course because it frames the epistemological stakes of Indigenous Studies: the course is not simply about Indigenous people as an object of study from a presumed Western-neutral standpoint. It asks students to examine the standpoint itself.

Unit 3: Indigenous Governance

Pre-Contact Governance Systems

Before European arrival, Indigenous Nations across what is now Canada operated sophisticated governance systems grounded in their own legal traditions, political philosophies, and social structures. The range of these systems was enormous. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, recorded in wampum belts and transmitted orally through the Condolence Ceremony, established a federal system in which the Grand Council of the Confederacy made decisions by consensus among clan mothers, chiefs, and the member Nations. The Anishinaabeg governed through clan (doodem) systems that distributed political, spiritual, military, and food-gathering responsibilities. Plains Nations governed through council systems and soldier societies that regulated communal hunts and warfare. Coastal Nations like the Haida operated through complex systems of ranked clans and hereditary leaders whose authority was validated through potlatches.

A crucial point made consistently by Indigenous legal scholars like John Borrows is that these governance systems did not simply disappear with colonization. They were suppressed, driven underground, and deprived of formal recognition by the colonial state, but they persisted. The contemporary resurgence of Indigenous governance — through self-government agreements, land claims, and assertions of jurisdiction — draws on living traditions, not simply nostalgic reconstructions.

Monchalin’s Contribution: Governance and Crime

Chapter 3 of The Colonial Problem examines Indigenous governance specifically in relation to how Indigenous communities addressed wrongdoing. This framing is significant because mainstream criminology and law tend to presuppose that “justice” means state prosecution and incarceration. Monchalin shows that many Indigenous governance systems approached what Euro-Canadian law calls “crime” in fundamentally different ways: emphasizing restoration of relationships, community healing, reintegration of offenders, and addressing the root causes of harmful behaviour rather than simply punishing individuals.

The concept of restorative justice — now widely discussed in mainstream criminology and justice reform — has deep roots in Indigenous legal traditions. Practices such as circle sentencing (used among Cree and other Nations) and Navajo peacemaking (in the American context) prioritize bringing together offenders, victims, families, and community members to discuss harm, its causes, and how relationships can be repaired. The colonial disruption of these systems — replacing them with a justice apparatus that dramatically over-incarcerates Indigenous people — is one of Monchalin’s central arguments.

Unit 4: Canadian Colonialism — History and Continuity

What Is Colonialism?

Colonialism refers to a political and economic system in which a foreign power claims sovereignty over a territory, dispossesses its inhabitants, exploits its resources, and imposes its own cultural, legal, and political institutions. Scholars distinguish between different forms of colonialism. Settler colonialism, the form most relevant to Canada, is a specific structure in which colonizers come not merely to extract resources and leave but to permanently settle the land and replace Indigenous populations.

Patrick Wolfe’s formulation — that the “logic of elimination” is the organizing principle of settler colonialism — is foundational here. Settler colonialism does not merely subjugate Indigenous Peoples; it seeks to eliminate them as distinct Peoples in order to clear the land for permanent settlement. This elimination takes many forms: physical violence (warfare, disease), legal mechanisms (the Indian Act), cultural destruction (residential schools), and demographic absorption (assimilation policies). Crucially, Wolfe argues, these processes are not historical relics but ongoing structures. Canada’s relationship to Indigenous Peoples today is still shaped by the logic of elimination.

Early Contact and the Fur Trade

European contact with the peoples of what is now Canada began in earnest in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with the Norse having made earlier, more fleeting contacts. The early colonial economy was organized primarily around the fur trade, which created an unprecedented interdependence between European trading companies and Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous hunters, trappers, guides, and diplomatic intermediaries were essential to the trade. Indigenous women often served as crucial cultural and economic mediators — through marriage alliances known as à la façon du pays (after the custom of the country) — bridging Indigenous and European trading networks.

This early period was one of relative (though never equal) interdependence. The fur trade required Indigenous cooperation and knowledge. European traders were numerically small and militarily dependent on Indigenous alliances. The result was a period of negotiation, treaty-making, and cultural exchange alongside disease, displacement, and conflict.

The Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat Confederacies, in particular, played central roles in shaping early European political arrangements in the northeast. The French allied with the Huron-Wendat and Anishinaabeg; the Dutch and then the English allied with the Haudenosaunee. These alliances shaped the geopolitics of North America for over a century.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763

One of the most important legal documents in the history of Indigenous-Crown relations in Canada is the Royal Proclamation of 1763, issued by King George III following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. The Proclamation declared that Indigenous Peoples had rights to their territories that could not be extinguished except by formal treaty with the Crown. It created a framework for treaty-making as the legitimate mechanism for land cession.

The Proclamation has been described as both a protection and a limitation of Indigenous rights. It recognized Indigenous territorial rights but also asserted Crown sovereignty. It is now recognized in Section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as one of the foundational texts of Indigenous rights in Canada.

The Transition to Agricultural Settlement

The shift from fur-trade economy to agricultural settlement in the nineteenth century fundamentally transformed the relationship between colonial states and Indigenous Peoples. Where the fur trade required Indigenous presence on the land, agricultural settlement required Indigenous absence. The dispossession of Indigenous territories became the explicit project of colonial policy.

The numbered treaties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — negotiated between the Crown and First Nations across the Prairie west and north — were presented as agreements to share the land and secure peaceful settlement. However, the treaty-making process was deeply asymmetrical. Crown negotiators had explicit instructions to acquire the land as cheaply as possible. Many First Nations leaders understood the treaties as agreements about sharing and coexistence, not about surrendering sovereignty. Oral promises made during treaty negotiations — about hunting and fishing rights, agricultural assistance, medicine, and education — were frequently omitted from the written texts or not honoured by the Crown.

Unit 5: Treaties, Rights, and Indigenous Law

The Nature of Treaties

Treaties between the Crown and Indigenous Nations are solemn agreements that have constitutional standing in Canada. They are recognized in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 as part of the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of Indigenous Peoples. There are two main categories of treaties in Canada: historic treaties (generally made before 1975) and modern treaties (land claims agreements made after 1975, beginning with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975).

The historic numbered treaties (Treaties 1 through 11, negotiated between 1871 and 1921) cover most of the Prairie provinces, parts of Ontario, and portions of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. Each treaty has its own specific provisions, but common elements include the creation of reserves, annual annuity payments, promises of agricultural assistance and education, and the recognition of rights to hunt and fish on unoccupied Crown lands.

The Supreme Court of Canada has issued landmark decisions clarifying treaty rights. In R. v. Sparrow (1990), the Court confirmed that the federal government cannot extinguish Aboriginal rights without explicit legislative language and must justify any infringement. In R. v. Marshall (1999), the Court recognized that Mi’kmaw treaty rights from 1760 treaties included the right to earn a moderate livelihood through fishing — a decision that sparked significant conflict in Nova Scotia between Indigenous fishers and non-Indigenous commercial interests, conflicts that continue to the present day.

The Honour of the Crown

Canadian constitutional law has developed the doctrine of the Honour of the Crown — the principle that the Crown must act with honour and integrity in all its dealings with Indigenous Peoples, and that treaty and Aboriginal rights must be interpreted generously in favour of Indigenous Peoples. This doctrine underpins the duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous communities when the Crown contemplates actions that might adversely affect their rights or title.

Section 35 and the Constitution Act, 1982

Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 provides constitutional protection for the “existing Aboriginal and treaty rights” of Aboriginal peoples of Canada. While this was a landmark achievement, the meaning of Section 35 has been worked out largely through litigation in the Supreme Court of Canada over the following four decades.

Key Supreme Court decisions interpreting Section 35 include Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), which recognized Aboriginal title as a distinct right to land held communally by an Aboriginal group that has occupied the land since before the assertion of Crown sovereignty, and Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests) (2004), which established the duty to consult and accommodate when the Crown contemplates decisions that might adversely affect established or asserted Aboriginal rights.

Unit 6: The Indian Act and Legal Manipulation

Origins and Purpose

The Indian Act of 1876 is the cornerstone of federal Indian policy in Canada. It consolidated and extended earlier colonial legislation into a single comprehensive statute governing virtually every aspect of the lives of “status Indians.” It defined who was legally an “Indian,” established the reserve system, vested title to reserve lands in the Crown, created the band council system as the only recognized form of Indigenous governance, controlled Indigenous movement (the pass system), prohibited the potlatch and other ceremonies, and subjected Indian finances to federal oversight through the Department of Indian Affairs.

The Indian Act is widely understood by Indigenous scholars and communities as an instrument of colonial domination. Its purpose was not to protect Indigenous rights but to manage the dispossession and eventual assimilation of Indigenous Peoples. The goal, as various officials and politicians stated explicitly in the nineteenth century, was to eliminate “the Indian problem” by eliminating Indians — not through mass violence (though violence was used) but through the slower processes of assimilation, enfranchisement (which meant losing Indian status), and the gradual dissolution of reserves.

Status and Enfranchisement

One of the most insidious mechanisms of the Indian Act was enfranchisement — the process by which an Indigenous person lost their legal “Indian” status and became a full Canadian citizen. This was presented as a grant of equality but functioned as a mechanism of dispossession: enfranchised individuals lost their right to live on reserves, lost access to treaty benefits, and were severed from their legal community.

Enfranchisement was sometimes voluntary but was frequently involuntary. Until 1985, Indigenous women who married non-Indigenous men were automatically enfranchised and stripped of their status, as were their children. An Indigenous man who obtained a university degree, became a doctor or lawyer, or served in the military could also be enfranchised. The Indian Act thus created perverse incentives against education and professional achievement for Indigenous men, and punished Indigenous women for their intimate choices.

The Bill C-31 amendments of 1985 restored status to many women and their children who had lost it through marriage, but the amendments also created a complex two-tier status system (sections 6(1) and 6(2)) that means the grandchildren of women who married non-Indigenous men are at risk of losing status entirely — a continuation of the same logic of attrition through a different mechanism.

The Pass System and Residential Schools Prehistory

The pass system, which had no legal basis in the Indian Act but was enforced by Indian Agents and the North-West Mounted Police from the 1880s onward, required Indigenous people on the Prairies to obtain written permission from their Indian Agent before leaving their reserves. This amounted to apartheid-like control of movement. The system was used to prevent Indigenous people from organizing politically, attending ceremonies, and seeking better economic opportunities off-reserve.

Unit 7: Assimilation and the Residential School System

The Logic of Assimilation

Assimilation as Canadian government policy expressed the settler colonial logic of elimination in its cultural form: rather than simply removing Indigenous Peoples from the land, the state sought to remove the “Indian” from the person. The goal was to absorb Indigenous Peoples into mainstream Canadian society by destroying Indigenous languages, cultures, spiritual practices, and kinship systems.

The most comprehensive and devastating instrument of assimilation was the residential school system, which operated from the 1870s to 1996 (when the last federally funded school, Gordon’s Residential School in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, closed). The system was jointly administered by the federal government and various Christian denominations, primarily the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the United Church (successor to the Methodist Church), and the Presbyterian Church.

The logic was articulated infamously by the first Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, who stated in 1920: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” The residential school system was the primary vehicle for this project.

Conditions and Abuses

Children, some as young as three or four years old, were forcibly removed from their families, often taken by Indian Agents, RCMP officers, or priests. They were transported to schools hundreds or thousands of kilometres from their communities. At school, they were stripped of their clothing, had their hair cut (a particularly significant violation in cultures where hair had spiritual meaning), given new names, and forbidden to speak their languages. Speaking one’s language could result in physical punishment — straps, beatings, mouth-washing with soap, and other forms of corporal punishment.

The schools were chronically underfunded. The federal government paid a per capita grant that was consistently below the actual cost of running the schools, which meant that children were often used as cheap labour to maintain school operations — farmwork for boys, domestic labour for girls — cutting into their educational time. Nutrition was frequently inadequate, and medical care was poor. The schools became incubators for tuberculosis and other diseases. Historical estimates suggest that the death rate in some schools was extraordinarily high — in some early periods approaching 25 to 50 percent of students.

Sexual abuse of children was widespread and systematic. The concentration of vulnerable children in institutions run by religious orders, often far from any oversight, created conditions in which predators could operate for years or decades. Survivors have testified about abuse by priests, brothers, nuns, and lay staff.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which operated from 2008 to 2015, was established as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 — the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. The TRC collected statements from more than 6,000 survivors, held seven national events across Canada, and produced a final report of six volumes totalling approximately 4,000 pages.

The TRC concluded that the residential school system constituted cultural genocide — a term chosen carefully and defined as the destruction of the structures and practices that allow a group to continue as a group. The TRC deliberately did not use the term “genocide” under the Genocide Convention, though subsequent scholarship has debated whether the full legal definition is met. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) used the term genocide more directly.

The TRC’s 94 Calls to Action represent a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, organized around child welfare, education, language and culture, health, justice, and other areas. They include calls for the repeal of Section 43 of the Criminal Code (which permits corporal punishment of children), the establishment of a national inquiry into MMIWG, the implementation of UNDRIP, the training of lawyers in the history of residential schools and Indigenous rights, and sustained public education. As of 2024, progress on implementation has been slow and uneven.

Intergenerational Trauma

The residential school system did not end its harms when the last school closed. Intergenerational trauma — sometimes called transgenerational trauma or historical trauma — refers to the transmission of the psychological and social effects of trauma across generations. Parents who were taken from their families as children and raised in abusive institutions without models of loving parental care often struggled to provide such care for their own children. Cultural knowledge, languages, and parenting practices were broken in transmission. The damage was compounded by the continued poverty, political marginalization, and racism that residential school survivors returned to in their communities.

The intergenerational effects of the residential school system are visible in elevated rates of mental health disorders, substance use, family violence, and child welfare involvement in many Indigenous communities. These are not evidence of cultural pathology or individual failure; they are the predictable consequences of sustained, deliberate, state-sponsored violence against families and communities over multiple generations.

Unit 8: Violence Against Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People

The Scale of the Crisis

Canada faces what the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls identified in 2019 as a national crisis and, more provocatively, a genocide. Indigenous women in Canada are murdered at a rate approximately four to seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, depending on the region and methodology used. Indigenous women constitute approximately 4 percent of Canada’s female population but, historically, have accounted for roughly 16 percent of all female homicides (and a higher percentage of unsolved homicides).

The highway known as the Highway of Tears — a 720-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in northern British Columbia — has become one of the most visible symbols of this crisis. Since the 1970s, at least 18 women have gone missing or been murdered along this highway, though Indigenous organizations estimate the actual number is much higher. Many of the victims were hitchhiking because of inadequate public transportation in the region — itself a product of underfunded infrastructure in remote Indigenous communities.

Colonial Roots of the Violence

Monchalin’s Chapter 9 situates violence against Indigenous women within the long history of colonialism. The sexualization and dehumanization of Indigenous women has colonial roots: European colonizers frequently portrayed Indigenous women as sexually available, morally loose, and undeserving of the protections afforded to “respectable” (i.e., white, European) women. This colonial imaginary licensed violence against Indigenous women and shaped the indifference of colonial institutions — police, courts, social services — to that violence.

The Sisters in Spirit initiative, launched by the Native Women’s Association of Canada in 2004, undertook the first systematic documentation of MMIWG cases, identifying over 600 cases (a figure that has since grown substantially). The federal government initially declined to launch a national inquiry, despite sustained calls from Indigenous organizations, families of victims, and international human rights bodies. A national inquiry was finally launched in 2016 under the Trudeau government.

The 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People — Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report — ran for three years and collected testimony from over 2,380 family members, survivors, experts, and knowledge keepers. It concluded that the violence constitutes genocide, perpetuated by the Canadian state through its colonial policies and institutions, and by the “deliberate race, identity, and gender-based genocide” targeting Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. The report includes 231 individual Calls for Justice.

Two-Spirit People

Two-spirit is a term coined by Indigenous people in 1990 at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian American Conference, as an English-language umbrella term for Indigenous people who fulfil traditional roles in their cultures for people of a third or alternative gender. Many Indigenous cultures had specific roles, names, and honours for people who embodied both masculine and feminine spiritual qualities or who lived in ways that transcended binary gender — Winkte among the Lakota, Nadleeh among the Navajo, and similar concepts across dozens of Nations.

Colonial Christianity aggressively suppressed these roles and identities, understanding them as sinful and perverse. The violence directed at two-spirit people in colonial and contemporary Canada is both anti-Indigenous and anti-queer, making their experience a particularly intense site of intersecting oppressions.

Unit 9: Corporations, Governments, and Indigenous Peoples

Resource Extraction as Colonial Continuity

Contemporary Indigenous-state relations in Canada cannot be understood without examining the role of resource extraction. Much of what Canada has historically defined as “empty” or “undeveloped” land — suitable for mining, forestry, oil and gas extraction, hydroelectric development — is unceded Indigenous territory or land subject to treaties whose terms have not been honoured. The interests of the Canadian state and the resource extraction industry are deeply intertwined, and they have frequently aligned against Indigenous rights and title.

Monchalin’s Chapter 10 examines this alignment directly, arguing that the “real criminals” in many contexts are not Indigenous individuals charged under the Criminal Code but governments and corporations that have systematically violated treaty obligations, flouted environmental protections, and ignored the rights of Indigenous communities.

Duty to Consult and FPIC

The Supreme Court’s articulation of the duty to consult in Haida Nation v. British Columbia (2004) and Taku River Tlingit First Nation v. British Columbia (2004) established that the Crown must consult with, and where appropriate accommodate, Aboriginal peoples when it contemplates decisions that might adversely affect their established or asserted rights. This duty is triggered by the Crown’s actual or constructive knowledge of a potential Aboriginal or treaty right and the contemplated Crown conduct that might adversely affect it.

The international standard is stronger: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) Article 32 requires that states obtain the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples before approving projects that affect their lands, territories, and resources. Canada voted against UNDRIP when it was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007 (one of only four countries to do so, alongside the United States, Australia, and New Zealand). Canada endorsed UNDRIP in 2010 and committed to its full implementation in 2016.

High-profile conflicts over resource projects on Indigenous territory — including the Dakota Access Pipeline (in the United States), the Coastal GasLink pipeline (affecting Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia), and the Site C dam — illustrate the ongoing tension between the Canadian state’s interpretation of the duty to consult and Indigenous assertions of a right of consent.

Unit 10: Modern Land Claims and Agreements

The Comprehensive and Specific Claims Processes

Canada has developed two administrative processes for negotiating unresolved Indigenous land grievances. Comprehensive claims address Aboriginal title — the right of Indigenous Peoples to lands they have traditionally occupied and used where title was never extinguished by treaty. Specific claims address alleged breaches of existing treaties or of the Crown’s obligations to First Nations under the Indian Act or other instruments.

The comprehensive claims process was initiated in 1973 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Calder v. British Columbia, in which six of the seven justices agreed that the Nisga’a held Aboriginal title to their traditional territory (though they split 3-3 on whether it had been extinguished). The federal government responded by establishing the comprehensive claims policy, acknowledging that unextinguished Aboriginal title existed and needed to be resolved through negotiation.

Modern land claims agreements — of which there are now over 25 in Canada — transfer land, money, and various rights to Indigenous parties in exchange for the “cession and release” of broader land claims. These agreements are critiqued by some Indigenous scholars and communities for requiring the extinguishment or modification of Aboriginal rights and for not adequately addressing self-governance. Others argue they represent practical gains in land, revenue, and political recognition.

The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement

The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) of 1975, signed between the governments of Canada and Quebec and the Cree and Inuit peoples of northern Quebec, was the first modern land claims agreement in Canada. It was precipitated by the James Bay hydroelectric project, which flooded vast areas of Cree territory. In exchange for accepting the project and its impacts, the Cree and Inuit received land rights over approximately 5,500 square kilometres (Category I lands), hunting, fishing, and trapping rights over a much larger area, financial compensation, and provisions for local governance.

The JBNQA established a template — though a contested one — for subsequent modern agreements. The Cree have since negotiated the Paix des Braves (2002) with Quebec, which is widely regarded as a more equitable and effective agreement that provides greater Cree control over resource development on their territory.

The Nisga’a Treaty

The Nisga’a Final Agreement of 1999 was the first modern treaty in British Columbia and a landmark in Canadian Indigenous law. The Nisga’a Nation had been seeking recognition of their land rights since the late nineteenth century — they were among the Indigenous Nations who petitioned the Privy Council in London in 1913. The final agreement granted the Nisga’a Nation ownership of approximately 2,000 square kilometres of land in the Nass River valley, self-governance powers, and recognition of their own constitution and legal system.

Unit 11: UNDRIP and the International Human Rights Framework

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is an international instrument adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007, by a vote of 143 to 4 (with 11 abstentions). It establishes a comprehensive framework of individual and collective rights for Indigenous Peoples globally, addressing rights to self-determination, land, culture, education, language, health, and governance.

Key provisions of UNDRIP include:

Article 3 affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination — the same right that the UN Charter guarantees to all peoples. Article 4 recognizes the right to autonomy in internal and local affairs. Article 10 prohibits the forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands. Article 19 requires that states consult and cooperate in good faith with Indigenous Peoples to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent before adopting legislative or administrative measures that may affect them. Article 26 recognizes rights to lands, territories, and resources. Article 31 affirms cultural heritage rights including the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.

In Canada, Bill C-15 (the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act) was passed in June 2021, committing the federal government to implementing UNDRIP and requiring the government to develop an action plan for doing so. Implementation remains incomplete and contested.

Unit 12: Indigenous Identity and Legal Definitions

Who Is an Indian? The Law’s Answer

The question of who counts as an “Indian” under Canadian law has been one of the most politically charged and personally consequential questions in Indigenous-Crown relations. The Indian Act definition has changed over time and has always been contested.

Under the Indian Act, “Indian” status (now formally called “registered Indian” or “status Indian”) is a legal category defined by federal legislation, not by Indigenous Nations themselves. Historically, it was an explicitly patrilineal system: Indian status passed from father to children, while women who married non-Indians lost status and were deemed to have lost their Indian identity entirely. The 1985 Bill C-31 amendments partially corrected this discrimination, restoring status to women who had lost it through marriage and to their children, but introduced the two-generation cut-off that continues to deplete the status population.

In 2017, Bill S-3 (amendments to the Indian Act) addressed further gender-based inequities in the status system identified by courts, but the broader issue — that the federal government defines Indigenous identity through legislation rather than through Indigenous self-determination — remains. The Assembly of First Nations, among others, advocates for Indigenous Nations’ own citizenship laws to govern membership, free from federal interference.

Métis Identity

The Métis are a distinct Indigenous People who emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the intermarriage of European (primarily French and Scottish) fur traders and First Nations women, particularly Anishinaabe, Cree, and other Great Lakes and Prairie Nations women. Métis identity is rooted in a distinct culture, language (Michif), economy (buffalo hunting, Red River cart), and political history.

The Métis played a central role in Canadian history through the Resistance of 1869-70 and the Northwest Resistance of 1885, both led by Louis Riel. The 1869-70 resistance resulted in Manitoba entering Confederation as a province with guarantees of French language rights and Métis land rights — guarantees that were subsequently violated by the federal government. Riel was hanged for treason in 1885 following the defeat of the Northwest Resistance, a decision that remains a politically charged symbol of anti-French and anti-Indigenous bias in Canadian history.

In Powley v. Canada (2003), the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that the Métis have Aboriginal rights under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, including rights to harvest for food. In Daniels v. Canada (2016), the Supreme Court held that Métis and non-status Indians are “Indians” within the meaning of Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, meaning the federal government has constitutional jurisdiction over them (and corresponding responsibilities to them).

Inuit

The Inuit are the Indigenous Peoples of Arctic Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia. In Canada, Inuit live primarily in Nunavut (created as a separate territory in 1999 largely in response to Inuit political organizing), the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. The Inuit represent one of the world’s most remarkable examples of human cultural adaptation: their knowledge of sea ice, marine mammal behaviour, navigation, and survival in extreme cold constitutes a sophisticated environmental science developed over millennia.

The Inuit were less directly affected by the early colonial processes that dispossessed First Nations in the south, but the twentieth century brought devastating disruption: forcible relocation of Inuit communities by the federal government (the High Arctic Relocation of 1953-55 moved Inuit from northern Quebec to the High Arctic under false pretenses of resource abundance, separating them from their home territories and support networks), the slaughter of sled dogs by the RCMP (which destroyed a fundamental element of Inuit culture and economy), and the residential school system.

Unit 13: Cultural Survival and Revitalization

Language as a Pillar of Identity

Language loss is one of the most severe ongoing consequences of colonialism. Of the approximately 70 Indigenous languages in Canada (representing over 300 dialects), many are critically endangered. Only three — Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut — have populations large enough to be considered viable without intensive intervention. The residential school system’s prohibition of Indigenous languages was the single largest cause of this loss, but urbanization, economic marginalization, and the absence of Indigenous-language education have perpetuated it.

The Indigenous Languages Act (Bill C-91, passed in 2019) established a legal framework for the revitalization, maintenance, and strengthening of Indigenous languages in Canada, though critics note that funding commitments have been insufficient. The TRC’s Call to Action 14 specifically calls on the federal government to enact an Indigenous Languages Act developed in consultation with Indigenous communities.

Ceremony and Cultural Revitalization

The banning of the potlatch (1885-1951) and the suppression of the Sundance, Midewiwin, and other ceremonies had devastating effects on the cultural and spiritual life of many Nations. The return of these ceremonies, and the revival of cultural practices across the country since the 1960s and 1970s, is one of the most powerful stories in contemporary Indigenous history — a story of resilience and resurgence rather than simply victimhood.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) in the United States and its Canadian counterparts, which emerged in the late 1960s, played a significant role in asserting Indigenous rights and cultural pride. In Canada, the National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations) and the Native Women’s Association of Canada were among the key organizations that pressured the federal government to recognize Indigenous rights in the Constitution Act, 1982.

The “Red Power” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-71), and the Oka Crisis in Quebec (1990) — a confrontation between Mohawk Peoples defending their territory against a golf course expansion and the Sûreté du Québec and Canadian Army — are all markers of the assertive Indigenous political resurgence of this period.

Urban Indigenous Life

By 2016, over half of Indigenous people in Canada lived in urban areas. Urban Indigenous life is complex and often poorly understood: it is neither simply a departure from Indigenous identity nor a replication of reserve-based community. Urban Indigenous people form their own communities, cultural institutions, and networks — friendship centres, urban Indigenous organizations, cultural spaces — while maintaining ties to their home communities and nations.

The Friendship Centre movement across Canada provides social, cultural, and recreational programs for urban Indigenous people and has been a crucial space for maintaining community and cultural connections in cities since the 1950s.

Unit 14: Indigenous Interactions with the Justice System

Over-Incarceration

Indigenous people are dramatically over-represented in the Canadian criminal justice system. As of the early 2020s, Indigenous people make up approximately 5 percent of the Canadian population but account for approximately 30 percent of federally incarcerated people (and over 40 percent of federally incarcerated women). In some provinces — particularly Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta — the figures are even starker.

This over-incarceration is not explained by Indigenous people committing more crimes; it is explained by poverty, lack of housing, family disruption caused by the residential school system and the child welfare system, inadequate legal representation, discriminatory policing practices, and a criminal justice system that was not designed to address the structural conditions from which crime emerges.

In R. v. Gladue (1999), the Supreme Court of Canada held that courts sentencing Indigenous offenders must take into account the systemic and background factors that bring Indigenous people into conflict with the law — including the legacy of residential schools, colonialism, and racism — and must consider alternatives to incarceration where appropriate. The Gladue decision has been reaffirmed and expanded in subsequent cases, including R. v. Ipeelee (2012), but its implementation remains inconsistent.

The Child Welfare System as the New Residential School

The Sixties Scoop — the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities by child welfare agencies from the 1960s through the 1980s — has been described as a continuation of the residential school system by other means. At the height of the Sixties Scoop, Indigenous children represented up to 30 to 40 percent of children in care in provinces like Manitoba, despite being a small fraction of the total population. These children were frequently placed with non-Indigenous families across Canada, the United States, and internationally, cutting them off from their communities, cultures, and languages.

Today, Indigenous children continue to be dramatically over-represented in the child welfare system. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada brought a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2007, arguing that the federal government discriminated against First Nations children by chronically underfunding First Nations child and family services on reserves. In 2016, the Tribunal found that the federal government had indeed discriminated, and issued orders requiring it to reform its funding approach and implement Jordan’s Principle.

Jordan’s Principle — named for Jordan River Anderson, a Cree boy from Norway House First Nation in Manitoba who died in hospital in 2005 while the federal and Manitoba governments argued over who should pay for his home care — is a child-first principle requiring that Indigenous children receive the government services they need without delay, with payment disputes between governments resolved after the fact.

Unit 15: Moving Forward — Reconciliation and the Path Ahead

What Is Reconciliation?

Reconciliation is perhaps the most contested word in contemporary Canadian political and public life. The TRC’s understanding of reconciliation is rooted in the repair and rebuilding of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian state and settler society — a relationship that has been defined by broken promises, violence, and dispossession. Reconciliation, on this view, requires not simply acknowledging past wrongs but actively working to correct ongoing injustices and transform the structures of power that continue to produce them.

The TRC insisted that reconciliation is not simply about individual attitudes — not simply asking Canadians to feel sorry for the past — but about systemic transformation: honouring treaties, implementing UNDRIP, reforming child welfare, justice, and education systems, and building structures of Indigenous self-determination. Tanya Talaga’s work Seven Fallen Feathers and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back are among the influential contemporary Indigenous voices articulating what meaningful reconciliation would require.

The Calls to Action

The TRC’s 94 Calls to Action are directed at governments at all levels, religious institutions, the education system, the media, the sports and arts communities, and Canadian society broadly. Several are particularly central to this course:

Call to Action 6 calls on the federal government to repeal Section 43 of the Criminal Code (the “spanking law”), recognizing that its retention has been used to justify abuse in residential schools and other institutional settings. Calls to Action 62 through 65 address education, requiring that curricula at all levels include mandatory content on the history of residential schools, treaties, and Indigenous Peoples’ contributions to Canada. Call to Action 94 calls on the Governor General and the Prime Minister to issue a public apology to Survivors, their families, and communities for the harms caused by the residential school system.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology in Parliament in 2008, acknowledging the harms of the residential school system — the first such formal government apology in Canadian history. However, many survivors and commentators have noted that apology without structural change is insufficient.

Self-Determination and the Eighth Fire

Monchalin’s final chapter draws on the Anishinaabe prophecy of the Eighth Fire — a teaching about a critical juncture at which humanity must choose between a destructive path and a path of healing and coexistence. The Eighth Fire prophecy speaks of a time when the light-skinned people and Indigenous Peoples would face a choice: continue on a path of greed and destruction, or light the Eighth Fire of reconciliation, justice, and mutual respect.

This metaphor frames the course’s concluding question: what would a Canada built on the genuine recognition of Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and self-determination look like? This is not simply a question for governments; it is a question that the course asks every student to engage with — what is your role, from wherever you are positioned, in either perpetuating or challenging the structures that have produced the current situation?

Indigenous self-determination — the right of Indigenous Peoples to govern themselves, manage their lands, and determine their own futures according to their own values and priorities — is both a legal right (affirmed in UNDRIP and Section 35 of the Constitution) and a political project. Self-determination does not necessarily mean independence from Canada; many Indigenous thinkers advocate for nation-to-nation relationships within the existing state, while others articulate more radical visions of decolonization.

The emergence of Indigenous-led institutions — Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Assembly of First Nations, the Métis National Council, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples — alongside a rapidly growing body of Indigenous academic scholarship, literature, and cultural production, signals that Indigenous Peoples are not waiting for Canada to grant them a place at the table. They are building their own tables.

Appendix: Key Concepts and Recurring Themes

The following terms appear frequently throughout the course and in the secondary literature. Familiarity with them is essential for engaging with the readings and producing strong written work.

Settler colonialism is distinguished from other forms of colonialism by its project of permanent settlement and the replacement (not simply domination) of Indigenous populations. Understanding Canada as a settler colonial state is foundational to this course.

Decolonization, as used by scholars like Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their influential 2012 article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” refers specifically to the repatriation of Indigenous land and life — not simply the broader project of social justice or inclusion. Tuck and Yang caution against using “decolonization” as a metaphor for any progressive social change, arguing that doing so can erase the material and political specificity of Indigenous claims.

Settler refers to non-Indigenous people who have settled on Indigenous land and benefit, whether consciously or not, from the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. In this usage, “settler” is not primarily a term of accusation but a description of a structural position within the settler colonial order. Immigrants and racialized settlers occupy this position in complex ways — they may themselves experience racism and marginalization while still benefiting from Indigenous dispossession.

Indigenous resurgence is a concept developed by scholars like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson to describe the contemporary movement of Indigenous Peoples to revive, strengthen, and practice their own cultures, governance systems, legal traditions, and land relationships — not as a return to an idealized pre-colonial past but as a living, adaptive renewal of Indigenous life in the present.

Land acknowledgement, such as the one that opens this course syllabus, is a practice of publicly recognizing the Indigenous territory on which one is present. Acknowledgements are meaningful when accompanied by substantive action — education, political advocacy, support for Indigenous-led organizations — rather than performed as a ritual that substitutes for that action.

Systemic racism in the context of Indigenous-Crown relations refers to the institutionalized and normalized patterns of race-based disadvantage embedded in laws, policies, and everyday practices. The Indian Act, the residential school system, the pass system, the discriminatory definition of Indian status, and the chronic underfunding of services on reserves are all examples of systemic racism — not simply the product of individual prejudice but of structures deliberately designed and maintained to subordinate Indigenous Peoples.

Critical race theory (CRT) — though primarily developed in the United States — offers analytical tools applicable in the Canadian context. CRT insists that racism is ordinary and pervasive, not exceptional; that race is a social construction with material consequences; and that the law both reflects and produces racial hierarchies. Indigenous legal scholars like John Borrows, Patricia Monture, and Val Napoleon have developed distinctly Indigenous and Canadian critical legal frameworks that draw on and depart from CRT.

Intersectionality, a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is essential to understanding Indigenous experience. Indigenous women, for example, experience discrimination that cannot be understood by looking at anti-Indigenous racism alone or at sexism alone — it arises from the intersection of both, along with class, geographic isolation, and other factors. Robinson explicitly incorporates intersectionality through the course’s attention to the specific vulnerabilities of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.

White settler innocence is a concept describing the ideological and psychological mechanisms through which settlers — particularly white settlers — maintain a self-image as innocent of colonial harm. Mechanisms of innocence include framing colonialism as a completed historical event rather than an ongoing structure, focusing on individual intention rather than structural outcome, treating Indigenous political claims as threats to national unity rather than legitimate rights, and performing reconciliation gestures (such as land acknowledgements) without engaging with their implications. Robinson’s course design directly challenges white settler innocence by requiring sustained engagement with the structural dimensions of the “colonial problem.”

Unit 16: Contemporary Issues — Clean Water, Health, and Housing

The Drinking Water Crisis

Access to safe drinking water is a fundamental right and a prerequisite for health. Yet as of 2021, dozens of First Nations communities in Canada were living under long-term drinking water advisories — some lasting for over two decades. The federal government had committed as early as 2015, under the Trudeau Liberals’ election platform, to end all long-term drinking water advisories on reserves within five years. That deadline passed in 2020 without fulfilment, and the crisis has continued.

The roots of the water crisis are both infrastructural and legal. Reserves have historically been chronically underfunded by the federal government for infrastructure — water treatment plants, pipes, sewage systems — relative to the funding provided to municipalities of comparable size under provincial systems. The Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act (2013) gave the federal government authority to develop enforceable water quality regulations on reserves, but critics noted it did not come with adequate funding. A 2021 federal court settlement resulted in a $8 billion commitment by the federal government to resolve long-term advisories and compensate those affected — one of the largest Indigenous rights settlements in Canadian history.

The clean water issue is not simply an engineering problem. It is a product of the reserve system, of the chronic gap in federal funding for First Nations services relative to comparable provincial services, and of a legal framework that treats Indigenous peoples as wards of the federal government rather than as autonomous communities with the capacity and resources to govern their own water systems.

Indigenous Health Disparities

The health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians are profound and well-documented. Indigenous Peoples in Canada experience dramatically higher rates of tuberculosis (the rate among First Nations is over 30 times higher than among non-Indigenous Canadians), diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and infant mortality. They have lower life expectancy — approximately a decade shorter than the non-Indigenous population, depending on geography and community. Suicide rates, particularly among Indigenous youth, are tragically elevated: Indigenous youth in Canada die by suicide at a rate five to seven times higher than non-Indigenous youth; in some Inuit communities, the rate is as high as 11 times the national average.

These health outcomes are not biologically determined. They are social determinants of health — the product of poverty, inadequate housing, food insecurity, the historical trauma of the residential school system and other colonial policies, barriers to accessing culturally safe health care, and the chronic underfunding of health services on reserves. The concept of social determinants of health insists that health outcomes are fundamentally shaped by the social, economic, and political conditions in which people live.

The Jordan’s Principle described above in the context of child welfare is also a health equity principle: it was developed in direct response to the failure of Canadian governments to fund health care for a sick Indigenous child. Delays in health services caused by federal-provincial jurisdictional disputes about which government is responsible for paying have literally cost Indigenous children their lives.

Housing and Overcrowding

Housing on First Nations reserves is frequently overcrowded, in poor repair, and lacking basic amenities. Overcrowded housing contributes to the spread of communicable diseases, exacerbates mental health challenges, makes it difficult for children to study, and is associated with higher rates of family stress and conflict. The federal government’s on-reserve housing programs have been chronically underfunded. The Assembly of First Nations has estimated that tens of thousands of housing units are needed on reserves to address the current shortage, with a backlog growing faster than it can be addressed.

In urban areas, Indigenous people face barriers to affordable housing including discrimination by landlords, lower average incomes, and the absence of culturally appropriate housing options. Indigenous people are significantly over-represented among Canada’s homeless population.

Note on the Primary Text

Lisa Monchalin is an Indigenous scholar from the Niagara region of Ontario. Her book The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Justice in Canada (UTP, 2016) is unusual among introductory texts in Indigenous Studies in that it approaches its topics — history, colonialism, governance, assimilation, violence, land, and justice — through the lens of criminology and socio-legal theory. The book argues that the “colonial problem” is not, as Canadian political discourse often frames it, a problem with Indigenous Peoples (their poverty, their crime rates, their political claims). The colonial problem is the problem of colonialism itself — the ongoing structure of settler colonial governance and its criminogenic effects on Indigenous communities.

Each chapter of the book opens with an Indigenous story or teaching and is organized around a specific domain of colonial impact. The text is simultaneously historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical. It models the kind of integrated, politically engaged Indigenous scholarship that the course as a whole encourages students to develop.

The course does not assign Chapter 8 (on over-policing and incarceration) because of scheduling constraints — there are only twelve weeks of class meetings and the book has thirteen chapters — but students are encouraged to read it independently, as it provides crucial context for the over-representation of Indigenous people in the justice system.

A Note on Terminology

The language used to describe Indigenous Peoples in Canada has shifted considerably over time and varies across legal, political, scholarly, and community contexts. Understanding these terminological distinctions is essential for reading both historical sources and contemporary scholarship.

“Indian” is the term used in the Indian Act and Constitution Act, 1867 (Section 91(24)) and remains a legal term of art in Canadian law. It is also used in many treaties and historical documents. Many Indigenous people find the term offensive or colonial; others use it in certain contexts (particularly in political organizing — “Indian Country”) as a reclaimed term. The course uses “Indian” when referring specifically to the legal category under the Indian Act or in historical quotations.

“Aboriginal” was the inclusive term used in the Constitution Act, 1982 and was the preferred government and academic term for approximately three decades following 1982. It is now largely replaced by “Indigenous” in common usage, though “Aboriginal” continues to appear in legal texts and some government programs.

“Indigenous” is the current preferred inclusive term, encompassing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. It aligns with international usage (as in UNDRIP) and is the term most often preferred by Indigenous political organizations and scholars.

“First Nations” replaced “Indian Bands” in common usage in the 1970s and 1980s as a political assertion of nationhood. It refers primarily to the registered Indian population (those with Indian status and their communities), though it is sometimes used more broadly. The term emphasizes that these communities are Nations with the rights and standing that come with that status.

“Métis” refers specifically to the Métis People described above — a distinct Indigenous People with their own culture and history. It should not be used as a catch-all term for people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry.

“Non-status Indians” are people of First Nations ancestry who do not have registered “Indian status” under the Indian Act, either because their status was never registered, was lost through enfranchisement, or was lost through the discriminatory provisions addressed (incompletely) by the Bill C-31 and Bill S-3 amendments.

“Two-spirit” (sometimes written 2S or 2-Spirit) is an English-language term coined in 1990 to describe Indigenous people who fulfil traditional cultural roles or identities that encompass or blend what Western culture treats as distinct masculine and feminine qualities. Two-spirit is not a direct translation of any single Indigenous-language term; it is a cross-cultural term that gestures toward the diversity of gender traditions across hundreds of Nations. The course uses “two-spirit” as part of the acronym “MMIWG2S” (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People) and treats two-spirit people as a distinct population facing intersecting forms of anti-Indigenous and anti-queer violence.

Understanding these terminological distinctions matters not only for academic precision but because the terms carry political weight. The choice between “Indian” (legal register), “Aboriginal” (constitutional register), and “Indigenous” (current preferred register) reflects different political and historical contexts, and using the wrong term in the wrong context can signal either historical illiteracy or political indifference to the communities being described.

Finally, the language of “community” itself deserves scrutiny. Indigenous “communities” are not homogeneous, and the interests of individual members, families, clans, women, elders, youth, urban migrants, and hereditary versus elected leaders are not always identical. The Indian Act’s band council system, by creating a single elected representative body as the only legally recognized form of governance, has sometimes suppressed internal diversity and traditional governance structures. Effective engagement with Indigenous Peoples requires attentiveness to these internal differences rather than the assumption that any one voice — whether a chief, a national organization, or an academic — speaks for an undifferentiated whole.

Key Scholars and Works in Canadian Indigenous Studies

The following scholars and texts are foundational to the field and appear, directly or indirectly, throughout INDG 201. Familiarity with their arguments provides crucial intellectual context.

Lisa Monchalin (Algonquin, Métis, Huron-Wendat, Abenaki) — primary text author, criminologist, author of The Colonial Problem (2016).

John Borrows (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) — one of Canada’s leading Indigenous legal scholars. His Canada’s Indigenous Constitution (2010) argues that Indigenous legal traditions are living, valid, and capable of contributing to the governance of Canada alongside common law and civil law.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) — poet, scholar, and activist. Her Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) and As We Have Always Done (2017) articulate a vision of Indigenous resurgence rooted in land-based practice and Indigenous intellectual traditions.

Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) — political theorist, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), which critiques the politics of recognition as unable to fundamentally challenge settler colonial structures of power.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) — scholar of science and technology studies with important work on Indigenous genetics research and data sovereignty.

Tanya Talaga (Anishinaabe) — journalist and author of Seven Fallen Feathers (2017), about the deaths of seven Indigenous students in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and All Our Relations (2018), on the global Indigenous youth suicide crisis.

Patrick Wolfe — Australian historian and theorist of settler colonialism, author of the foundational article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006) and the book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999).

Primary text: Lisa Monchalin, The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Justice in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016). Course taught Spring 2021, University of Waterloo.