Jérôme Melançon: Emily and I got together today to introduce a series of talks that we organized in order to use as a living land acknowledgement. Primarily, this is a conference that we’re organizing, but we’re alsohoping that you’re watching this for any number of reasons – either because you want to know more about the territory that’s generally around Regina, or Saskatchewan, or the Prairies. Maybe you have been called upon to watch this before you come to an event here in Regina. Our hope with this shorter video is to introduce what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, give some context for it, and give you a sense of what to expect as you watch the talks that we had with a few of our colleagues and people we called upon to help us out.

Emily Grafton: Great, thanks Jerome. So to get us started, we’re not going to do a land acknowledgement because of course, this whole series is enacting and embodying land acknowledgements. But we are going to situate ourselves to sort of let you, as the audience, understand who we are.

The Trajectories that Led Us Here

Jérôme: Maybe I can start because you sent it to me. I grew up on or around military bases in different parts of Canada. So that’s maybe the opposite of reserves. That land that’s set aside, land that’s heavily patrolled, heavily controlled, where you have to give reasons before you enter. And it’s also a land that’s used to mobilize part of the population, so Canada can look like a normal state with its sovereignty, its army to defend itself.

So that’s a very strange relationship to have in the first place where you end up having this access to forbidden territory. As opposed to reserves that are that were used for a long time to keep people on a specific part of land, keep them away from the rest of the territory. I grew up on territories of peoples that I didn’t know. I was unaware of their presence, let alone of their histories. In school, we learned about delocalized people named Hurons or Iroquois. There wasn’t more context than that, really. There were some – a lot of falsehoods, actually, about these larger families of peoples. We learned about the explorers missionaries, how badly missionaries were treated by Indigenous peoples. For instance, I had no idea, living in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, close to Montreal, that I was on territory that was shared historically by Kanien’kehà:ka and Abenaki people. I was shocked when the Kahnawake and Kanesatake resistance took place because it was so close to home – only a few minutes’ drive away. I had no idea that they were there in the first place when I was young. And because the army was called in, being a boy at that point, I was concerned that my father may end up going to war on the territory around it.

I also had no idea about colonialism in Canada. No idea about residential schools. I was generally aware that on reserves life was bad. This was as a young man; it’s not until I did my PhD and started to look at what the TRC was doing that I got a sense that there’s a lot more at stake than just living conditions on reserves, that there is such an important urban population as well. There’s a lot that I didn’t have access to. So I had this very abstract relationship to the land, this very distant relationship to Indigenous peoples.

When I moved to Treaty 6 territory, first of all, to Meadow Lake and Saskatoon, it’s my wife really who taught me a lot. Her family is a settler family, although like many settler families, she has some indigenous ancestry as well, but it wasn’t passed on. That was just erased within one generation. But her maternal grandmother and her father both had good working relationships with different communities around Flying Dust, Waterhen, Green Lake, Makwa Sahgaiehcan, all around the North of the province. So my wife’s education was in a sense already being “Indigenized” at that point. They had Elders come in, knowledge keepers come in, they did activities with kids on the reserve nearby. So there was already this sense of what people would begin to do, almost from scratch, but later on – practices of coming together that were not kept up. It was she who let me know how many things I had gotten wrong.

And then Camrose, AB, when I was teaching there, I got to meet a lot of Indigenous students. I was listening to what barriers they faced. I had thought: this should be easy enough to fix. Turns out it’s not! There was lots of bureaucratic red tape, lots of minds to change. But through that, I got involved in the Indigenous Engagement Committee. I got to know Indigenous staff on campus, Indigenous colleagues, knowledge keepers, and Elders from Maskwacis. I read about the TRC, I got to host Wilton Littlechild in my classroom when the TRC was just starting out.

Through all these relationships, these events, I got to learn about the land where I was, what the treaties were, that there were treaties in the first place. So my relationship to the land there, then here, in Regina, became one where I tried to learn a lot from those who came before me. Both in terms of what people had done, but also the kind of approach to the land, relationship to the land that Indigenous peoples had developed, first in Treaty 6, and then here around Regina and Treaty 4.

I got to learn also about the place and the role of Francophone communities in colonialism. I hadn’t really thought about that before I moved here. My job here is tied to the fact that there’s a physical presence, that there’s support for Francophone communities. And communities were protected and developed through the Catholic church. By the same people who ran many of the residential schools.

So that’s how I came to be here, how I came to think about the land and think about land acknowledgement. Because there’s a lot to acknowledge.

That’s the basic takeaway, I think, from this experience. Which is different from yours, very different from yours.

Emily: Very different from mine. Yes, my experience is very different. I grew up just in the prairies, really, right? I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is on Treaty 1 territory. And I lived there my whole life until I moved here. My family is just very different in the sense that I am a citizen of the Métis nation, but my immediate family is made up of Métis, First Nations, and settler people. My dad is Métis, my mother is Icelandic, and then I have various aunts, uncles and cousins who have different positionalities related to any of those identities. But as a Métis person, I think I was very lucky to grow up in Winnipeg where there is a very large Métis population. I feel very fortunate to have grown up with my father, who taught me a lot. He had a lot of traditional teachings, which is in some ways kind of unusual for urban Métis folks to maintain. So I do feel very lucky with the culturally rich family unit that I had. And throughout my whole life, had teachings from Elders.

But I am also aware of all that has been lost because of colonization. I think that this sort of education was bestowed on me also from my parents, so I wasn’t one of these folks who sort of learned about the residential school system when the TRC came into being. It was something that I had known about my entire life. I had an uneasy relationship, I guess you could say, with the colonization of reserve systems. I did grow up visiting a reserve and spending time on a reserve and was very familiar with the role that Indian agents had in formulating colonization and stripping cultural identity and  language from Indigenous nations. And my maternal grandmother is a Lafreniere and a Lavoisier, so our relationship to land is really situated in the Red River Valley and southern Manitoba. And my grandmother grew up fluently speaking Michif, the language of the Métis nation. And that is something that I didn’t grow up with.

I’ve been aware my whole life of the external influences of colonization. And I’ve seen it in all sorts of ways within my family, my broader family, my immediate family. But I think also, to draw some parallels with your experience, moving to Treaty 4, moving to Regina, Saskatchewan, also really broadened my Métis identity. It really allowed me to learn from folks who weren’t my immediate kin, my immediate relations, or my broader community at home. And I’m very fortunate to have moved here to this place and to be immersed in this process of Indigenization and reconciliation and decolonization. Because it’s been very valuable for me to conceptualize in a deeper way those things that we learned in our PhDs, right? The things that we read in books and wrote about in our essays. It’s just enhanced that lived experience with decolonization, I think.

Jérôme: I think it’s worth mentioning, too, that I learned a lot through you. We met when we had the same new faculty orientation. You were both being oriented, and were orienting which is very strange, but this is how things often work. And we started to work together right away at that point to respond to the TRC’s report and Calls to Action on behalf of the university. I’m grateful that I got to learn from you, because you’ve had the chance, I think, the opportunities as well, to establish deeper relations with local knowledge keepers, local Elders, and have helped me in touch with them as well and for my own relationships instead. For me, I think that process of learning here has also helped me learn more about my past, right? Because then I see my family and the stories about my family from family members who are passing off as Indigenous or saying that we’re Indigenous. Again, it’s only a few generations back that I have this one ancestor whom my father would have met her. But knowing indigenous people, and knowing what the difference is between the erasure that doesn’t come from the Sixties Scoop, doesn’t come from residential schools, but comes from other aspects of colonialism, around racism, what’s forbidden, survival strategies as well – and how that leads to an entirely different kind of life and philosophy and view of the world, and embodied relationship to land. Also, because I actually come more from a series of farmers who took on “new” lands, right? So like literal settlers.

Land and Indigeneity

Emily: I don’t know that our questions really sort of pick at land in that way, but maybe we can spend a moment or two just thinking about and discussing, animating, what that relationship of Indigenous peoples to land is, and how integral it is to Indigenous cultures, Indigenous linguistic practices, laws, social and political development of community and society and nationhood. And just how much of a conflict settlement has had on that – European settlement, Canadian settlement, that real, intended disruption of Indigenous practices on the land to enable the settler colonial project. Which is really what land acknowledgements are trying to sort of point towards, and perhaps disrupt in certain ways.

Jérôme: When you read how Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel, or Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang define Indigeneity, it’s not even in relation to the land. It’s being of the land and it’s being the land. Being Indigenous under these definitions, these explanations, is really a matter of having a way of being, of relating, that was developed in close relationship with this land, based on what the land made possible. Basically ways of life that were best adapted to the land. Everything around language – and you said knowledge, stories, all that is treated on different parts of the land. And so settler colonialism comes in and severs these ties to many areas, many locations that make language and make most cultural practices possible. And it also severs ties between people that took place through this being present on the land. Basically making an Indigenous life impossible, unless some access is guaranteed to the land.

Experiences in Creating Land Acknowledgements

Jérôme: You’ve had more direct experience than I have in creating land acknowledgements. So can you maybe share a bit about what your experience was in developing them?

Emily: I have worked for a number of institutions, colonial, Western-based institutions that have developed land acknowledgements. And every process has been different, but I’ll share a little bit about that.

In my time as a PhD student, I was working for a professor, Dr. Kiera Ladner, who at the time was a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Governance at the University of Manitoba. And she was asked by the President’s office to develop a report. And within that, one of the components was a land acknowledgement. And this was somewhat new to me at the time. It was the early days of the TRC. We developed this land acknowledgement. And it was a really fascinating process in the sense that the first time it was read aloud by the President at a public event, it was this really special moment of seeing one’s academic actions become a public practice. And it was very new at the time.

I went on to develop land acknowledgements, working at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and then here at the University of Regina. And these processes were also different, but the basic elements to them, we’re going out and seeking the knowledge of different old ones and knowledge keepers and Indigenous leaders at more political institutions to sort of get a sense of what was important to them in the land acknowledgement. And these were very political processes. It was very much a balance of political interests and political will. And a balance of even ordering differing nations into almost a hierarchy of experience and time on land. So those have been my experiences. How about yourself?

Jérôme: When I was at the University of Alberta, I taught at the Augustana Campus, which is in Camrose, a rural urban center, about an hour south of Edmonton. We had used the University of Alberta’s statement up until that point. We weren’t happy with it. And so myself and a few other people had suggested that we come up with our own, specific to the land where we were. And what I wanted to do to start with was to, well, do what everyone else does, consult with Elders. But rather than just keep it to ourselves, we thought: let’s make this a public learning event, create a learning opportunity. We had four Elders from the four nations in Maskwacis come in and talk about the land, their relationship to the land, the words that they would use in nehiyawewin to talk about it. We actually had a good showing there, so that when we got to actually using the statement, a lot of people had more knowledge and the statement could act as a reminder. And other people could share these stories, share this knowledge with others. So we had a self-education component to it as well.

But to work towards the statement, it wasn’t enough to just get a sense of the place, of the relationship to land, which as you said is a very political process. Not everybody has the same view. Land is disputed, especially in places that weren’t central, like Regina, Camrose wasn’t a place that was central to any one community or nation. It was a part of a route basically, people might stop by, but it wasn’t central to them.

So that lots of people had a relationship, and it’s not everybody who has the knowledge. One of the issues here is that there’s migration that took place because of colonialism or in reaction to colonialism. There were people who were there before. They were people who were there before that. So few people actually had – few Indigenous people and even fewer settlers – have the history of the peoples who were present on the land before the Indigenous people who are here now. And so getting that knowledge as well as acknowledging that longer presence was really important to some of them; others were wondering why we would go that far back. The wording and, again, creating this hierarchy where you have different groups, just a couple of words could trip up the list of nations whose land this is, so that there’s a recognition of those who continue to live there. So definitely there’s diplomacy that was present in these exchanges.

Why and How We Do Land Acknowledgements

Emily: Yeah, that’s a really interesting process that I think I want to circle back to when we talk about problematizing land acknowledgements. But it also gets us to why we do land acknowledgements. And this is a very tricky one for me to answer because if I’m honest, I’ve come to realize that I think I’ve always misunderstood land acknowledgements. For me, since that first experience working for Dr. Ladner, I had understood land acknowledgements as an extension of Indigenous protocols. In my teachings in my community back home, when introducing ourselves or meeting folks for the first time, the question would come up or we would offer who are our families and where are our lands. And so I had always interpreted land acknowledgements as an extension of this Indigenous protocol, which could be perhaps one core component to it or one way to interpret it. But I’ve come to understand that there are differing ways to understand why we do a land acknowledgement and different purposes to them.

Jérôme: The reasons why I do them are very different, I think, from the reasons why the institution does them, although there is some overlap, obviously. At first, for me it was very much an obligation, a duty, right? I have to do this. It was very rigid. And I still have colleagues doing that now; it has to be done first. It’s a ritual. But ritual without ceremony. Rituals without connection to the activities that are taking place end up being empty. Then it’s bit of a panic at the moral level around having to do something, otherwise we would be criticized for it. But you still don’t know why you’re doing it. The more I did them, and as I ended up adopting them as well for different moments, I realized that for me, it’s really about giving myself a goal: if I’m doing one, I have to know why I’m doing it here, in this way. Also it’s a possibility for education for those who wanted to be reminded that there’s a question, there’s a problem, a situation that we’re all sharing on this land that isn’t experienced the same, but doesn’t affect everyone.

Emily: Which sort of gets us to our next point around how we do land acknowledgements. And my approach has always been to sort of take my standard land acknowledgement and change it, adapt it to the event or the situation that I’m in. So this is my attempt to make it the most authentic in that moment. In that sense of striving for authenticity, or as you spoke about, accountability, my land acknowledgement does change because I change, as I referred earlier to my idea of being Métis, my identity has changed in Treaty 4 territory. Since moving here, a few things have become apparent to me. One, when I first moved here, I realized after a while that most folks assumed that I grew up on a reserve and that I fluently spoke Cree, which is a misinterpretation of who the Métis people are. And so I started to address that up front by explaining to people that I am an urban Métis person. I did grow up in Winnipeg. I grew up in Winnipeg’s inner city. And so a lot of my experiences, especially my formative experiences as a child and as a youth, really come from that time of being in that place. But then since moving here, my partner (who’s a citizen of the Métis Nation – Saskatchewan) and I, we’ve had two children, they’re registered with the Métis Nation Saskatchewan. And so again, these are opportunities and exposure to Métis communities that are continuing to change how I understand myself and deepen my personal relationship with being Métis.

I try to wrap all of this up into my acknowledgement. Since I’ve moved here, I’ve always situated myself as a guest to this territory, sometimes an uninvited guest. And even that has changed in the sense that this past winter I called an old one that I worked with closely who’s become sort of an auntie to me in my time here in Regina. I asked her: I’m opening an event for an Indigenous person from a different territory. Would it be appropriate as a guest to this territory to welcome them here and invite them into shared space in Treaty 4? Her response was that I needed to re-evaluate my positioning as a guest in this territory and that I am no longer a guest. I am home. These are my relations. My relation to land and to people has changed and that I should drop the guest from my introduction and just sort of really identify myself as being home. And so again, just another way that my identity is shifting as I continue to make this place home.

Jérôme: When it comes to how I have been doing land acknowledgements – until this project, this summer, because that’s likely to change now too – first, very technically, very, practically, I tried to do it slowly.  As sentence, not as an incantation. So to de-ritualize it, to put the emphasis on the different nations as I go along, and to distinguish that the territory and the treaties, are not referring to traditional territories, but the territories, because “traditional” does send it back to the past. And then to make it clear to them (who are present) that the idea of territory is not the same as the idea of treaty land. Because the territories are both broader and smaller, when it comes to different nations. I think that this is an important way for me to put the emphasis on different parts of that pre-written statement that I can wing too – I mean, I know the nations, their order, I’ve said it enough times.

But then I think to me, it’s important to adapt it to whatever we’re doing, to why we’re gathered in that place. I think without that, it can be very empty. It’s rattled off at the start of a meeting, then we just carry on. I don’t really see the need for land acknowledgement statements in that context, if there’s no link between the acknowledgement of the land and the activity that leads people to gather in this place. And I state that too, because maybe we should be thinking about why we, who are gathering this place on this land, at this moment, are not accountable to Indigenous peoples for what we’re doing. How would we begin to think about how what we’re doing might affect them. I think that that’s a central point of how I tried to do them.

And to make sure that there’s room – that’s where this project here comes in, is to make room for an exchange around it as well. Because if it’s a good practice, if it’s done in a good way according to the protocols that you were talking about, you don’t start off by just rattling something off, making a short stump speech about why this is important. And then people just move on to say what they have to say, that’s just not really an exchange. You have to start off by talking about you’re together, who everybody is, how they are doing, what’s going on with that, address that, and then continue that exchange. There’s a potential in a land acknowledgement, if it’s done right, as a protocol, not as a bureaucratic ritual, to change the way that we gather and what we do when we gather.

Emily: Picking up on what you’re talking about around the educational component and the potential for disruption. Another item within my land acknowledgements that often shifts is, as I better understand, the colonial anchorings within this particular institution – because every institution in every space understands colonialism differently – as I better understand those kinds of colonial anchorings, my land acknowledgement shifts to address those, to attempt to disrupt them or shine a light on them in sort of a decolonial way. Then it also changes with the audiences, right? So sometimes if it’s a predominantly Indigenous audience, maybe the message is around celebrating, celebrating the Indigenous bodies that are within the university institution. And if it’s a predominantly settler or non-Indigenous audience, then perhaps it’s reminding folks of the ways that Indigenous worldviews have been marginalized and kept out of those spaces. Because so often these land acknowledgements are a sentence, as you said, they are sorted in some ways, devoid of a message, right? And so, at least in my opinion, my purpose in my practice has to be, has been to bring that message into the land acknowledgement.

Problematizing Land Acknowledgements

Jérôme: A lot of what we’ve been saying already shows the problems around land acknowledgements, the limits around them. This is what we’re reacting to anyway. I talked a little bit about how they can be ritualized or repetitive. Can you help problematize them a little bit?

Emily: That’s probably the biggest problem with the land acknowledgement. And the source of so much criticism towards them is just that they become this sort of box to check or this tokenized statement that folks aren’t thinking about. It’s part of “turn off your cell phones, washrooms are in this direction, land acknowledgement, let’s go.” So they become really disingenuous actions and they do breed resentment.

And part of my experience creating land acknowledgements has been sitting with old ones and knowledge keepers to painstakingly craft these sentences to reflect the Indigenous relationships to land in a particular area. And you sort of reference this with that wonderful approach that you took in Camrose where you brought the knowledge keepers and created a public audience to demonstrate that process.

And so it becomes very frustrating where you’ve gone through this and you’ve developed this statement. Then it just becomes this sort of vacuous box to check. And then, but then also as you evolve this statement for your own self, there’s this real political struggle to continue to acknowledge and recognize the knowledge and the time that the old ones spent developing it. And so it’s this, it’s this really hard  struggle to achieve a balance of authenticity and reflecting one’s own lived experience in a territory. And not sort of leaning into that sort of tokenization or co-optation that can come from that ritualistic application of the land acknowledgement.

Jérôme: To me, the idea of a statement that’s fixed gives us an illusion of certainty and simplicity. And that’s a problem in itself.

In bringing people together as we did here, in the videos that we’re introducing, and in other events before, I approach the idea of acknowledging the land a lot more in connection to how I’ve been taught about story, an Indigenous understanding of story, that you’re given the right to tell a story once you’ve heard it enough times and in enough different contexts that you have the whole story. But no one ever tells the whole story. There’s always more to be told. A story is told at a certain moment, to specific people, at a certain place. And so elements from it are going to be chosen by the person who is the knowledge keeper, who has been given the right to tell that story by those who had it before. Because it’s going to teach something to those who are present.

A statement doesn’t do that. A statement accomplishes very little other than an obligation, a duty in the very general legal sense, not in the sense of having a responsibility. Whereas if I see it as more of a story that’s meant to help guide people in their actions and augment their knowledge, then I am passing on what the people I’ve sat with have told me. And that includes you, Emily, because you’ve told me what others have told you beyond just the statement itself. This passing on of knowledge – in a very limited way, I don’t want to say in any way that I’m a knowledge keeper or that I understand Indigenous storytelling – that I’ve been taught, this is how I’ve been approaching it.

I didn’t really realize this until just now. I like this conversational aspect because it’s not just each of us writing down what we want to say.

Emily: I love the idea that you’ve just shared with us around story. One of the things that I’ve learned around story is that yes, you’re absolutely correct, knowledge keepers will share this part and withhold this part depending on the audience, depending on what’s appropriate in that moment, in that season, that time in their life. But the other aspect to storytelling is that the audience often absorbs and understands what they’re ready to understand. And so I have missed, I have heard stories repeated and repeated from the same knowledge keeper. And then after I’ll say “uncle or kokum, you’ve never shared that part”, but really, it’s just that I wasn’t ready to hear that part yet.

And so I just wonder around land acknowledgements, what we are ready to hear, what we are ready to express within that kind of decolonial paradigm that some of us connect to land acknowledgements.

And then I’ll just offer this last piece as somebody who’s done workshops around land acknowledgements. I’ve thought deeply about the ways that they become these ritualistic box checking things. I encourage folks to really find their own personal meaning within a land acknowledgement. What is their lived experience? What is their experience with their family coming to a land? How did their family get here and what did they do when they got here? And what was their relationship to Indigenous folks, if they’re non-Indigenous?

Or if they are Indigenous, even what has been lost, what has been regained? What are the hopes for the next generation? And so just to really make it this a meaningful, again, almost story, right? Because this is in some ways what our land acknowledgements are when we think about who our family is and where our lands are, it’s about that story and celebrating the sort of specific, particular relationship that only Jerome has to a territory because of that really interesting experience of moving around from military bases and that learning journey that you’ve been on.

Jérôme: Then, too, in terms of what the problems can be with land acknowledgement statements is that without that exchange, without that relationship to others and relationship to the land through others, they can be very empty… or they can be like a spell. Using them is like magical thinking, often. You’re just saying the words, right? The Walking Eagle had this great joke, that it keeps bringing back now and then. This joke is about a land acknowledgement that malfunctions, and briefly reverts possession of the territory to Indigenous peoples, until it’s brought back to Canada. So it’s a magic spell. It malfunctions, as if just saying it is going to simply, actually fix something. As if saying these words in the statement is going to accomplish anything. And it doesn’t. It has to be part of something bigger.

They can also in this way hold people under their spell. Those who are very well-intentioned get the impression of doing something, expressing solidarity, of redefining themselves. And often even that is difficult. They are, in a sense, but if they’re lived as a spell, through this magical thinking, where just saying words is going to change anything, they can end up being an obstacle to actual change.

For me, there are a few things that they are able to do. They should be able to act as an opening from those making the acknowledgement to the Indigenous people who are present. Or they ought to address their absence from the room, right? That is not something that’s taking place. The goals that are often referred to or addressed in statements are of the past, or are somewhere else. It’s always “they” and not “you.” That’s also a problem with these statements.

They also ought to encourage learning. I think that’s going to be shifting as public consciousness develops. But also, remember that there’s always newcomers to these lands, to the idea of treaties, people who change their mind after a long time about how they think about Indigenous peoples as well.

There’s also a time and a place for them. I think they’re often not worth doing. They’re often very empty. If they don’t serve a purpose, then I’m not sure if they need to be done in that moment.

I think they also open up the question of why we function on… I’ll say “Western time,” because I’ve had Elders tell me about that. With these heavily imposed schedules that leaves no room for relationships.

I think there’s a lot that they could do, but they just reinforce things because we use them as statements in a very Westernized, bureaucratic way of approaching meetings as opposed to gathering.

Emily: Which I think we’ll come back to when we talk about what we’ve learned from this process: this real methodological challenge, this barrier to input, implementing this in sort of a more broad-scale way.

Jerome: Yeah, for sure.

Introduction to the Speakers

Emily: So let’s turn to who we invited to this speaker series as sort of an introduction to our four speakers.

Jérôme: We didn’t want to be too limited in terms of what the land, or the territory, was. Knowing that it’s very shifting and open, that people move around, have always moved around. And so it wouldn’t be right to just focus on the area exactly around Regina. Regina was a part of many networks.

Emily: Absolutely a part of many networks. And in fact, because we really wanted to emphasize that, that’s why we invited knowledge Langan Goforth to come and talk: because we were aware of his teachings and we have worked with him over the years and heard him speak and the number of ways on how the lands in this territory – and beyond Treaty 4 – are shared, and the importance of different gathering spaces within this region to bring differing nations together.

Jérôme: And then going a bit further away from the southern plains, we also wanted to invite Melanie Bryce: because of her connection to what we call northern Saskatchewan, but is the central part of the province; the very close connections that still exist there between Métis and Cree communities; and the different kind of Michif that’s spoken there than what’s spoken say in Winnipeg or around here. And so having her here also allowed us to look at these networks and these routes, traveling routes, that connected Indigenous peoples to land, and not just ever to one specific piece of land.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And then also thinking about her work, which is so integral to sort of maintaining Michif as a spoken language in these territories, and the language camps that she’s been running out on the land in Fort Qu’Appelle, and just thinking through what those relationships to land and language are and how land itself hold language, embodies language and how integral it is, if one wants to reclaim their language or learn an Indigenous language, how important it is to be physically on the land to do so.

Jérôme: So we had language with her, we had a lot around ceremony and all kinds of practices with Landon. And it’s worth also mentioning that we both – and you more than me – learned from Landon over the years, working closely with him.

I also learned a lot from James Daschuk. We go back and forth, speaking French or English, all kinds of different projects or exchanges together. He comes from Ontario, has a background both in English-speaking and French-speaking settler communities. He has written the book Clearing the Plains, that’s been a source of learning for everybody in the southern plains, in the plains in general, or northern plains, since we are in Canada. A lot of Indigenous people have learned about their own history and were able to recontextualize it in relation to government policy. So he’s made himself at home on this territory – in a very good way though! –, he really developed that relationship through that research and through connections to so many people. Through the number of talks he’s given over this area, all over the continent, he has explained to people what has happened here and how that continues today.

Emily: And we really wanted to include a settler voice on in this series. We thought that it was really important to unpack in some ways the Indigenous-settler divide that exists. And that is so integral to reconciliation in terms of mending those relationships. And as a friend of mine recently told me, he said, “The Hammer of colonization hit the hardest here in Saskatchewan.” And I continue to think that through and think about the validity in that statement and what that statement means. But in reflection to that statement, inviting Jim to the series was such a sort of automatic reflex, I think for us because of his work with Clearing the Plains and his ongoing research around just uncovering what that process of settler colonialism looks like in very tangible ways. Right around the railroad, around road development, telephone development within this province, and the physical creation of reserves and thinking through how settler colonialism approaches Indigenous peoples and attempts to erase them and how it physically does that with populations in a large way in terms of creating the reserves. So I think Jim was definitely a voice that we wanted to include to sort of bring some of those perspectives to the series.

Jérôme: Then we also reached out to the Office of the Treaty Commissioner, and to Annie Battiste specifically, for a number of reasons and we did want to go through the Office of the Commissioner. That’s an important relationship that we have here. They’re doing great work to try to bring together the visions, such different views and understandings of what treaties are. Annie has, through her heritage or better yet her belonging to her people – she brings this idea of being a guest as well, but she has also made this her home. She has such amazing knowledge of the treaties here, of the history that took place here specifically. So she has both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective. I think it’s important to know, too, that there’s always been diplomacy between Indigenous peoples, movement between Indigenous peoples, adoptions. And so it’s not just that we have settlers like Jim or myself, coming from further away. We also have Indigenous people from Manitoba, which is still the plains, but also from the Maritime provinces.

Emily: Yeah, I think one of the things that Annie does so well is developing an understanding around Indigenous peoples’ practice of treaty long before settlers came, which I think is so important to understanding the importance of treaty today in terms of what is often described as the spirit and intent of treaty. But understanding how treaty is an alive sort of practice as opposed to just something written on paper, and how does treaty become embodied, and how can we understand treaty beyond this piece of paper or a contract, but understand it in much broader perspectives to really breathe life into treaty. And I think that Annie, her talk, brought so many of those elements to the conversation, but also situated a lot of that within the actual settler colonial state and enabled us to see that real tension  that exists between settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous nationhood. And that tension is core to unpacking what reconciliation is, and core to us – if we’re going to move towards reconciliation, we really need to have a good foundation within what those tensions are and how they have come to be and how they exist today.

Send off

Jérôme: For those of you, for you who are watching/reading this right now, we’re going to assume that you’re watching this in the same order and we invite you to go through the next few talks that we just described. We’re happy that you’re taking the time to watch this.

We’re happy to have a discussion over any kind of medium if you have further questions, are interested about this as well, and hope that this

can be a part of your learning and your process of living on the land here, where we are – or where you are, because there’s a lot around this that will need to be transferred to other locales.