Roger Epp is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Alberta.
In the menacing first month of the maelstrom that has been Donald Trump’s presidency, the terms of political talk in Canada have escalated quickly. We’re talking about “survival” and how the U.S. President poses an “existential threat” – assessments reinforced in sombre essays and statements by, among others, former prime ministers and cabinet ministers.
The language of existential threat has attached itself to multiple plausible scenarios: the taunting offer of statehood, of course; the geopolitical and geological draw of water, minerals, and the Arctic for the manifest destinarians in the White House; the real likelihood of election interference; the harm that American tariffs on Canadian goods will do to an economy that is integrated, deeply but unevenly, into a continental one, and the difficulty of responding without provoking a unity crisis for Canada itself; and, not least, the prospect of a rush of migrants driven north to our border, with all of the quandaries that presents.
There is, in short, no guarantee that Canada will survive the next four years, much less the next century.
But what is striking about all the talk of existential threat is how little Indigenous peoples are figuring into it. Their national representatives might be offered a side meeting, but they are not routinely at the table with the first ministers. Their community leaders, scholars, and knowledge-keepers are not regulars on news-network panels. More clearly than a decade of reconciliation talk, their absence betrays a mainstream sense of what Canada is and how it is threatened.
If the threat is really existential, then it’s by definition constitutional – that is, it’s about how Canada is constituted. And if the threat is constitutional, then Indigenous representatives need to be part of the conversation about how to respond, what to concede, and when.
Indigenous peoples share in the inheritance of this country’s oldest and most basic constitutional building blocks, as old as the Treaty of Niagara (1764), in which the British Crown and Indigenous representatives from many nations agreed on principles by which they would live on the northern part of this continent: peace, friendship, and the sharing of land and responsibility for good relations. One would not absorb the other. Two eminent constitutional theorists, the late Peter Russell and the Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows, have called the Treaty of Niagara a founding treaty.
The historical treaties that followed, west and north, were negotiated under duress, to be sure, but they were still very much negotiated on those same principles. It makes no difference that the Canadian government at the time regarded them transactionally, as land deals, when its own treaty commissioners thought otherwise, or that it failed to meet its obligations while imposing legal and other modes of subjugation, including successive versions of the Indian Act, or that, as recently as 1969, Ottawa proposed to abolish the treaties altogether on “just society” principles. After all that, the treaties remain.
They were never the simple surrenders of land, law, and political authority described in the written texts. With their spirit and intent honoured, they are, as Gina Starblanket has written, “the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state.”
Treaty relations are not about woke ideology or social justice. They are not a feel-good luxury to be abandoned at the first sign of trouble. They are foundational, the basis of our living where we do. They are affirmed in the Constitution Act of 1982 because they are, well, constitutional. They were always meant to be living agreements: relational, not transactional.
Taken seriously, that bundle of treaties, both historic and modern, is what saves Canada from the unflattering story that imperial might makes right, that power confers legitimacy. Turns out, this is the uncomfortable position that Canadians now confront in an American President with a developer’s eye for real estate – see Greenland and Gaza – and a casual disregard for ancestral lands, self-determination, and treaties. Everything has its price, he believes, and every price can be lowered by intimidation.
There is plenty at stake for Indigenous peoples in the existential crisis facing Canada, whether it concerns borders and border crossings, Arctic security, mines, pipelines, or a centuries-old history with the Crown. The “solutions” that panicked Canadian politicians seem ready to offer represent real risks to their communities. So their leaders need to be at the table.
This is not an argument for mere representation or performative tokenism. The times are too important for anything less than an affirmation of treaty relationships as a first point of defence. The actions that Canadian politicians choose to take vis-à-vis Mr. Trump will be better and stronger for it – as will Canadians’ ability to withstand whatever comes next.