Sources and References

• LeMay, Rachel. Ally is a Verb: A Guide to Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Page Two Press, 2025.
• Gray, Lynda. First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About the First Peoples of Canada. 2nd ed. Adaawax Publishing, 2022.
• Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada. Portage and Main Press, 2016.
• Nickel, Sarah. “Reconsidering 1969: The White Paper and the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights Movement.” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2019): 223–238.
• Manuel, Arthur, and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson. Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Between the Lines, 2015.
• Miller, J. R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indigenous-White Relations in Canada. 4th ed. University of Toronto Press, 2018.
• Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. University of Toronto Press, 1996.
• Dickason, Olive Patricia, with William Newbigging. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Oxford University Press.
• Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press, 2014.
• TallBear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Final Report. 2015.

Chapter 1: Many Nations, Not One “Indigenous”

The problem of a collapsing category

Any history of Indigenous peoples in what is now called Canada must begin with a refusal of the assumption that there is a single story to tell. The federal legal and bureaucratic term “Aboriginal peoples,” enshrined in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, names three broad groupings: First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Each of these categories contains enormous internal diversity. There are more than six hundred First Nation communities in Canada representing roughly fifty distinct languages from a dozen unrelated language families, the four Inuit regions that together form Inuit Nunangat, and Métis communities whose political institutions and historical claims differ significantly from Red River westward.

Lynda Gray opens First Nations 101 by reminding readers that “we are not all the same.” That sentence, deceptively simple, resists a centuries-long settler habit of treating hundreds of peoples as a single undifferentiated mass. Chelsea Vowel writes in Indigenous Writes that the generic label “Indian” was invented for administrative convenience and is now so thoroughly embedded in law that Indigenous peoples themselves sometimes have to use it in order to make legal claims. The point is not that the umbrella terms are always wrong but that they must be used with care and specificity.

First Nations, Inuit, and Métis

First Nations peoples have lived south of the treeline for millennia, with governance systems ranging from the confederated Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace to the potlatch-centred protocols of the Northwest Coast. The Inuit are a distinct circumpolar people whose homelands, Inuit Nunangat, encompass four regions: Nunatsiavut in Labrador, Nunavik in northern Quebec, Nunavut, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the western Arctic. The Inuit have never been subject to the Indian Act in the same way as First Nations, and their relationship with the Crown is structured instead by modern comprehensive land claims agreements.

The Métis, as a distinct people, emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around the Red River and the fur-trade routes of the northwest. Métis nationhood is not simply the fact of mixed ancestry: it is grounded in a shared history, a language (Michif), kinship networks, and political assertions that crystallized in the resistances of 1869–70 and 1885. In R. v. Powley (2003), the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that Métis communities hold constitutionally protected harvesting rights under section 35. In Daniels v. Canada (2016), the Court held that Métis and non-status Indians fall within federal jurisdiction under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, closing a long-standing “jurisdictional wasteland” in which neither order of government would accept responsibility.

Chapter 2: The Indian Act and the Legal Fiction of “Status”

Origins and architecture

The Indian Act of 1876 consolidated decades of earlier colonial legislation, including the Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869). Its purpose, as its authors candidly admitted, was the legal extinguishment of Indigenous difference through assimilation. The Act defined who counted as an “Indian,” regulated band membership, established the federally supervised band council system that replaced traditional governance, controlled reserve land, and for most of its history made it illegal for Indigenous peoples to retain lawyers, leave reserves without a pass, or practice ceremonies such as the potlatch and Sun Dance.

J. R. Miller, in Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, describes the Indian Act regime as a shift from the earlier “commercial” and “cooperative” phases of Indigenous-settler relations into an explicitly coercive phase. Olive Dickason similarly notes that by the late nineteenth century, the Crown had moved from treating Indigenous nations as allies to treating them as wards.

Status, blood quantum, and Bill C-31

Unlike the United States, Canada does not formally use blood quantum to determine status, but it operates a functionally similar descent rule. For most of the twentieth century, an “Indian” woman who married a non-status man lost her status and transmitted that loss to her children. Men faced no such penalty. Decades of Indigenous women’s advocacy, culminating in cases such as Lovelace v. Canada at the United Nations, forced Parliament to pass Bill C-31 in 1985. The bill removed the most explicit sex-based enfranchisement rule and reinstated many women who had lost status.

Bill C-31 did not end discrimination; it re-engineered it. The Act was amended to distinguish between status inherited under section 6(1) and status inherited under section 6(2). A 6(2) parent who partners with a non-status person has a child who is not eligible for status at all. This rule, known as the “second-generation cut-off,” means that the legal category of “Indian” is being slowly actuarially wound down. Bill C-3 in 2011 and further 2017 amendments addressed some remaining gender inequities, but scholars including Pamela Palmater argue that the cut-off remains a tool of legislative extinction.

Chapter 3: Indigeneity Beyond the Indian Act

Métis constitutional recognition

For more than a century, the Métis existed in a legal twilight. Although they had signed scrip agreements with the Crown after 1870, the federal government denied that it had constitutional obligations to them. Powley in 2003 and Daniels in 2016 changed this. Powley established a test for identifying rights-bearing Métis communities, requiring self-identification, ancestral connection to a historic Métis community, and acceptance by the contemporary community. Daniels confirmed that Ottawa, not the provinces, is responsible for Métis and non-status peoples.

Inuit Nunangat and the modern treaty era

Inuit governance is structured by a series of modern land claims agreements: the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (1984), the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (1993, leading to the creation of the territory of Nunavut in 1999), and the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement (2005). Taken together, these constitute one of the largest land settlements in world history and represent a distinct path from the Indian Act framework: one of negotiated, constitutionally protected treaties enacted between self-identifying Inuit nations and the Crown.

Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and Afro-Indigenous identities

Gender and sexuality in Indigenous nations cannot be read through European binaries. The pan-Indigenous term Two-Spirit, coined in Winnipeg in 1990, was chosen to signal that many nations traditionally recognized more than two genders and that Indigenous queer identities should be understood within Indigenous worldviews rather than imported settler frameworks. “Indigiqueer” is a more recent term that some younger people prefer. Afro-Indigenous peoples, whose histories connect African diasporic experience with Indigenous nationhood across the Americas, remind us that Indigenous nations have never been racially homogeneous and that anti-Blackness and settler colonialism operate together.

Chapter 4: Gender, Violence, and Indigenous Feminisms

MMIWG and structural violence

The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) concluded that the ongoing disappearance and killing of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people amounts to a “Canadian genocide” rooted in colonial structures. Indigenous women in Canada are murdered at rates many times higher than non-Indigenous women. The Inquiry documented how the Indian Act, the residential school system, child welfare apprehensions, and the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in hospitals combined to make Indigenous women disposable in the eyes of settler institutions.

Indigenous feminisms

Indigenous feminist scholars and activists have long insisted that patriarchy is not indigenous to most Indigenous nations: it was imposed through missionization, the Indian Act’s rules about status transmission, and the gendered violence of residential schools. Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus argues that the removal of Indigenous women from their political roles in matrilineal nations was a precondition for settler sovereignty, and that Indigenous women’s refusal to accept that erasure is itself a political act. Kim TallBear extends the analysis to the biopolitics of kinship, arguing that settler anxieties about blood and belonging mask a deeper unease about Indigenous peoplehood.

Chapter 5: Myths, Mascots, and Pretendians

Anti-Indigenous racism and everyday stereotypes

LeMay’s Ally is a Verb spends considerable space on myths that circulate in Canadian public life: that Indigenous peoples do not pay taxes, that they receive “free money,” that reserves are failed experiments, that pre-contact societies were static. Each of these claims obscures the actual operation of treaty, taxation, and federal fiduciary law. The persistence of Indigenous mascots in sports, and of headdress costumes at festivals, trades on an image of Indigeneity as simultaneously noble and vanished — always in the past tense.

Pretendianism and ethical belonging

Recent years have brought renewed attention to “pretendianism,” the phenomenon of settler academics, artists, and professionals falsely claiming Indigenous identity to access scholarships, hiring preferences, and cultural authority. Kim TallBear’s work is often cited here: Indigenous identity is not a matter of a distant ancestor or a DNA test result but of ongoing, accountable relationships with a living Indigenous community that recognizes the person as one of its own. Ethical belonging requires community, not genealogy alone, and identity fraud is not harmless — it diverts resources from actual Indigenous people and distorts the Indigenous presence in public institutions.

Chapter 6: Treaties, Reserves, and the Politics of Land

Treaties as constitutional instruments

Treaty-making in Canada is as old as contact. The peace and friendship treaties of the Atlantic region, signed between the Crown and the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, and Passamaquoddy between 1725 and 1779, did not surrender land: they established ongoing relationships of peaceful coexistence. The numbered treaties signed between 1871 and 1921 across the prairies and the north were understood very differently by Crown and Indigenous signatories. Crown negotiators came with prepared texts extinguishing “aboriginal title” in exchange for reserves, annuities, and schooling. Indigenous leaders understood the agreements through their own legal traditions as nation-to-nation compacts for sharing the land to the depth of a plough.

Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms the existing treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. That recognition has opened space for a series of Supreme Court decisions — Sparrow, Delgamuukw, Haida Nation, Tsilhqot’in — that have given treaty and title some real legal force, though the gap between constitutional recognition and lived outcomes remains wide.

Reserves: the problem and the non-problem

Chelsea Vowel devotes a chapter of Indigenous Writes to the question: why don’t First Nations people “just leave the reserve?” Her answer is that this question itself embodies the confusion. Reserves are not simply rural poverty traps; they are, for many communities, the last remaining recognized territory of a people, the place where language is spoken and ceremony is practised, and the geographic anchor of nationhood. The real problem is not the existence of reserves but their chronic underfunding, the Indian Act restrictions on economic activity, and the legal constraints that prevent First Nations from exercising ordinary governance powers.

Glen Coulthard, in Red Skin, White Masks, extends this analysis into a critique of what he calls “the politics of recognition.” Drawing on Frantz Fanon and his own Yellowknives Dene nation’s experience, Coulthard argues that the Canadian state offers Indigenous peoples recognition precisely in order to manage and contain them. Land claims settlements, he argues, exchange the possibility of real sovereignty for a bureaucratic seat at the settler table.

Inuit relocations and the price of sovereignty

The High Arctic relocations of 1953 and 1955 forcibly moved Inuit families from Inukjuak in northern Quebec to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, far above the Arctic Circle. The official justification invoked game populations and community renewal; the documented underlying motive was to establish a human Canadian presence in the High Arctic during the early Cold War. The film Martha of the North tells this story through the memory of Martha Flaherty, whose family endured hunger, cold, and decades of separation from kin in order to anchor Canadian sovereignty claims. Ottawa eventually apologized in 2010.

Chapter 7: Residential Schools, the TRC, and the Calls to Action

A century of schools

The Indian residential school system in Canada was born of the 1879 Davin Report, which recommended replicating the American model of boarding schools aimed at “aggressive civilization.” Beginning in the 1880s, the federal government funded and the churches operated an expanding network of schools designed to remove Indigenous children from their families and communities. J. R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision traces the system’s origins and the complicity of missionary denominations; the schools remained in operation until the last federally funded institution closed in 1996.

The stated purpose of the schools — “to kill the Indian in the child” — produced an explicitly assimilationist curriculum, systematic suppression of languages and ceremonies, and a documented pattern of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Mortality rates in some schools in the early twentieth century exceeded those of Canadian soldiers in the First World War.

The Sixties Scoop and child welfare

As residential schools began to close, child welfare authorities scaled up the removal of Indigenous children into foster care and adoption, disproportionately placing them with non-Indigenous families across Canada, the United States, and Europe. This process is now known as the Sixties Scoop, though it began earlier and continued well into the 1980s. Its contemporary continuation is the “millennial scoop,” in which Indigenous children remain dramatically over-represented in provincial child welfare systems.

The TRC and the 94 Calls to Action

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which operated from 2008 to 2015, took statements from thousands of residential school survivors and produced a final report concluding that the school system amounted to cultural genocide. The report issued 94 Calls to Action addressed to governments, churches, professional associations, and Canadian civil society. The Calls cover child welfare, education, language, health, justice, and reconciliation proceedings.

Chapter 8: From the White Paper to Land Back

1969 and the birth of a modern movement

In 1969, the recently elected Trudeau government tabled a Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy — the 1969 White Paper — proposing to abolish the Indian Act, dissolve the status category, transfer responsibility for Indigenous peoples to the provinces, and treat Indigenous Canadians as individual citizens with no special rights. Framed by its authors as a progressive liberal reform, the White Paper was recognized by Indigenous leaders as the final move of a long assimilationist strategy: rights that would disappear once “difference” was abolished.

Sarah Nickel’s 2019 Canadian Historical Review article “Reconsidering 1969” argues that the importance of the White Paper lies not only in what it proposed but in what it provoked. The Indian Association of Alberta’s response, Citizens Plus — known as the Red Paper — and parallel responses from organizations across the country, marked the emergence of a genuinely pan-Indigenous rights politics in Canada. Nickel urges historians to see 1969 not as a moment of government failure and Indigenous reaction but as a generative turning point: the moment at which a modern Indigenous rights movement coalesced on its own terms.

The Fourth World and Land Back

Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson, in Unsettling Canada, remind readers that this politics was never purely national. Manuel’s father George Manuel had coined the concept of a Fourth World of Indigenous peoples within settler states, a vision that seeded the global indigenous rights movement and ultimately the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Chapter 13 of Unsettling Canada, “The Fourth World,” situates the Indigenous struggle in Canada as one node in an interconnected global movement of dispossessed peoples whose claims to land and self-determination are mutually reinforcing.

The contemporary expression of this politics is often summarized by the phrase Land Back. From the 1990 Kanien’kehá:ka resistance at Oka, through the Idle No More mobilizations of 2012–13, to the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ stand against the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the Tyendinaga solidarity blockades of 2020, Land Back names a refusal to accept that dispossession is final. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn in “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” that decolonization cannot be reduced to a feeling or a curriculum reform: it requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in As We Have Always Done, describes this as “grounded normativity” — a politics whose legitimacy flows from actual relationships with particular lands, waters, and beings.

Food sovereignty and rematriation

Food sovereignty has emerged as a concrete practice of Land Back. The reassertion of traditional harvesting, seed saving, and fishing rights is not only about nutrition; it is about reproducing a people in relation to a territory. Environmental racism — the disproportionate siting of pipelines, mines, and waste in Indigenous homelands — makes food sovereignty a question of survival. Cultural regeneration, language revitalization, and the reclamation of sacred objects from museums (rematriation) form a parallel front of the same struggle.

Chapter 9: Reconciliation and the Path Forward

UNDRIP, RCAP, and section 35

The framework for reconciliation draws on several legal and moral instruments. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, as interpreted through three decades of jurisprudence, provides constitutional protection for Aboriginal and treaty rights. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), which reported in 1996 after five years of research, offered a comprehensive blueprint for renewed relationships that was largely shelved. The TRC’s 94 Calls to Action revived many RCAP recommendations. UNDRIP, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007 and at last implemented domestically by Canada in 2021 through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, sets out the minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of Indigenous peoples.

Bill C-92 and Indigenous child welfare

Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families (2019), recognizes the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to exercise jurisdiction over child and family services. In 2024, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Act, affirming that the right to self-government in relation to children is protected under section 35.

What reconciliation means

Reconciliation, properly understood, is not a program of apologies and gestures; it is the structural transformation of relationships grounded in truth, justice, and the return of land and authority. LeMay’s Ally is a Verb closes with the observation that allyship is not an identity one claims but a practice one performs over time, in public, and at cost. The work ahead is not a matter of helping Indigenous peoples adjust to Canada; it is a matter of Canada adjusting to the fact that it was, and remains, built on the territories of nations whose histories did not begin with contact and whose futures are not contained within the settler state.