TRC Calls to Action: #45

Reconciliation
Royal Proclamation and Covenant of Reconciliation

45. We call upon the Government of Canada, on behalf of all Canadians, to jointly develop with Aboriginal peoples a Royal Proclamation of Reconciliation to be issued by the Crown. The proclamation would build on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara of 1764, and reaffirm the nation-to-nation relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. The proclamation would include, but not be limited to, the following commitments: 

i. Repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.  

ii. Adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.

iii. Renew or establish Treaty relationships based on principles of mutual recognition, mutual respect, and shared responsibility for maintaining those relationships into the future.

iv. Reconcile Aboriginal and Crown constitutional and legal orders to ensure that Aboriginal peoples are full partners in Confederation, including the recognition and integration of Indigenous laws and legal traditions in negotiation and implementation processes involving Treaties, land claims, and other constructive agreements.

The Doctrine of Discovery is an old European claim that any place "discovered" by European nations became lands over which those nations gained special rights, regardless of whether the land was already occupied. It is an idea based entirely on one people's superiority over another - and the entitlement of that "superior" people to essentially any land - and one that still inherently informs our own laws and ways of thinking.

Similarly, terra nullius (a Latin expression) means "nobody's land," and is also a principle which describes territory that may be acquired by a state's occupation of it. Of course, the land we now call Canada was not actually vacant when the Europeans settled here, yet they used this concept of nobody's land to give themselves permission to take it over.

According to Beyond 94, neither of these concepts has been formally repudiated by the federal government, nor has a Royal Proclamation of Reconciliation been created. The Trudeau government has, however, committed to developing a Recognition and Implementation of Indigenous Rights Framework that will "ensure full and meaningful implementation of treaties and other agreements," and has taken some steps toward addressing the points in this Call.

In my research regarding Treaties I came upon another government page, which hilariously and erroneously states that early treaties between European settlers and Indigenous people were based on mutual respect and cooperation, and that these relationships were only later eroded by colonial and paternalistic policies which were enacted into laws. Of course, this can't be true, considering the settlement of Europeans on these lands was based entirely on the premise that Europeans were superior to the people indigenous to this land, and were therefore entitled to it. The Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius can not be reconciled with mutual respect and cooperation; these two concepts, and European settlement generally, are based entirely on colonialism and paternalism. The people indigenous to this land had no choice but to cooperate.