Another Indigenous view point on independence
from Alberta Independence face book page.

Letter from a Member of a First Nation to Members of the First Nation in Alberta

" The chief and council you vote for was not built by your ancestors. It was built by the Crown to manage you.

That is the origin of the system. Not self-determination. Administration.

And Ottawa still decides who is allowed inside. The federal government determines who is a status Indian and who is not, registration, the second-generation cut-off, the decades of sex discrimination that took Bill C-31, then Bill C-3, then Bill S-3 to half-fix and still hasn’t fixed.

Think about what that means. The government that built the band council also keeps the list of who counts as one of us. They define the membership and they define the office that membership votes for.

We did not draw either line. They did. And then we are told the path to sovereignty runs through the very machinery they designed to deny it.

So let’s look at the results, because results are the only honest measure. As of mid-2026 there are still thirty-eight long-term drinking water advisories in thirty-six First Nations communities.

Neskantaga has been boiling its water since 1995, a child born there has now grown up, had children of their own, and never once drunk safely from the tap in their home community.

Ottawa promised to end all of it by 2021. The deadline came and went. The water legislation, Bill C-61, got delayed again. One hundred and fifty-six advisories have been lifted since 2015 and we are still here, holding a cup of water up to the light and wondering. Ukraine got their money though........

For thirty years the water ran foul and no one called an emergency assembly. The children kept getting apprehended and no one filed an injunction.

But the moment Alberta let its citizens circulate a petition, not to leave Confederation, not even to hold the referendum, just to ask whether the question of leaving could one day be put to a vote, the chiefs found their fight.

Sturgeon Lake Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan, the Blackfoot Confederacy, Onion Lake, straight into the Court of King’s Bench to kill the petition on duty-to-consult grounds, treaty rallies on the legislature steps, the whole apparatus mobilized at speed to stop the question before it could ever reach a ballot.

Sit with the absurdity of it. They did not kill a separation. They killed a question about whether to ask a question, the most preliminary, least binding step in the entire process, strangled in the cradle.

And the thing they raced to bury was the best leverage our people have been handed in a century.

When the Mohawks stood at Oka they stood for land, for the dead in their own burial ground, for their own people, their own honour. That is what resistance is for.

The Alberta chiefs lined up to block a vote.

They blocked democracy in the province the same way they have blocked it on their own reserves for three generations, where the same one or two surnames have held the council table for seventy-five years and called it tradition.

A captured office defending a captured future, and calling the defense sovereignty.

So no.

I will not risk my liberty for that. I am not waiting for the band office to save me, I stopped a long time ago.

The Crown built the cage in 1876, but the people guarding the door now look like us, and they have decided the cage is comfortable enough to keep. One hundred and fifty years is enough evidence.

Sovereignty was never going to come from the men who throw away the one real chance at renegotiation because the old arrangement keeps them in their chairs, with full pockets.

The cage was built in Ottawa, but the door is held from the inside now, and I am done asking the men in the doorway to move."

Darren Grimes