Canada Wasn't Created on Empty Land

 Canada Wasn't Created on Empty Land

Where does Canada fit into the story of wampum, Indigenous government and the Great Law of Peace?

Right in the middle of it.

When we learn Canadian history, the story often begins with European explorers, French and British colonies, Confederation in 1867, and eventually the country we know as Canada.

But there is a huge problem with starting there.

Canada did not begin on an empty landscape.

Long before Confederation, this continent was home to hundreds of Indigenous nations with their own governments, laws, territories, economies, languages, diplomatic systems and relationships with one another.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was one of those sophisticated political systems.

And European powers didn't simply arrive and start making the rules.

They had to negotiate.

They needed alliances.

They needed trade.

They needed peace.

And they entered into treaties with Indigenous nations.

The Crown knew about wampum

This is where the story gets particularly interesting.

The British Crown inherited and entered into diplomatic relationships that had already been established between Indigenous nations and European powers.

The Haudenosaunee and the British developed what became known as the Covenant Chain, a diplomatic relationship maintained through repeated councils, agreements and renewals.

Wampum belts were part of this diplomatic system.

They weren't souvenirs.

They weren't decorations.

They could serve as memorials of agreements and relationships, carrying meanings that were preserved through Indigenous oral traditions.

Canada's own Department of Justice acknowledges that treaties between the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk Nation and European powers were negotiated on a nation-to-nation basis and that wampum belts were used to memorialize agreements.

So let's stop for a moment.

Nation to nation.

Those words matter.

Then came the Royal Proclamation

In 1763, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation, which established important principles concerning Indigenous lands and treaty-making.

It recognized that Indigenous lands could not simply be taken by private individuals or colonial governments. The Crown claimed the authority to negotiate land cessions through treaties.

The Royal Proclamation became an important foundation for Crown-Indigenous relations.

And Canada itself later recognized treaties as foundational to the relationship between Indigenous nations and the Crown.

But then something changed.

From partnership to control

The relationship that had been described in terms of diplomacy, alliance and nation-to-nation relations increasingly became a system of colonial administration.

The Indian Act of 1876 became one of the major instruments of that transformation.

Instead of treating Indigenous peoples simply as independent nations with their own governments, the Canadian state created an extensive system of federal control over Indigenous lives and communities.

Indigenous peoples were subjected to policies designed to assimilate them.

Children were taken to residential schools.

Languages and cultural practices were suppressed.

Traditional systems of governance were interfered with.

And the very people with whom European powers had once negotiated as political partners were increasingly treated as populations to be administered.

Canada's own Justice Department has acknowledged that this represented a shift away from the nation-to-nation relationship symbolized by wampum toward colonial administration and assimilation.

So what happened to the two boats?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

The Two Row Wampum offered an idea:

Two peoples.
Two governments.
Two ways of life.
Travelling together without one steering the other.

But Canada's colonial history moved increasingly in the opposite direction.

One government claimed greater and greater authority over the other.

And that history isn't ancient.

Its consequences are still with us.

Canada now talks about nation-to-nation relationships, reconciliation, Indigenous self-government and the implementation of treaties and Indigenous rights.

The federal government itself says Indigenous peoples are foundational to Canada's constitutional framework and that historic treaties are living relationships rather than simply documents from the past.

That means reconciliation isn't simply about saying sorry for history.

It means asking:

What was the relationship supposed to be?

And perhaps that is where the old wampum belts have something to teach modern Canada.

Maybe the question isn't:

"How do Indigenous people fit into Canada?"

Maybe we should be asking:

"How does Canada fit into a continent that already had nations, laws and governments?"

That is a very different question.

And perhaps an important one.

Reflective questions

1. What changes when we understand that Canada was built on lands already governed by Indigenous nations?

2. What can the Two Row Wampum teach us about relationships between governments today?

3. If treaties were intended to establish relationships between nations, what responsibilities come with those relationships?

4. How might Canadian history look different if Indigenous systems of law and governance were taught alongside European history?

5. Instead of asking how Indigenous peoples fit into Canada, what might we learn by asking how Canada fits into a continent that already had nations, laws and governments?