Honourable senators, I rise to speak in support of Senator McPhedran’s amendment to Bill C-29, the national council for reconciliation act.

Colleagues, the term “time immemorial” has been used in many research articles, books and documents; it has been used by First Nations leaders, Elders, knowledge keepers and scholars. In our First Nations ways of being and knowing, it is a tribute to our connection to Creator and in our prayers, in Cree, we say kâkike, kâkike; forever and ever. It is a reminder of our sacred responsibility to the seven generations before us and that these ancestors also had their seven generations before them. It is also a reminder of our responsibility to the generations yet to come, including my grandson’s seven generations.

I now speak to the term “time immemorial” from a Cree perspective. In the book entitled Untuwe Pi Kin He Who We Are: Treaty Elders’ Teachings Volume I, Nisichawayasi Nehetho Nation and Kihche’otthasowewin — the Great Law of the Creator, Elder D’Arcy Linklater shares the great law of the creator from the Nisichawayasi Nehetho perspective. This is comprised of 12 laws of which the fourth states Aski Kanache Pumenikewin, which means that the conduct of a person must be in accordance with the sacred duty to protect N’tuskenan, the land, life, home and spiritual shelter entrusted to us by Kihche’manitou, for our children, michimahch’ohc. That is a different form of time immemorial.

Honourable senators, I spoke yesterday to Elder Claudette Commanda at the installation of the Indigenous Chiropractors Caucus. In her prayers, she said that her ancestors from Kitigan Zibi First Nation have been here since time immemorial and their lands remain unceded today. These are the lands we stand on. The First Nations knowledge of the term “time immemorial” and seven generations is uniquely situated on Turtle Island and keeping the land pristine.

I would like to draw your attention to the April 2019 report by the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal peoples entitled How Did We Get Here? A Concise, Unvarnished Account of the History of the Relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Canada. This report’s section entitled, “From Sovereign Nations to Wards of the State: The Story of First Nations’ Relationship with the Crown” has a subsection entitled “From Time Immemorial: The Life of First Nations Before the Arrival of Settlers,” where it states:

For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, First Nations lived on their traditional territories, depending on the lands and waters around them for sustenance. First Nations relationships to the land were a central part of their identity, as reflected in the diversity of cultures, laws, languages, ways of life and forms of governance that flourished across the area that is now Canada. . . .

The report continues:

When newcomers first arrived on the shores of Eastern Canada, they brought with them ideas about the land and the Indigenous inhabitants of the country, embodied in the concepts of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery. . . . As explained by Elder Fred Kelly, the concept of terra nullius allowed ‘a discoverer ... [to] occupy the land by virtue of the fact that there is nobody there other than the animals’; this essentially allowed a discoverer to overlook the presence of Indigenous Peoples who were living on that land. A related concept, the doctrine of discovery ‘held that the discovery of such lands gave the discovering nation immediate sovereignty and all right and title to it.

In contrast, First Nations relied on the land for their sustenance — hunting, fishing or farming to feed their families and communities. For the Cree, land is ‘not about ownership and money.’ Instead, Cree People have a holistic understanding of land reflected in the concept of uski, which ‘includes all living things, such as the animals, plants, the trees, the fish, the rivers, the lakes and...the rocks...[and] also includes our concept of the sky world.’ The Cree view the land as integral to their culture, language and identity, and recognize that humans ‘are only a small part of our environment and...totally dependent on uski for their survival.’

The Government of Canada website, regarding the UNDRIP, or United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, Action Plan, in “Chapter 1: Shared priorities,” states:

As a preliminary note to this Chapter, Canada recognizes that the UN Declaration Act states that “measures to implement the Declaration in Canada must take into account the diversity of Indigenous peoples and, in particular, the diversity of the identities, cultures, languages, customs, practices, rights and legal traditions of First Nations, Inuit and the Métis and of their institutions and governance structures, their relationships to the land and Indigenous knowledge.”

Canada recognizes that while some priorities may be shared among First Nations, Inuit and Métis, adopting a distinctions-based approach requires that Canada’s relationships and engagement with First Nations, Inuit and Métis include different approaches or actions and result in different outcomes. . . .

Honourable senators, in legal terms, “time immemorial” originated in English common law, where it referred to a legal concept signifying a period way back in time where there is no recollection of record to prove a custom, right or claim.

In the U.K., a statute of the year 1275 said that the time before King Richard I’s reign or 1189 was declared to be time immemorial.

You will see the difference here between how the two define the word.

Colleagues, much of the remaining information I will share is taken from a book published by the Thompson Rivers University entitled Histories of Indigenous Peoples and Canada, which reads:

Canadians — including many Indigenous people — came to understand Indigenous histories as tangential, small, unimportant, and even a blind alley. This kind of thinking enabled Canadian authorities and citizens to regard Indigenous communities as being “without history,” as in, outside of history. And no one outside of history is going to fare very well . . . We — all of us — are those Canadians invited to engage in the Truth and Reconciliation process. Some truths are unknowable but what we can know, what truths we can distill from the past will be essential to the long hard climb toward reconciliation.

One common form of histories across cultures is that they legitimate a society’s claim to be where it is. . . . For millennia, Indigenous history was maintained by many means —

— including oral history.

Privileging the written word, European and Euro-Canadian historians overwhelmingly disregarded and sometimes disparaged the oral tradition. In New France, British North America, and Canada, the colonialist strategy was more subtle: it simply denied the existence of a historic past [of the First Nations]. Since material records by First Nations were dependent on an interpreter, these skills became less common as alien diseases, warfare and relocation interrupted the connection between the past and its heirs and hence the importance of oral history.

The book continues:

A systematic academic archaeological dig that stretched from the 1880s to the 1950s in Marpole Midden, a traditional village and burial site of enormous importance, pointed to occupation that stretched back at least fifteen hundred years and abandonment sometime in the mid-1700s. . . . The Ottawa Citizen newspaper in 1948 took the view that, whoever they were, the people whose remains constitute the Marpole Midden “. . . were not Indians certainly.” This tendency to deny a history before colonization survives in the practice among some scholars and commentators — still found in some quarters today — to refer to the period before the arrival of Europeans as “pre-historic.” This alleged absence . . . allowed newcomers to write their own history over top of Indigenous Histories . . . Europeans in the early contact period might transcribe Indigenous voices, but that is always filtered through the Europeans’ lens of what is important and how they understood the speaker. For example, they were more likely to journal about beaver pelts than . . . Cree moral debates and Ktunaxa understandings of the past.

Honourable senators, we must ensure that, as educated and civilized champions of the marginalized, we do not continue to place First Nations, Métis and Inuit histories into a monolith, and that we do not adopt legislation that, once again, ignores First Nations histories.

We have to ensure that we do the right thing and continue to accurately place First Nations within Canadian history. What remains problematic is the persistent use of the term “Indigenous”; it remains a form of assimilation.

Colleagues, when Bruce Trigger broadened historical approaches now described as ethno-history, he was able to transform understandings of the pre-, proto- and post-contact history of the Wendat.

At first, Western scholars were astonished that Indigenous knowledge included centuries-old elements. One example included:

The Heiltsuk, a.k.a. Bella Bella, people’s history and their insistence that their direct ancestors lived in their region for many millennia; recent archaeological evidence validates this claim back about fourteen thousand years.

“Vindication” may seem like the right word here, but it has been more like an education. Euro-Canadian society as a whole has been slow to grasp the strength and depth of Indigenous historical knowledge . . . Indigenous societies speak of knowledge keepers, not necessarily knowledge providers. Under no obligation to disclose their historical knowledge, Indigenous peoples nevertheless have the right to demand truthfulness in historical studies —

— and in this case, truthfulness in legislation.

Honourable senators, changing the wording in the amendment — to reflect the truth — is not about denying the status and authority of the Métis. It was never about excluding.

My intention, and the intention of the amendment before us, is in regard to historical accuracy. Such an amendment is not signalling that Métis are of lesser importance. It is a historical fact that they came later in Canadian society because of the Métis shared biology between a First Nations woman and a European man.

Honourable senators, if we deny historical accuracy, then we are facilitating a harmful illusion of Canada’s history that will ultimately have deleterious impacts on First Nations rights, history and culture.

We must be resolute that we approach our work in giving sober second thought with diligence, and that includes ensuring the legislation we pass is fundamentally accurate.

In the book entitled We All Go Back to the Land: The Who, Why, and How of Land Acknowledgements, author Suzanne Keeptwo states:

Although the Land Acknowledgement is perceived as a relatively new phenomenon, it prompts mainstream Canadians to re-imagine an inhabited world — a world prior to European settlement, that is unlike any other —

I will be three minutes.

Thank you.

. . . to re-imagine an inhabited world — a world prior to European settlement, that is unlike any other, and that will never be the same. The descendants of that world are still here, still striving to be understood and to remain connected to a Land that has been drastically altered. And, yes, that connection to the Land is typically perceived as political. That connection remains an ongoing reality lasting for hundreds of years now.

Colleagues, I urge you to support Senator McPhedran’s thoughtful amendment. Thank you.