It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Alberta’s pitch to the major projects office for a new oil pipeline to the West Coast is being billed as a public-private partnership, though its current structure skews almost entirely toward the public end of the spectrum.
Ninety per cent of the proposal would be in the hands of provincial and federal Crown corporations — at least in the beginning. Energy infrastructure company Pembina Pipeline Corp. would be a minority partner.
Here is a rundown of what each entity does and what they bring to the table:
Trans Mountain Corp.
The new pipeline would have a familiar builder and route. It would largely follow the path of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline that runs from the Edmonton area to the B.C. Lower Mainland. Trans Mountain Corp., a federal Crown corporation, would be its developer, builder and operator.
The Trans Mountain pipeline has been delivering Alberta crude to southwestern B.C. since the 1950s. Its former owner, U.S. company Kinder Morgan, proposed an expansion in 2012 to almost triple its capacity to 890,000 barrels per day. As costs ballooned and the project got snarled in court delays, Kinder Morgan walked away. The federal government bought the pipeline for $4.5 billion in 2018 to see the expansion through to completion. The project ended up costing $34 billion, a stark increase from its 2017 estimate of $7.4 billion.
Trans Mountain is a subsidiary of the Canada Development Investment Corp., which answers to Parliament.
The Trans Mountain expansion started up in May 2024, and is now operating at full capacity. Since that time, the corporation has returned $2.2 billion to its owner, the Canadian government, in the form of interest and dividends. The price oilsands producers receive for their heavy crude has also risen as their product is now able to now reach Asian markets in meaningful volumes.
Plans are underway to further expand Trans Mountain to almost 1.2 million barrels per day through additional pump stations, chemical additives and some new pipe.
The proposal before the major projects office would “integrate really well with our legacy pipeline,” Trans Mountain chief executive Mark Maki said.
“Same corridor, you can use some of the same people, the same systems,” he said. “All of the stuff that we have already built becomes very, very useful to the new pipeline.”
Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission
The commission is the “business arm” of Alberta’s energy department, said Richard Masson, a former head of the provincial Crown corporation. A stake in a new pipeline falls within its mandate to “try to do things that are in the interest of Albertans as the owner of the resource,” he said.
The APMC has a history of committing barrels to early-stage pipeline projects, like the Trans Mountain expansion and Enbridge’s Line 9 revamp in Ontario and Quebec several years ago. It also committed volumes to the defunct cross-Canada Energy East proposal put forward by TransCanada Corp., now TC Energy.
Up until now, APMC’s biggest and most complicated investment was a deal to supply bitumen to a refinery north of Edmonton.
“This is a big step. There’s no question about it,” Masson said of the West Coast pipeline plan. “APMC has never done anything like this before.”
Pembina Pipeline
Pembina’s core business is natural gas gathering, processing and transport in Western Canada. It is also constructing the Cedar liquefied natural gas plant and export terminal in northern B.C. alongside the Haisla Nation.
Pembina brings “capital discipline” and “operating expertise” to the pipeline partnership, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday.
“And that enriches it.”
In 2021, Pembina formed a 50-50 partnership with a coalition of First Nations and Métis communities to buy Trans Mountain, though the federal government has signalled it has no plans to put the asset up for sale any time soon.
In the meantime, under a “non-binding heads of agreement,” Pembina is to hold a 10 per cent interest in the new West Coast project during construction with the opportunity to double its stake once the pipeline starts up. It said its role would be “complementing, rather than replacing” Trans Mountain as the project’s lead partner.
“The project represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance nation-building energy infrastructure that strengthens Canada’s economy and expands access to global markets for Canadian energy,” said Scott Burrows, Pembina’s chief executive.
“Our participation will be evaluated through the same disciplined lens we apply to every capital decision. We have approached our involvement in a way that is measured, that preserves our financial flexibility and that incorporates meaningful protections — so that any participation remains consistent with our financial guardrails and creates durable value for our shareholders.”
There is one area where Pembina’s established core business would intersect with a new bitumen pipeline, Masson noted. In order for thick, tarry bitumen to flow through pipelines, it needs to be diluted with liquids that come as a byproduct of natural gas production.
Pembina has plants where the liquids — often referred to as condensate or diluent — are separated out of the gas that comes out of the ground. With all of the oilsands pipeline expansion on the books, the sector is short on those liquids, Masson said.
“If we’re going to do all this, we have to more than double the amount of diluent produced in Canada, which is huge.”
Indigenous partners
The Alberta government says Indigenous equity partnership and consultation will be an “essential part” of the project, with the provincial and federal governments both saying they will “facilitate opportunities” for communities to invest through their respective Indigenous loan agencies. But Masson doesn’t see Indigenous groups coming on board until the pipeline starts generating steady cash flow.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 3, 2026.
The Canadian federal government may reconsider a plan to privatize the Trans Mountain oil pipeline.
Since the expanded TMX pipeline launched in 2024, exports to Asia—especially China—have surged, with up to 70% of shipments from British Columbia heading to Asian buyers by late 2025.
Officials now see TMX as a highly profitable “strategically important asset,” with potential for further expansion
The Canadian federal government may reconsider a plan to privatize the Trans Mountain oil pipeline and keep it state-owned amid a surge in appetite for Canadian crude to replace lost Middle Eastern barrels.
“The prior narrative had been that this should be returning to private hands,” the head of the government entity that owns Trans Mountain said at an event this week, as quoted by the Financial Post. “That was in a different market and that was in a different time,” Elizabeth Wademan also said.
Indeed, this is a very different market from what it was when the government in Ottawa had to step in and buy Trans Mountain from Kinder Morgan, which quit the project under relentless pressure from climate activists who used environmental regulations to strangle the expansion project. The price tag for the nationalization deal, which took place in 2018, was about $3.3 billion, and the Trudeau government quickly signaled it would start looking for buyers as soon as possible.
By 2024, the cost of the pipeline expansion project had swelled to about $23 billion, but the project, somewhat surprisingly, was completed, and the expanded pipeline launched in May of that year, running at three times its original capacity or a total of 890,000 barrels daily.
The destination for these barrels was the vast Asian market, as a way to diversify away from the U.S., which has for decades been pretty much the only foreign market for Canadian crude—and an export conduit, with the oil transported from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and from there, to markets overseas. With the new TMX, Canadian crude producers got a new, more convenient channel to Asian energy buyers.
It did not take long for the effect to be felt: between the launch of the expanded pipe and spring 2025, the average flow rates for shipment to China reached 207,000 barrels daily. That compares with an average of 173,000 barrels daily pumped to the United States. Since spring, the shift has become even more marked. By October 2025, as much as 70% of Canadian crude exported from the British Columbia coast was going to China. Now, everyone else in Asia is also interested.
The Trans Mountain pipeline is a “strategically important asset”, Trans Mountain Corp.’s Wademan said this week, suggesting the project could be expanded further, with more “energy corridors” that would add value for Canadians, the Financial Post reported.
“Let’s look where we are, and look how important energy security is, and look how incredibly profitable this asset is; there’s a lot,” Wademan said. “There’s a lot of merit to holding onto it and realizing that full value.”
Indeed, it would be profitable for the federal government to hold on to the infrastructure as the price of Canadian crude inches closer to $90 per barrel—a level hardly seen as possible just five years ago, and even more recently. TMX has turned into a game-changer for the Canadian oil industry and it will be in the center of the “golden opportunity” that Canada has to become a bigger global player in both oil and gas.
Canada has a “golden opportunity” to become a major global oil player as the war in the Middle East limits sources of crude and natural gas, the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said earlier this month, adding that “The cost of missing this train will be incredible.” It seems the Canadian government is acutely aware of that risk and plans to avoid it and make the best of the country’s resources in a fascinating departure from the previous government’s focus on emission reduction and alternative energy.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
Friday, March 27, 2026
Alberta Courts Asian Capital for 1M bpd Pipeline to Break U.S. Dependence
Asian and Middle Eastern investors are willing to fund a major Alberta-to-Pacific pipeline to reduce Canada’s reliance on U.S. exports.
Indigenous opposition, tanker bans, and complex approvals threaten the project’s feasibility despite strong economic potential.
Middle East disruptions highlight Canada’s potential as a stable supplier, but limited infrastructure may prevent it from fully capitalizing.
Asian and Middle Eastern capital is lining up behind Alberta’s latest export push. Premier Danielle Smith says investors, including sovereign wealth funds, are prepared to take 15% to 30% minority stakes in a proposed 1-million-barrel-per-day pipeline aimed at Asian markets.
The plan centers on moving oil sands crude to the northwest coast of British Columbia, with Prince Rupert now favored over Kitimat as the terminal site. The objective is straightforward: break Canada’s near-total dependence on the U.S., which still absorbs roughly 95% to 97% of Alberta’s crude exports.
For Edmonton, the pipeline is a direct response to chronic transport bottlenecks that have long capped production growth and discounted Canadian crude.
But the political barrier is just as clear. Indigenous leaders along B.C.’s coast remain firmly opposed to lifting the tanker ban, calling it non-negotiable, setting up a familiar standoff between market access and local consent.
The 2019 Oil Tanker Moratorium Act bans vessels carrying over 12,500 metric tons of crude or persistent oil from stopping, loading, or unloading at ports along British Columbia's northern coast, specifically protecting areas from Northern Vancouver Island to the Alaska border. The Act intends to protect fragile marine ecosystems and the Great Bear Rainforest. The project's feasibility also depends on ongoing negotiations regarding carbon pricing, with negotiations between Alberta and the federal government on an industrial carbon tax and thePathways Alliance carbon capture project expected to miss an April 1 deadline.
A recent study by ATB Financial and Studio.Energy found that expanding Canadian oil pipeline capacity could boost export capacity by an additional 1.5 million barrels per day, add an average of $31.4 billion annually to Canada's real GDP between 2027 and 2035 (~1.1% of GDP) and support 112,000 extra Canadian jobs. The joint study by Studio.Energy and ATB Economics revealed that increased capacity to the West Coast allows for better access to Asian-Pacific markets, reducing reliance on U.S. routes and strengthening economic security.
The proposed pipeline could do much of the heavy lifting for Canada’s oil export ambitions thanks to its massive capacity, comparable to the famous BTC pipeline, with a throughput capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd). The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is a 1,768-kilometer (1,099-mile) crude oil pipeline that serves as a primary energy corridor linking the landlocked Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. It originates at the Sangachal Terminal near Baku, Azerbaijan, traverses Georgia via Tbilisi, and terminates at the Ceyhan Marine Terminal on Turkey's southeastern coast.
The Iran conflict has positioned Canada as a potentially reliable, low-risk oil and natural gas supplier for its allies, potentially boosting its energy exports. According to Eric Nuttall, senior portfolio manager at Toronto-based Ninepoint Partners, the Middle East conflict is a “massive opportunity” for Canada, which can position itself as a stable and secure supplier of oil.
Nuttall argues that Canada is uniquely positioned as a stable and secure energy supplier with decades of inventory in the oil sands and the Clearwater formation. The Clearwater Formation in Alberta, Canada, holds vast, high-viscosity heavy oil and bitumen reserves, with estimated in-place volumes exceeding 70 billion barrels in the Cold Lake area alone. Production is expected to grow, withestimates that it could hit nearly 400,000 bbl/d by 2031. The war has also accelerated calls to ramp up Canada’s LNG export capabilities, with companies like ARC Resources (OTCPK:AETUF) and TC Energy (NYSE:TRP) looking to benefit.
Unfortunately, limited pipeline capacity coupled with long regulatory approvals for infrastructure threaten to hinder Canada’s ability to fill the global supply gap. Major Canadian oil pipeline projects have historically faced significant political and regulatory hurdles, resulting in several high-profile cancellations and delays. U.S. President Joe Biden famously revoked the permit for the cross-border permit for TC Energy's Keystone XL project in 2021 on his first day in office. The project was designed to carry oil from Alberta to Texas, with a capacity of 830,000 barrels per day.
Indeed, the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) stands as the only major recent expansion project to reach completion in Canada after becoming operational in May 2024. TMX was similarly plagued by legal challenges from First Nations and environmental groups, leading the federal government to purchase it from Kinder Morgan (NYSE:KMI) for $4.5 billion in 2018 to ensure its completion. Massive cost overruns also threatened to derail the project after final construction costs surged from an initial estimate of $5.4 billion to nearly $35 billion.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is working to streamline Canada’s byzantine energy regulatory hurdles, and has pledged to come up with an efficient approval process that will attract the private sector. Carney has proposed creating "energy corridors" to facilitate project development and has encouraged provinces to create agreements to allow regional assessments to substitute for federal reviews. The Carney government is focused on attracting private capital, and has doubled the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program to $10 billion in a bid to support Indigenous ownership of major resource projects. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Friday, October 24, 2025
The Architecture of Avoidance
How Canada Manages Reconciliation to Protect the Stolen Prize of the Land
by Amel-Ba’al / October 23rd, 2025
“Since my life as a prisoner has begun, I have heard of some white men who said they owned my land and my home. I don’t believe they do. I have never given any consent to such ownership. The land belongs to my people and to our children.”1
“We were taught that God’s laws are about how we treat each other and the land. The white man doesn’t obey God’s laws. They take the land that belongs to us, the land that God gave us.”2
– Chief Geronimo.
“The Great Spirit gave this great island to his red children. He placed the whites on the other side of the big water. They were not contented with their own, but came to take ours from us. They have driven us from the sea to the lakes — we can go no farther.”3
– Chief Tecumseh.
“The white man has made many promises to us, and they have kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they have taken it.”4
– Chief Red Cloud.
“My lands are where my dead lie buried.”5
– Chief Crazy Horse.
To sit with Elder Ttesalaq—Tom Sampson—of the Tsartlip First Nation is to be granted an audience with living history. His words are not merely recollections; they are the continuous, unbroken thread of a nation’s memory, stretching back to a time before the word “Canada” was ever uttered on these shores. To understand his testimony is to undertake a fundamental re-examination of the story Canada tells about itself. It reveals a narrative not of benevolent nation-building, but of a guest who moved into the house, claimed the deed, and has been trying to evict the original owners ever since. This truth stands in stark contrast to the official discourse of “Truth and Reconciliation,” which across the vast apparatus of the Canadian state and its media echo chambers, reveals a sophisticated architecture of avoidance. This architecture is designed to manage the symptoms of settler-colonialism—the pain, the cultural loss—while carefully protecting its root cause: the systematic robbery of the land itself.
The Original Welcome: A Host Becomes a “Refugee” in His Own Land
Elder Ttesalaq begins not with accusation, but with a profound act of empathy. “We welcomed the first refugees that came here in 1492,” he states, framing a history of Indigenous generosity that provided food, medicine, and land. This was not a transaction but a foundational principle of his civilization.
The great, painful irony he identifies is that this act of welcome was perverted into a logic of dispossession. “We were put under the Ministry of Immigration in the early days,” he notes with a wry, painful clarity. “So we were considered immigrants in our own country.” This single, bureaucratic act encapsulates the entire colonial project: to render the host a stranger, the native an alien. The Canadian state, from its very inception in the Indian Act and the reserve system, has been an engine of identity reassignment, systematically working to erase the original political identities of the peoples it encountered.
The Douglas Treaty: A “Nation-to-Nation” Agreement Betrayed
At the core of Elder Ttesalaq’s testimony is the Douglas Treaty of 1852. For him, this is the legal and moral cornerstone that the Canadian state has spent over a century undermining. He is meticulous in his historical framing: this was not a treaty with Canada. Canada did not exist. It was a treaty between the Saanich Nations and the British Crown, represented by Governor James Douglas.
The treaty’s promise was simple and profound: the Saanich people would be allowed to hunt and fish “as formerly,” as if they were the “sole occupants of the land.” In return, they granted the Crown permission to settle. “We gave him the right to come here,” Elder Ttesalaq corrects the colonial narrative. “He didn’t give us any rights.” This distinction is critical. Sovereignty was not ceded; access was granted.
The betrayal began with Confederation in 1867. The Crown transferred its authority to the new federal government of Canada without the consent of the treaty signatories. “Our treaty’s been breached straight since 1867 right to the present day,” he states. The creation of Indian reserves was the first and most catastrophic breach. The Indian Act then became the primary tool of control, creating a system of “delegated authority” where Band Councils were transformed into “Crown corporations,” effectively making them administrators of their own oppression. “The colonizer is now our own people,” he laments. “We have become the colonizer.”
The Long War in the Courts: Rights Recognized but Never Respected
A significant portion of Elder Ttesalaq’s narrative is dedicated to the relentless legal battle his people have been forced to wage. He speaks not with the zeal of a victor, but with the weary frustration of a man who has won the argument a dozen times over, only to have his opponent pretend the debate never happened.
He recounts how the Supreme Court of Canada has consistently ruled in favour of Indigenous rights. He references Section 35 of the Constitution, which affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights, and which a federal minister once called a “full box.” He cites the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, where the Court acknowledged that Aboriginal title had never been extinguished. “They knew that as late as 1997, they knew that they never had extinguished Aboriginal title and Aboriginal rights. And yet they continue to pretend that they owned everything.”
The tragedy, in his view, is the intransigence of the bureaucracy. “The bureaucrats, British Columbia, Ottawa, the Department of Indian Affairs, they don’t seem to understand that the law has changed in this country and they don’t want to change it.” He describes a Canadian state that functions as a schizophrenic entity: its judicial branch affirming rights, while its executive and legislative branches spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fight those same rights. It is a state at war with its own legal foundation.
The Bureaucratic Mask: Polishing the Machinery of Dispossession
This judicial truth is met with what Elder Ttesalaq identifies as a wall of bureaucratic resistance—a pattern that reveals itself with stark clarity across the state’s own institutions. The Department of National Defence (DND), in its “Towards Truth and Reconciliation” report, speaks of “harm” and “assimilation” but is utterly silent on the historical and ongoing use of military force to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. For the DND to discuss reconciliation without confessing its role as the ultimate guarantor of the state’s territorial claims is the height of irony.
This sleight-of-hand finds its most sophisticated expression in the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC). Its “Reconciliation Framework” is a masterpiece of procedural liberalism: it outlines how to consult Indigenous peoples on new resource projects, but never once questions the underlying authority of the Canadian state to grant permission for the extraction of wealth from unceded land. The entire process is designed to make Indigenous communities stakeholders in their own dispossession, rather than sovereign nations with the power to grant or refuse consent.
The Symbolic Veil and the Complicit Echo
At the highest symbolic levels, the avoidance becomes a form of political theater. The Governor General, the representative of the very Crown that asserted sovereignty over Indigenous nations, frames reconciliation as a matter of “listening” and “dialogue.” This transforms a fundamental political struggle over jurisdiction and territory into a therapeutic process of interpersonal understanding.
The most telling performances come on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The Prime Minister’s statements and the accompanying Canadian Heritage pages are saturated with the language of “reflection,” “honour,” and “painful legacy.” They speak of “colonial policies” in the abstract but will not utter the words “settler colonialism.” They mourn the loss of “ways of life” but will not admit that the goal was to destroy the political and economic bases of those ways of life to clear the land for settlement and resource extraction. This is reconciliation as a public ritual of mourning for cultural loss, deliberately severed from the material reality of property and power.
This state-driven narrative is amplified by the complicit machinery of mainstream media. Outlets like the Globe and Mail often provide “explainer” journalism that focuses on the what and the when of reconciliation, while omitting the why. They personalize the story through powerful, heart-wrenching accounts like that of Phyllis Webstad’s orange shirt, yet in doing so, they often individualize a systemic crime, directing public empathy toward a single instance of a taken shirt, subtly diverting attention from the larger, more politically explosive story of taken continents.
Even the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) finds itself structurally bound within this architecture of avoidance. For instance, a CBC article headlined “As 5th National Day for Truth and Reconciliation arrives, many say little has changed,” quotes Indigenous leaders who state plainly that the government’s “piecemeal approach” prioritizes “performance over progress” and fails to act on “land dispossession and resource sharing.” Yet, as a state-funded institution, the CBC’s mandate is inextricably linked to the very state it is critiquing. It can report on the government’s failure to live up to its own promises, but it cannot consistently and fundamentally question the legitimacy or foundational claims of the colonial state that provide its mandate and foundation. It is a “critic” from within the palace walls, its voice constrained by the very architecture it describes, ultimately reinforcing the boundaries of a conversation that must never challenge the state’s ultimate authority over the land.
The Unmasking: The RCMP and the Guardian of the Theft
The most potent example of this architectural avoidance is found in the so-called Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Their pages on “Indigenous Policing” and how they “Advance Reconciliation” are not merely omissions; they are active, breathtaking acts of historical whitewashing. The RCMP was not created to be a neutral police service. It was established as a paramilitary force with an explicit colonial mandate: to assert Canadian sovereignty over Indigenous lands and to suppress resistance.
For the RCMP to speak of “building trust” is the ultimate hypocrisy, because its historical role was to systematically break the will of Indigenous nations. This institution was the primary enforcement arm for the residential school system; RCMP agents were the ones who forcibly kidnapped children from their families at gunpoint. They also enforced the illegal pass system and suppressed the Métis Resistance. Today, their “reconciliation” framework focuses on “cultural competency.” This is a safe admission that allows them to acknowledge a flaw in their culture without confronting their foundational settler-colonial purpose. Their modern, militarized raids on Wet’suwet’en land to protect pipeline construction are not an aberration; they are the continuation of their original purpose: to protect the state’s claim to the stolen land and the resources beneath it.
Against this backdrop of state-sponsored ambiguity, the clarity of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) acts as a powerful unmasking of the state’s true motives. Its statement does what other bodies refuse to do, naming the residential school system as “a key component of a deliberate, settler-colonial policy of assimilation designed to eliminate First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples as distinct peoples and to gain access to their lands and resources.” By correctly identifying this as a “land-based project,” the CHRC lays the motive bare: the entire colonial endeavor was, and is, a project of land robbery.
This truth is not new. It is meticulously documented in the foundational work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC’s Calls to Action are a blueprint for dismantling the legal and philosophical underpinnings of the colonial state. Call to Action 46, which demands the repudiation of the “Doctrine of Discovery” and terra nullius, is a direct assault on the legal justification for centuries of land theft. The failure of the state to fully implement these calls is the evidence of its bad faith.
The Land and the Cost: Reconciliation Versus Reality
For Elder Ttesalaq, these abstract legal and bureaucratic battles manifest in the very concrete devastation of his people’s land and waters. The fight against the Kinder Morgan pipeline is the defence of a way of life guaranteed by treaty. “The issue is that it’s going through our territory, our land, and our resources are at risk.”
He speaks with the authority of a scientist who has inherited millennia of data. He recalls elders in 1947 noting the waters were warming and the fish were moving—early warnings of climate change that were ignored because the bearers lacked “a degree and diploma.” Now, the evidence is everywhere: the dying salmon, the vanished herring, the polluted air. “My world has already come to an end,” he says, a statement of devastating finality. “All my food, all our food from the ocean that we needed, all the birds that used to be in the sky are gone.”
This environmental cataclysm is inextricably linked to the unfinished business of the treaty. The Canadian state and its corporate partners see land as a “commercial commodity,” while for the Saanich, it is a relative, named and known, part of a family. True reconciliation, therefore, is impossible without reconciling with the land itself. “It’s not just reconciliation with Indigenous people; it’s reconciliation with the land and reconciliation with the ocean and reconciling the air that we once breathe.”
The Unfinished Struggle
Ultimately, Elder Ttesalaq presents a deeply sobering critique. For him, the truth is known and has been affirmed by the courts and its own commissions; the failure is in the reconciliation, which remains a hollow performance so long as the fundamental issues of land and sovereignty remain unaddressed. He points to the ongoing, visceral racism and police violence as proof of the state’s insincerity. How can there be reconciliation, he asks, when one side still holds the power of life and death over the other? When the state’s laws, like the Indian Act, continue to impose what he unequivocally names an “apartheid system”?
Elder Ttesalaq’s testimony is not a plea, but a declaration. It is a map of a parallel Canada, one where the Douglas Treaty is the supreme law and where the original relationship of host and guest has yet to be restored. The path forward is not one of assimilation, but of recognition. “We’re not going to be French, we’re not going to be English,” he asserts. The goal is an “equal right,” where Indigenous nations can exercise their inherent sovereignty.
The Canadian state stands at a crossroads. It can continue to spend billions fighting a truth it has already lost, perpetuating a conflict that poisons the land and its people. Or, it can finally “come to terms” with the original nation-to-settlers agreement and dismantle the apartheid system it built. Until it has the courage to face this truth and relinquish its grip on the stolen prize, the promise of reconciliation will remain, like the treaty itself, an unkept promise, and the unfinished struggle of this land will continue to demand a reckoning.
ENDNOTES:
1 Chief Geronimo: In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache by Eve Ball, as told to her by James Kaywaykla.
2 Chief Geronimo: His Own Story, as told to S.M. Barrett.
3Chief Tecumseh: The Life of Tecumseh and His Brother the Prophet by Benjamin Drake.
4 “Chief Red Cloud: A speech given at a council at Fort Laramie,” as recorded in the New York Times, May 7, 1870.
5 “Chief Crazy Horse: A statement made to Lieutenant William Philo Clark,” as recorded by He Dog.
