Reading Audra Simpson's chapter in the 10th anniversary ed of Red Pedagogy and I've figured out what bothers me about "we're all treaty people"

They are part of a legal framework that crafts Indigenous and settler identity, rendering our land as property and us tenants on it.

They begin the story too late. We're all treaty people starts us after the genocide. After the dispossession.

We can't talk about the treaties as if they begin and end with the earliest agreements. We have to see them combined together, the bones of a legislative framework.

I just read Treaty 9, which is why I won't shut up about it, but in it you can clearly see what Audra, and Sandy, are saying.

Indigenous rights and land become "regulated through the legal arbiters and instruments of that theft. "

So I'm not opposed to learning from them, recognizing the responsibilities within them, and most importantly understanding the different ways that Indigenous peoples and the ascending colonial state understood them. We need to recognize the coercive nature of the later treaties.

And we need to recognize that at some point Canada and the US dispensed with treaties altogether and simply imposed the laws that benefited the colonial project.

So we can't allow institutions to flatten our collective experiences and use the phrase as a move to innocence.

Start the story at the beginning. With the land.

And give it back.