Alberta Has Been Freeloading Off First Nations for a Century. Now Smith Wants to Audit Them.
$315 billion in royalties. Zero to the treaty nations whose land it came from. Let’s talk about accountability.
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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith went on her radio show this weekend and entertained a caller who asked whether she’d consider auditing First Nations chiefs to see “where all the money is going.” She said she’d bring it to her minister of Indigenous Relations — and appeared to favour doing it. Requiring First Nations to release audited financials publicly in order to continue doing “business with them.” Just like, she said, “everyone else we do business with.”
OK, Smith. Let’s talk about money.
Because before we get to what chiefs may or may not owe Albertans in transparency, let’s talk about what Alberta owes First Nations — and that number is so staggering it should shake up every person in this province. We’ll get there. But first, let’s name what’s actually happening here.
Anyone spending five minutes in the comment sections of Alberta news stories right now — any story about First Nations chiefs asserting their treaty rights, pushing back on separatism, defending their territory from potentially being sold to Donald Trump — knows exactly where this “audit the chiefs” call is coming from. The comments are a sewer. “Where does all the money go?” “Corrupt Indians.” “Their own leaders steal from them.” Every chief, every nation, every community blanketed wholesale with the assumption of theft and corruption.
This is not curiosity. This is not policy. This is a racist trope being laundered through social media and now into the premier’s own radio microphone.
Yes — there have been individual cases of Indigenous leaders who did wrong things and misused money in this country. That is real, and communities have suffered for it. But politicians steal money too. Corporate executives steal money. Church officials stole children and got pensions. So what, exactly, is the point here, if not to smear and demean an entire people in the middle of a constitutional crisis they didn’t create and don’t deserve to be defending against?
The point is the fog. The point is to keep you looking the wrong direction.
What Smith did on that radio show has a name. It’s propaganda. Not a strong word carelessly thrown — the actual definition: the use of emotionally charged, group-targeting narrative to serve a political agenda, deployed not to inform but to manipulate. She didn’t cite evidence of widespread financial mismanagement across First Nations. She didn’t commission a report. She didn’t consult her own minister before floating the idea publicly. She took a call from a listener repeating a social media talking point — the kind that’s been circulating as fact in separatist Facebook groups and UCP-friendly social media for months — and she validated it from the most powerful political platform in this province.
This is not accidental. Governments and colonial administrations have used the “corrupt and incompetent Indigenous leadership” narrative for well over a century — specifically to justify continued control over Indigenous lands and resources. It is one of the oldest tools in the colonial playbook. Smith isn’t inventing it. She’s reaching for it at the precise moment Treaty chiefs are asserting constitutional rights that directly threaten the separatism agenda and her ability to make resource deals with the United States. The timing is not a coincidence. It’s the point.
Because here’s what Danielle Smith does not want you asking: if we’re auditing who’s been taking money that isn’t theirs on this land — where does that audit actually lead?
It leads straight back to Alberta. It leads straight back to her.
That is the freeloading this headline is talking about. Not chiefs. A province. A province that has collected $315 billion in royalties since 1974 from land it acquired — without the consent of the people who owned it — and has paid the original owners zero percent of that wealth in return. A province now trying to distract you from that fact by pointing fingers at the people it has been taking from.
Cara Currie-Hall is a prominent Cree political strategist who advises chiefs from Maskwacis, Treaty 6 territory. Her father was Cecil Currie, her grandfather Sam Currie — treaty rights experts, warrior leaders. She grew up in a household where treaty was the law at the kitchen table. But she brings something else to this fight that many people attending a high-level treaty meeting in Samson Cree Nation last week didn’t know when she walked in.
Her husband, is from the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota — an oil and gas rich tribe. For the last twenty years, they have been living inside one of the most significant oil booms on the continent. When the United States Geological Survey mapped the mineral resources of that region, Cara looked at the map and told the tribal leadership what she saw: the Three Affiliated Tribes were sitting in the deepest pool of oil in the entire play. She was right.
What she learned there — working in the oil and gas industry representing mineral owners — turned out to be the most important education she could bring back to Alberta.
In the United States system, the Three Affiliated Tribes have what are called allotees: individuals who own their land and their minerals, and can document and prove it. Her husband Ken is one of them. That ownership, she explained at the presentation, puts you in a very specific and very powerful position when the oil companies come knocking.
“Oil corporations respond to investors,” she said. “They have to make money for other people, so they’re not even spending their own money. Governments are supposed to regulate. But what we have learned is this: the most powerful people in the room are the owners of the lands and the minerals. Until they give their consent, nothing happens. Nothing happens.”
She came home to Maskwacis carrying that knowledge. And when she holds it up against what’s happening in Alberta— where the nations are treaty peoples who own the lands and the minerals by every moral and by a legal argument that’s now actively moving through the highest levels of governments and the courts. And yet receive none of the royalties — the contrast is not subtle. It is staggering.
“We, as Treaty Six and Treaty Seven and Treaty Eight and all the other treaties across the prairie provinces, receive zero,” she said. “Now, who did the math — that the original owners of the lands and the minerals would get nothing?”
Nobody did the math. Or rather — somebody did, and decided the answer worked just fine for them.
Here’s the part most people don’t know.
In 1899, when the federal government sent negotiators into the Athabasca region to sign Treaty 8, the Geological Survey of Canada had already published reports about the petroleum sitting under that land. They knew. They went in knowing. The promise made to Cree, Dene, and other nations at that table was that they could continue their way of life — that they would share the land with settlers. The oral understanding, as Cold Lake First Nation and others have documented, was that the land would be shared “to the depth of a plow.” Not to the depth of a bitumen well. Not to the depth of a tailings pond.
Then came 1930. The Natural Resources Transfer Agreement — the NRTA — transferred ownership of all Crown lands, mines, minerals, and royalties from the federal government to the province of Alberta. The province that didn’t exist when those treaties were signed. The province that First Nations never negotiated with, never consented to, never had a single seat at the table with.
And here’s the part most people don’t know: First Nations were legally prohibited from hiring lawyers at the time. Under the Indian Act as it then existed, it was illegal for First Nations to retain legal counsel to challenge or even fully understand what was being done to their land and resources. That prohibition wasn’t lifted until 1951 — twenty-one years after the NRTA had already transferred their mineral wealth to the province, and the oil industry was already roaring.
The NRTA is not some old forgotten policy. It is embedded in the Constitution Act, 1930. It is part of Canada’s constitution — meaning no government, provincial or federal, can change it unilaterally. And yet it was written without a single First Nation at the table, without a single clause protecting their right to share in the wealth beneath their feet, and against the explicit spirit of the treaties that preceded it.
That’s the foundation this province’s wealth is built on. And it was theft. Plain and simple.
Cara put it directly: “I had a really hard time trying to find anything about treaty in it. It talks about Canada and gift to the province, and the province shall, and the province will. But it doesn’t say anything about the treaties.”
Not a word. The nations whose lands and minerals were being transferred — not a word.
Now let’s look at what Alberta actually pays First Nations today — since accountability is apparently on the table.
The biggest direct provincial cash flow to First Nations comes not from oil royalties but from casino slot machine revenue, through the First Nations Development Fund. And here is something that should be in every headline in this province:
First Nations make up 3% of Alberta’s population, have contributed more than 25% to the Alberta Lottery Fund, but accessed just 0.12% of available charitable monies between 2006 and 2011.
Who’s cheating who here? First Nations are not being generously funded by Alberta. First Nations are subsidizing Alberta’s general provincial programs with revenue generated on their own reserve land — and then being handed back a fraction of it through a bureaucratic grant process requiring applications, compliance audits, reporting requirements, and ministerial approval. Each non-casino First Nation receives roughly $1.2 to $1.5 million per year from this fund.
Meanwhile, Alberta collected $17.2 billion in bitumen royalties in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone. From land that Treaty 8 nations never surrendered.
Beyond gaming revenue, Alberta provides approximately $7 million total — across all First Nations and Métis Settlements in the province — in consultation capacity funding. That works out to roughly $85,000 to $125,000 per community per year to participate in a regulatory process overseeing billions of dollars of extraction from their territories. There are also various grant programs for economic development, language, and cultural initiatives — all application-based, all discretionary, all at the province’s pleasure to approve or deny.
Health, housing, and education for First Nations communities comes primarily from the federal government through Indigenous Services Canada — not from Alberta. The province that collects all the royalty revenue offloads the cost of human survival to Ottawa.
That is the audit.
There’s something Cara said at that presentation about Smith’s so-called Resource Revenue Sharing proposal that people need to get— because it sounds better than it is.
“Danielle Smith is proposing a Resource Revenue Sharing Agreement as a grant initiative and as a policy,” she said. “But within the policy — and this is probably not known by many chiefs — she’s saying it will never be seen as a royalty. Because if it ever was seen as a royalty, then you would have to admit that we’re the owners of the lands and the minerals. And heaven forbid she would want that to happen.”
That is the line. That is everything. A grant is a gift from a government that controls the resource. A royalty is a right that belongs to the owner. Smith wants to give a discretionary, revocable, politically controlled gift — rather than acknowledge the legal and moral reality that these nations are the original owners of what’s being extracted from beneath their feet.
Glen Coulthard is a Yellowknives Dene scholar and associate professor at the University of British Columbia, and one of the most important Indigenous political thinkers working today. In his landmark work Red Skin, White Masks, he writes that this is exactly how settler colonialism sustains itself — not through outright refusal, but through recognition frameworks that appear to include Indigenous peoples while ensuring the fundamental question of ownership is never actually answered. You get a seat at the table. The table stays in their house. The royalties keep flowing to them. Smith’s grant-not-royalty sleight of hand is that logic made policy.
Crystal Lameman of Beaver Lake Cree Nation — whose traditional territory in Treaty 6 has been 88% consumed by oil and gas infrastructure, including 35,000 wells — described what financial exclusion looks like from inside a community living it: “For the amount of development that has happened in our traditional territory, if we were receiving what we should be receiving, we definitely wouldn’t be in the financial situation that we’re in right now. We wouldn’t have a housing waiting list of over 50, and my nation wouldn’t have to be turning away post-secondary students for education funding even though they have a treaty right to education.”
Treaty 8 former Grand Chief Arthur Noskey put the numbers in plain language at the height of the Woodland Cree–Obsidian blockade in 2024: “The government of Alberta has received over $30 billion from resource development in our backyard. And the government of Canada is prospering as well.”
Treaty 8 First Nations have formally asked for 2% of royalties from resource development on their lands. Two percent. Of Alberta’s $17.2 billion in bitumen royalties last year, 2% would be $344 million — distributed across all Treaty 8 nations. That’s barely a rounding error in Alberta’s budget. It has been ignored.
But Cara made clear at the presentation that the chiefs are thinking far beyond 2%. Treaty 8 did a formal economic analysis of the value of minerals in their territory alone. It measured into the trillions of dollars. “Not the millions,” she said. “Not the billions. The trillions of dollars. This is what we’re sitting on.”
And the chiefs are moving on this now. At a recent national gathering called Unfinished Business — a National Assembly of Treaty Chiefs on the constitutional future of the NRTA — they set a clear direction: a legal analysis of the NRTA, an economic analysis of what’s owed, a political strategy for how to move, and the appointment of a negotiator to carry this to the federal level. This is not a distant possibility or a talking point at a conference. The chiefs named it what it is — unfinished business — and they are organizing to finish it. Readers of this publication are hearing about the shape of those negotiations before anyone else is reporting on them.
Cara was clear about what this moment means: “We have to stop managing poverty and start managing our wealth. We have the opportunity and the right — the inherent right — to be wealthy.”
Which brings us back to Danielle Smith and what she’s actually doing.
When a caller phones into her radio show and asks her to audit the chiefs, and she says yes, she’d bring it to her minister — she is handing a platform to a racist distraction in order to dodge a constitutional reckoning that is closing in on her from every direction.
And let’s be clear about what’s underneath all of this. Smith’s move here isn’t happening in isolation. It is directly connected to her courting of the separatist movement — her deliberately fabricated constitutional crisis, engineered to please a base that is hostile to First Nations asserting any rights at all. Cara named it: “She’s trying to make a deal with our mineral resources with another country. She’s trying to make a deal on Alberta resources — treaty resources in this province that belong to us — with the United States of America and its current president.”
The NRTA is a constitutional agreement between the federal crown and the Province of Alberta. Alberta’s legal right to collect those royalties exist only becuase Alberta is a province within Canada. Separate from Canada, and you no longer have a constitutional relationship with the Crown that granted you those rights in the first place. You can’t take the NRTA with you. If people no longer want to be that province — if you blow up your relationship with Canada and with the treaty nations that predate you — you have opened a door you cannot close. “Alberta has now become disqualified as a recipient of the royalties,” Cara said. “I think she’s opened the door for us to give her the boot.”
Whether Alberta stays or goes, First Nations win this argument. If it stays, the constitutional reckoning over the NRTAis already coming. If it tries to leave, it loses the legal instrument that gave it the right to collect those royalties in the first place. Smith has handed First Nations a sword with two edges- and she doesn’t seem to know it yet.
At that same presentation, Cara invoked English barrister and judge Lord Alfred Denning’s proclamation in his judgment on the patriation of Canada’s constitution: “No parliament shall do anything to lessen the worth of these guarantees. They should be honoured by the Crown in respect of Canada as long as the sun rises, the grass grows, and rivers flow. The promise must never be broken.”
That promise wasn’t just broken by the NRTA. It has been broken in the treaties themselves, in residential schools, in the Indian Act that barred First Nations from retaining lawyers while their resources were transferred away, in the tailings ponds leaking carcinogens into the Athabasca River, in the cancer rates at Fort Chipewyan where six out of ten Mikisew Cree households have been touched by the disease, in communities managing housing wait lists and turning away students while billions flow to Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa from beneath their feet. The promise has been broken across a hundred years and in a thousand ways. And the people bearing the cost of every one of those broken promises are the same people the premier of Alberta now wants to audit.
So here is your audit, Smith.
Audit the $315 billion in royalties collected from treaty territories whose owners received zero percent of it. Audit the 57 years of oil sands production in Treaty 8 territory — on land the federal government knew contained oil when they signed that treaty in 1899. Audit the 21 years First Nations were legally prohibited from hiring lawyers while governments wrote the laws that stripped their resources. Audit Fort Chipewyan, where Alberta collected $50 million a month from the Kearl mine while a toxic spill went unreported to downstream Indigenous communities for nine months. Audit the First Nations Development Fund, where Alberta takes 30% of casino revenue generated on reserve land, funnels it into general provincial programs, and calls it generosity toward the people who generated it. Audit the consultation capacity funding — $85,000 to $125,000 per community — handed to nations expected to meaningfully participate in a regulatory regime overseeing billions of dollars of extraction from their territories. Audit the NRTA itself: a constitutional instrument written in 1930, without First Nations’ consent, without their lawyers, without their knowledge of its full implications, and without a single clause guaranteeing them a share of the wealth buried in their own land.
That is the accountability that matters here.
The reckoning is already on its way. It is moving through courtrooms and treaty meeting rooms, through the Unfinished Business that chiefs across Treaty 6, 7, and 8 are organizing to finish. It is being led by people like Cara Currie-Hall — women who have sat in oil boardrooms in North Dakota and treaty meeting rooms across this country and know exactly what power looks like when the owners of the land finally decide to use it.
You’ve been freeloading off this land for a century, Smith. The people it belongs to are done letting you change the subject.
Brandi Morin is a multi-award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is the founder of Indigenous Insider on Substack and the author of the national bestselling memoir Our Voice of Fire. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the BBC, and more.
If this work matters to you, become a paid subscriber. These stories exist because you make them possible. Hiy hiy.
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FSIN legal challenge announcement, August 2023: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/prairie-first-nations-prepare-legal-battle-natural-resources-1.6950842
Cold Lake First Nation statements on NRTA and treaty interpretation
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R. v. Badger, [1996] 1 SCR 771: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1366/index.do
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https://www.aioc.ca
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Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (1969)
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So much of this reminds me of what happened to the Irish - an ancestry I’m reclaiming nowadays. English colonization was conducted largely through property rights - all kinds of trickery with laws and decisions made outside of Ireland, without any Irish presence or consent, and so on. It’s half fascinating and half horrifying.
Colonialism truly is just one massive repeated echo across the world. Hopefully, with much effort, each reverb gets quieter until it finally dies out.
“OK, Smith. Let’s talk about money”.
While we’re at it, let's talk about how white-supremacy utilizes money, politics, & religion, to keep power & control over All The People. Ok?
We might need to commit sociology to further everyone's understanding about how these factors, are all deeply interconnected, to the way the world IS today… 🚩🌎👀