Fort Chipewyan is the oldest settlement and the oldest Métis community in what is now the Province of Alberta. Our ancestors built the fur trade on the rivers of the Athabasca region, and their descendants continue to practice our unique Métis way of life and culture. For more than 200 years, our community has exercised its inherent and constitutionally-protected rights to self-government and self-determination. Recently, however, our rights to self-government and self-determination have come under threat from the new Métis Nation within Alberta (MNA) and its Otipemisiwak Métis Government (OMG), with the support of Canada.
We wish to have strong, positive, and productive relations with all our Métis kin, both in Alberta and across the Métis homeland. To do this, our relations must be based in our history and in our values of mutual respect and recognition. The word Otipemisiwak is the term given to us by our Cree kin, which means “the people who govern themselves”. It is deeply ironic, then, that it is our brothers and sisters in the MNA/OMG who now seek to stifle and deny our inherent right to do just that: govern ourselves.
The flawed vision advanced by the MNA/OMG is one of Métis self-government built from the top-down, not from the bottom-up. It is a vision where our inherent and constitutionally-protected rights as a historic and contemporary Métis community are usurped, at the stroke of a pen, by this new “Métis Nation within Alberta”, and our historic community is reduced to “Citizens” within a “District” of this Nation. This sleight-of-hand is evident in the OMG Constitution, which appropriates “all the rights inherent to Indigenous peoples and all peoples” to the Métis Nation within Alberta, which includes “all [MNA] Citizens, all Métis who live within Alberta, and the Métis communities…” This vision of Métis self-government and rights is at odds with our history of community self-government and the decisions of Canadian courts, including the March 2024 federal court ruling that found that the MNA’s self-government agreement with Canada unduly granted the MNA a monopoly over the section 35 rights of all Métis communities in Alberta.
While the MNA/OMG now belatedly acknowledge that not all Métis communities must be a part of their Nation and their government, their laws continue to threaten our rights and undermine the unity and integrity of our community. Despite the fact that the OMG Constitution does not require our community (labelled the “Fort Chipewyan District”) to have a District Council (the OMG equivalent to a municipal-level of government), the OMG’s District Councils Law empowers and requires the OMG to hold elections every year for a District Council in Fort Chipewyan, without the consent of our community. It is deeply regrettable to see the MNA/OMG now employing the very same divide-and-conquer strategies of the colonizers, threatening to create a parallel and competing government that could divide and undermine our community.
The Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation has never relinquished its inherent and constitutionally-protected rights to self-government and self-determination, either to Canada or to the MNA/OMG. The communities that make up the broader Métis Nation are rich and diverse, and should be able to exercise their rights to self-government and self-determination as they see fit. For all those Métis communities in Alberta who wish to be a part of the MNA/OMG, we support you. But this decision must be made by the historic and contemporary Métis communities of Alberta, not by Canada and the MNA/OMG behind closed doors.
To the Métis communities across our province and the Métis homeland, we ask for your support as we assert our rights to Otipemisiwak, to be people who govern themselves. To Canada, we ask that you support, protect, and recognize the inherent and constitutionally-protected rights of our community, in a manner consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Constitution of Canada. And finally, to the MNA/OMG, we ask that you meet with us, in the spirit of kinship, reciprocity, and mutual respect, to discuss how we can move forward together on a government-to-government basis, to build a better future for Métis people, from the bottom-up, not the top-down.
Kendrick Cardinal
President, Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation