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Danielle Smith wants a vote on ripping Alberta out of Canada. First Nations aren’t waiting around to find out what that means for treaty rights, land, or anyone else. They’re organizing — and they’re borrowing a page from a campaign that already worked once.
Here’s the plan, and here’s the history that makes it more than just a plan.
I Watched This Movement Build the First Time
I was the Alberta correspondent for APTN National News back in 2015, covering that federal election on the ground. I watched Indigenous Peoples mobilize like I’d never seen before — rallies, pop-up round dances breaking out in parking lots and city squares. The momentum was powerful. It was palpable.
I spent that fall closely following Cara Currie Hall, one of the organizers who brought Rock the Indigenous Vote to Canada. She grew up in Maskwacis on Montana First Nation, comes from a family of chiefs, and had spent sixteen years living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, where she’d helped organize the Native American vote for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. She came home to Alberta that October to try to do the same thing here — meeting with chiefs, speaking at AFN election forums, standing at flash-mob round dances that broke out in Edmonton and other cities telling people this was their moment to be heard.
Organizers across the country were building their own versions of this, region by region, all rewriting who got counted.
And just like Idle No More before it, social media carried the message. Facebook events, hashtags, shared videos of round dances — the modern-day smoke signal. And it worked. Indigenous Peoples helped shift this country in 2015.
What Actually Happened With Rock the Vote
Side note, in case you didn’t know: our people didn’t even have the right to vote in federal elections in this country until 1960. Before then, the only way to vote was to give up your Indian status entirely — a process called enfranchisement, designed to strip people of treaty rights, culture, and community in exchange for a ballot. It took an act of Parliament under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to finally change that, and even then, it came without forcing anyone to trade away their status to get it. Sixty-six years later, this is still a fight about whether our vote actually counts.
Fast-forward to 2015, on-reserve voter turnout across this country was sitting at 47.4 percent. Alberta was worse — 33.3 percent. So a First Nations councillor named Tania Cameron, from Niisaachewan Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty 3, built the fix herself, out of her living room and sometimes her mom’s van in Kenora.
No budget. No sponsors. No party backing her — she made sure of that at the time, keeping it strictly non-partisan. Just a stack of Elections Canada’s confusing ID rules, rewritten so a person could actually use them, and a Facebook page that became her only advertising.
Cameron knew exactly where the barrier sat. Elections Canada’s official voter counts on some reserves were absurd — a community she knew had 400 people living on it would show up on the list with 62 eligible voters. That’s not apathy. That’s a system that never bothered to count Indigenous people properly in the first place. So she and a handful of volunteers went community to community — eventually reaching dozens of First Nations across the riding — setting up ID clinics and registration drives. Instead of a driver’s licence, people could bring a residency confirmation: a simple form signed by band office staff certifying where someone lives, which Elections Canada accepts as valid proof of address. That one piece of paper closed the gap for anyone without government-issued ID.
The result: on-reserve turnout jumped to 61.5 percent nationally — the highest ever recorded since Elections Canada started tracking it. In Alberta, turnout nearly doubled, from 33.3 to 56.6 percent. Some polling stations on reserves ran out of ballots. That’s what it looks like when the barrier isn’t the will to vote — it’s whether anyone ever built you a door.
Now Alberta’s Treaty Chiefs want to run it back for the province’s October referendum, and Cameron is stepping in again to help build it.
The playbook, boiled down:
- Build the toolkit. Take the confusing official rules and rewrite them so a person can actually use them.
- Go where people are. Registration drives on-reserve and in the cities First Nations people call home too — Edmonton and Calgary have some of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the country.
- Kill the ID excuse. A signed residency confirmation replaces a driver’s licence.
- Bring in the allies. Treaty partners, not just Indigenous voters, get mobilized too.
- Make the chiefs the messengers. When Mercredi says “our nations and our rights and our resources are not to be traded around,” that lands different than a pamphlet.
The Lesson Underneath the Playbook: Quebec, 1995
Alberta wouldn’t be the first province to run into a wall of Indigenous nations saying ‘no, you don’t get to do this without us.’
When Quebec came within a whisper of separating in 1995, the James Bay Cree didn’t wait for Ottawa or Quebec City to decide their fate for them. They ran their own referendum, days before Quebec’s. The question: would Cree territory go along with an independent Quebec?
Ninety-six percent said no.
Then they backed it with paper. The Grand Council of the Crees published a legal brief called Sovereign Injustice, laying out — in documented, unglamorous legal terms — why Quebec had no right to drag Cree land into secession along with it. Cree territory was governed by treaty. Nobody had asked Cree people if they consented to being carved out of Canada. The brief spelled out what a seceding Quebec would actually run into on the ground: court challenges, continued federal jurisdiction, federal programs and taxes still flowing into Cree communities regardless of what Quebec City declared. You can vote for your own independence. You cannot vote away someone else’s land.
That argument made its way into the Supreme Court’s landmark Secession Reference in 1998, forcing the country to answer a question separatists always try to skip past: whose land is actually on the table.
Quebec’s “Yes” side lost by less than one percentage point. Nobody can say the Cree were the only reason. But they made sure that if Quebec walked, it wasn’t walking off with two-thirds of its landmass and everyone living on it.
“We have spoken as unanimously as a people can. The message is clear and now others must listen: We will not be separated from Canada. We have withheld our consent,” said Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees (of Quebec), Matthew Coon Come, during a press conference in Montreal announcing the results of the Cree’s own referendum, October 24, 1995.
What’s Actually On the Table
This isn’t an abstract unity debate. Almost all of Alberta sits inside Treaties 6, 7, and 8 — agreements signed with the Crown decades before Alberta existed as a province. Treaty 6 doesn’t even stop at Alberta’s border — it stretches east into central Saskatchewan, signed the same year at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt. Treaty 8 goes further still, spanning northern Alberta, northeastern B.C., northwestern Saskatchewan, and the southern Northwest Territories. Treaty 7 is the one that stays inside Alberta’s current lines, covering the southern part of the province. So this was never just an Alberta story — a chunk of it is Saskatchewan’s and the NWT’s too.
An independent Alberta walks out from under the Canadian Constitution, and Section 35 — the provision that protects Aboriginal and treaty rights — goes with it. As Justice Leonard put it in her May ruling: “there can be no doubt that Alberta’s secession from Canada will have an impact on Treaties 7 and 8.”
Here’s what that impact actually looks like. Secession carves a brand-new international border straight through First Nations territory. Treaty 8 families have followed caribou across that land long before any of those lines existed, and many still cross those boundaries today to hunt, fish, and trap. An international border doesn’t ask permission before it cuts a migration route in half.
Treaty obligations — the medicine chest clause, harvesting rights, the whole nation-to-nation relationship — were made with the Crown. Not with a hypothetical independent Alberta. There’s no guarantee any of it survives the handoff; it becomes whatever a future Alberta government feels like recognizing, instead of a constitutional guarantee. And Justice Feasby already ruled on this back in December — Alberta cannot inherit the Numbered Treaties without First Nations consent, full stop. Instead of appealing that ruling, the government tabled Bill 14 that same day. Bill 14 stripped out the exact provision Feasby had relied on — the requirement that any citizen-initiated referendum petition comply with the Constitution — so future petitions like the separatist one could move forward without having to clear that bar at all. Same fight, different door.
So this is not a squabble over equalization payments. It’s whether a solemn, 125-year-old covenant survives a UCP government’s referendum math.
Smith’s Answer: Threaten to Arrest the Chiefs
When Treaty 8 chiefs said they were prepared to block highways and get in the way of industry if the referendum kept moving without their consent, Premier Smith didn’t blink. She pointed straight at Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act — the law built in 2020 after solidarity rail blockades shut down parts of the country in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who were fighting a pipeline crossing their unceded territory in B.C. without their consent — and said it would be enforced. Up to six months in jail for anyone who gets in the way.
First Nations leaders raise the possibility of peaceful civil disobedience to defend treaty rights the courts have already told Alberta it’s violating, and the Premier’s response is a law built to jail land defenders. This is the same Danielle Smith who, back in 2013 as Aboriginal Relations critic, stood in the legislature and told the House the Crown “cannot act unilaterally” — that treaty rights carry stronger protection than property rights, and that legislation built without First Nations consent tears relationships that take years to build. She knew it then. She’s the one enforcing the opposite now.
Alberta Is Already Running the Cree Playbook — In Court
This isn’t theoretical here either. Since Smith’s government lowered the threshold for citizen-initiated referendums, a growing list of nations has gone straight to the courtroom, the same instinct the Cree had thirty years ago: don’t ask permission, build the legal wall yourself.
Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation sued first, arguing Alberta, Ottawa, and the province’s chief electoral officer all failed to uphold Treaty 8. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy — Piikani Nation, Siksika Nation, and the Blood Tribe (Kainai) — filed alongside them. Mikisew Cree First Nation and Tsuut’ina Nation added their voices. Chief Allan Adam of ACFN put it this way: Canada and Alberta are “only corporations to work with us.”
Those lawsuits are what led to the Feasby and Leonard rulings — the same message both times: you don’t get to negotiate away treaty land in a process the treaty holders were never invited into.
Two Fronts, One Fight
So here’s the throughline. In court, First Nations are proving separation is legally impossible without them. At the ballot box, they’re making sure it’s politically impossible to ignore them either. The Cree didn’t wait for a seat at the table in 1995 — they built their own table and put a legal case on it. Alberta First Nations are running both plays at once: the lawsuits and the registration drives, the courtroom and the doorstep.
This province is sitting on the highest GDP per capita in the country, no provincial sales tax, and the third-largest oil reserves on the planet. This was never about oppression. It’s people who’ve been handed one of the best hands in the world, demanding a bigger pot — off land they were never asked to give up.
Treaty Nations have already won twice in court. Now they’re coming for the ballot box too. Treaty leaders are telling their members: Get your ID sorted. Get registered. Call your band office, ask about a residency form, find out where the nearest clinic is. This land was never on the table to begin with — showing up in October is how you make sure everyone else knows it too.
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.
Sources
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- [Organizer who helped get Obama elected, hopes to rock the Indigenous vote in Canada — APTN News](https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/organizer-who-helped-get-obama-elected-hopes-to-rock-the-indigenous-vote-in-canada/)
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The Indigenous Alberta’s are going to save Alberta’s fate yet again from the treasonous separatists/UCP, who are one and the same.
"pop-up round dances breaking out in parking lots and city squares. "
Oh yes, let's have them.