The chief and council you vote for was not built by your ancestors. It was built by the Crown to manage you. The Indian Act of 1876 swept aside whatever governance our nations carried before contact. Clan systems, hereditary lines, councils that answered to the people in front of them, and replaced it with an elected band council overseen by an Indian agent who could depose a chief he didn’t like and withhold the rations of a community that stepped out of line.
That is the origin of the system. Not self-determination. Administration. A municipal-grade office grafted onto a sovereign people so that one department in Ottawa would have a single throat to talk to and a single hand to sign the papers. We have been electing into a colonial container for a century and a half and calling it leadership.
And Ottawa still decides who is allowed inside. The federal government determines who is a status Indian and who is not, registration, the second-generation cut-off, the decades of sex discrimination that took Bill C-31, then Bill C-3, then Bill S-3 to half-fix and still hasn’t fixed. Think about what that means. The government that built the band council also keeps the list of who counts as one of us. They define the membership and they define the office that membership votes for. We did not draw either line. They did. And then we are told the path to sovereignty runs through the very machinery they designed to deny it.
So let’s look at the results, because results are the only honest measure. As of mid-2026 there are still thirty-eight long-term drinking water advisories in thirty-six First Nations communities. Neskantaga has been boiling its water since 1995, a child born there has now grown up, had children of their own, and never once drunk safely from the tap in their home community. Ottawa promised to end all of it by 2021. The deadline came and went. The water legislation, Bill C-61, got delayed again. One hundred and fifty-six advisories have been lifted since 2015 and we are still here, holding a cup of water up to the light and wondering. Ukraine got their money though.
The suicide numbers are worse and quieter. The First Nations rate runs three times the non-Indigenous rate, roughly twenty-four deaths per hundred thousand against eight.
On reserve it doubles again.
For young First Nations men aged fifteen to twenty-four living on reserve it sits near seventy-nine per hundred thousand. Inuit youth in some regions die at up to forty times the national rate. Here is the part nobody at the microphone wants to say out loud:
First Nations suicide deaths in that period outnumbered the homicides of Indigenous women and girls by roughly two and a half to one, and got a fraction of the national attention. Our young men are killing themselves, and our women, in numbers that should have stopped this country cold, and the leadership class found other priorities.
The addiction and the violence ride alongside it, and the violence is closer to home than the slogans admit. The RCMP’s own commissioner confirmed in 2015 that in solved cases of murdered Indigenous women, seventy percent of the offenders were Aboriginal, eighty-nine percent were men, and the offender was known to the victim in one hundred percent of solved cases, the majority of them spouses, family, intimate partners.
That is not a comfortable sentence to write and I am not writing it to let the colonial structure off the hook; the structure built the despair the violence grows in. But sovereignty means telling the truth in our own house, and the truth is that much of the harm done to our women is done by our men, and a leadership that cannot say so plainly is not protecting anyone. It is managing optics.
Then there is the part that gives the whole thing away. Manitoba has the highest child apprehension rate in the country. In 2024–25 there were over nine thousand children in care in that province, the first increase in years, and ninety-one per cent of them were Indigenous. A University of Manitoba study found that roughly half of First Nations families in Manitoba have had a child welfare file opened on them.
Half.
That is not a system that lost its way. That is the Sixties Scoop wearing a new uniform, and it is happening right now, under an Indigenous premier, in a province led by an Indigenous government, and the rate went up.
Watch what finally moves them.
For thirty years the water ran foul and no one called an emergency assembly. The children kept getting apprehended and no one filed an injunction. The young men kept dying and no one went to court.
But the moment Alberta let its citizens circulate a petition, not to leave Confederation, not even to hold the referendum, just to ask whether the question of leaving could one day be put to a vote, the chiefs found their fight. Sturgeon Lake Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan, the Blackfoot Confederacy, Onion Lake, straight into the Court of King’s Bench to kill the petition on duty-to-consult grounds, treaty rallies on the legislature steps, the whole apparatus mobilized at speed to stop the question before it could ever reach a ballot.
Sit with the absurdity of it. They did not kill a separation. They killed a question about whether to ask a question, the most preliminary, least binding step in the entire process, strangled in the cradle. And the thing they raced to bury was the best leverage our people have been handed in a century. A separation crisis cracks the constitutional order wide open and drags every treaty back onto the table. It was the renegotiation we have been fighting for and denied since 1876, handed to us by a premier who didn’t even mean to hand it over. And the response of our leadership was to slam the door, lawyer up, and defend the status quo, to stand on the legislature steps and wave the treaties like a shield for the very Confederation that poisoned the water and emptied the homes. They acted like Canadians protecting Canada. Not like Indians who have been fighting Canada for scraps for a hundred and fifty years.
When the Mohawks stood at Oka they stood for land, for the dead in their own burial ground, for their own people, their own honour. That is what resistance is for.
The Alberta chiefs lined up to block a vote.
They blocked democracy in the province the same way they have blocked it on their own reserves for three generations, where the same one or two surnames have held the council table for seventy-five years and called it tradition.
A captured office defending a captured future, and calling the defense sovereignty.
So no.
I will not risk my liberty for that. I am not waiting for the band office to save me, I stopped a long time ago.
The Crown built the cage in 1876, but the people guarding the door now look like us, and they have decided the cage is comfortable enough to keep. One hundred and fifty years is enough evidence. Sovereignty was never going to come from the men who throw away the one real chance at renegotiation because the old arrangement keeps them in their chairs, with full pockets.
The cage was built in Ottawa, but the door is held from the inside now, and I am done asking the men in the doorway to move.
Darren Grimes
Another outstanding article on the subject. Your insights are incredibly valuable.
As you stated, everyone in Alberta has an Ottawa problem, but Ottawa doesn't want to be bothered with western Canada or Natives problem s. They would prefer that everyone in Alberta would bow to the east and thank them. All Albertans should fight for their freedom and not wait for someone else to fight for them.