When I hear people say that “we are all treaty people” the first thing that comes to mind is that they are acknowledging that we all live on treaty land and they acknowledge the troubling and miserable history of this land, land built on tumultuous relationships. I think as a person with Indigenous and European background that calling myself treaty means that I am acknowledging this troubling and miserable past and I am learning and working towards Truth and Reconciliation for Indigenous people.
“I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole … are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense,” Macdonald told the House of Commons in 1882.” This quote pulled from the Maclean’s Here is what Sir John A. MacDonald did to Indigenous people. This quote and the rest of the article show that the past has come to define Canada in ways the rest of the world does not hear about. Canada’s history is full of systemic racism from mistreatment of Indigenous peoples to the mistreatment of Asian people that came to build the railway. Systemic racism was used to control the government’s “Indian problem” by implementing Residential Schools and creating the Indian Act and Reserves. Other more local methods of systemic racism where the starlight tours in Saskatoon that pretty much enabled police to kill Indigenous people. The scariest part of all is that we do not educate our younger generations on the systemic racism that is still happening. I did not learn about the starlight tours in Saskatoon until this year. How can we better educate our younger generations on what it means to be “treaty people and how can we educate them about Canada’s past mistakes so those mistakes are not repeated?