They’re Ready to Arrest Chiefs.
First Nations are ready to shut it down. Danielle Smith says she’ll arrest them. The chiefs say: skoden.
Tansi — You showed up. I am grateful.
Yet, I have 6,900 readers. 360 paying. That gap is the weight I carry every single day.
I leave my girl behind and hit the road. I’ve stood my ground in front of armed guards. Reported through fever, through grief, through terrain that doesn’t forgive. I’ve put my body on the line — because no one else is coming.
These stories exist because I refuse to let them disappear.
That’s what reconciliation looks like from where I’m standing.
I need you in this with me. Step into the fire with me.
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On June 5th, Premier Danielle Smith stood at a news conference in Calgary and pointed straight to Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act. Treaty chiefs had just told the province they were prepared to block highways, shut down infrastructure, and get in the way of industry if the separation referendum moved forward. Smith’s response was immediate: the law would be enforced. She will arrest chiefs.
The audacity of that is breathtaking.
This is a law that was introduced in 2020, widely seen as a direct response to Indigenous-led rail blockades across the country — specifically, the blockades that sprung up in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs fighting the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. It levies hefty fines against individuals or companies found to have blocked, damaged, or illegally entered any essential infrastructure, including pipelines, rail lines, oil sites, electrical lines, and highways — with penalties of up to $25,000 a day and up to six months in jail for individuals, and up to $200,000 per day for corporations. It created to silence Indigenous land defenders. Full stop. And now Smith is waving it in the faces of the very same people it was designed to suppress — this time, for the crime of protecting their treaty rights against a separation referendum they never consented to.
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” she said. And then she made clear it would.
The Line Gets Drawn
The day before, on June 4th, Alberta Treaty chiefs held a press conference in Edmonton and said it directly: they will do whatever it takes to protect First Nations rights. Treaty 8 Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi laid it out — First Nations have not given consent and will stop the referendum in any way they can. “That means stopping industry, that means maybe going out on the highways, that means doing what we need to do to be heard on this issue of separation,” he said. He was joined by Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam, Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation Chief Sheldon Sunshine, and Chief Billy Joe Laboucan of the Lubicon Lake Band. That same day, they released an open letter to Premier Smith — dated June 3rd — demanding the province immediately halt all separation activities without the full, prior, and informed consent of Treaty 8 First Nations. The letter stated: “The duty to consult and the proposed referendum on Alberta sovereignty have placed this province on a course towards direct constitutional conflict with Treaty 8 First Nations. That conflict is not abstract. It is immediate, documented and already before the courts.”
Standing there together, they drew a line. Smith drew one right back.
And this fight had already gone far beyond Alberta’s borders. Two days before the chiefs stood in Edmonton, on June 2nd, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak was at Buckingham Palace meeting with King Charles — taking the treaty rights crisis directly to the Crown. The meeting, originally scheduled for 40 minutes, ran nearly two hours.
“The King was there with us in unison, that First Nations are foundational partners in the creation of Canada, and our relationship cannot be changed or moved just from politics,” Woodhouse Nepinak told reporters afterward.
She was blunt about what separation would actually mean: “We’ve got a beautiful country. If you don’t want to be part of it, you’re free to leave. You won’t be taking any land with you.”
She also called the entire separation push unconstitutional — a direct affront to sacred treaties that predate the province itself— and invited the King to Canada, noting several treaties are approaching major milestone anniversaries. This is not a provincial dispute anymore. This has become a national reckoning, and it’s now being heard at the level of the Crown itself — the very entity those treaties were signed with.
The Ground Beneath It All
Now here’s the line that’s actually drawn across — because the separatist movement has spent a year figuring out how to leave Canada and hasn’t spent a single day seriously answering the question of whether the land they want to take is actually theirs to take.
The entirety of Alberta sits within treaty territory. People confuse this with reserve land — the specific parcels set aside for First Nations use, which account for roughly one per cent of Alberta’s total land area. Treaty territory is something else entirely. It’s the land where treaty rights and obligations apply. That covers the whole province. Every city, every oil field, every stretch of highway. All of it sits within Treaty 6, 7, or 8 territory — and those treaties predate the province of Alberta by anywhere from six to 29 years. Treaty 6 was signed in 1876. Treaty 7 in 1877. Treaty 8 in 1899. Alberta became a province in 1905. Alberta was created inside treaty territory, not the other way around.
Those treaties — which collectively cover nearly the entire landmass of what is now Alberta — guaranteed First Nations the right to hunt, fish, trap, and move across their traditional territories. They guaranteed annuity payments and health support — Treaty 6 specifically included a “medicine chest” provision, which courts have since interpreted as a right to healthcare. They guaranteed education, and peaceful coexistence. These were nation-to-nation agreements made with the British Imperial Crown. Not with a provincial government. Not with a separatist petition group. With the Crown.
Now think about what separation actually does to all of that. Treaty 8 alone spans parts of Alberta, northeastern British Columbia, the northwestern corner of Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. An independent Alberta would draw an international border straight through that territory — fragmenting it, cutting across it, making it functionally impossible for First Nations to exercise the rights that treaty guarantees: to hunt and fish and move across the land as their ancestors did. The Treaty 8 open letter captured the stakes with precision: a referendum that could result in Alberta’s separation “represents one of the most profound adverse impacts on Treaty rights that it is possible to contemplate.”
No separatist organization — not the Alberta Prosperity Project, not Stay Free Alberta, not one — has published a single plan addressing what happens to those treaty obligations in an independent Alberta.
And here’s the part the separatists conveniently skip over when they’re crying about Ottawa taking too much from Alberta’s energy wealth — about carbon pricing, about environmental regulations they say are strangling the industry: the First Nations whose territory those resources are being gutted from are barely seeing a cent of it. The separatists want control of those royalties and the right to do as they please with that land. But who is asking what was taken from Indigenous peoples in the deals that built this province long before any of this became a political fight?
This goes back to 1930. The Natural Resources Transfer Agreement (NRTA) handed jurisdiction over Crown lands and natural resources from the federal government to the prairie provinces — and it was negotiated without the consent, consultation, or inclusion of a single First Nation, despite the fact that those lands were on treaty territory. The Assembly of First Nations has called this a clear violation of signed treaties and the protections enshrined in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 — noting that treaties 6, 7, and 8 did not surrender First Nations title to natural resources, and that the unilateral imposition of the NRTA undermines the solemn promises of those treaties. Decades later, First Nations are still litigating the fallout. So when separatists scream about what Ottawa has taken from Alberta, the outstanding grievances and reckonings that predate that fight by generations don’t get a mention.
The Courts Already Answered This
Two Alberta courts have already answered the question the separatists won’t. In December 2025, Court of King’s Bench Justice Colin Feasby ruled that converting provincial borders into international borders would directly contravene the Numbered Treaties by significantly impairing the exercise of treaty rights. He called First Nations “founding partners in the creation of Alberta.” Five months later, on May 13th, 2026, Justice Shaina Leonard reached the same conclusion from a different angle — finding that even beginning the process of separation was enough to trigger the constitutional duty to consult First Nations, and that Alberta had already breached it. Smith called that ruling “anti-democratic” and announced an appeal. Then she put the question on the October 19th ballot anyway, in defiance of both rulings.
Grand Chief Mercredi cut to the chase at the June 4th press conference: “If they’re ignoring courts, ignoring the rulings, it shows to me that they are lawless.”
The Chief Who Won’t Back Down
Yesterday I interviewed Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation Chief Sheldon Sunshine — whose nation was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to halt the referendum — and I asked him directly: can you envision police coming after Indigenous chiefs? He didn’t flinch. He told me that’s always the expectation when you’re Indigenous. He said his nations have already been having that discussion for some time. “If it comes to that, then that’s what we’ll be doing,” he told me. “We can’t sit back because we’re being threatened.”
He talked about the Woodland Cree industry blockade near High Prairie two years ago — being there, watching and waiting for the government to arrest someone and then launch litigation in response. He said he has, since then, watched this government attack First Nations rights again and again, even as First Nations have won in court — repeatedly. “Rights are continually upheld in a court of law in their courts,” he said. “And yet.”
And yet.
Chief Sunshine also pointed out something that is more than ironic: the double standard. When the Freedom Convoy locked down Coutts, that same law was weakly enforced, barely a whisper. Now that it’s First Nations standing up for constitutionally protected treaty rights, suddenly Danielle Smith is very interested in enforcement.
Sunshine added he has not heard from the province since the court ruling. Nothing. Not a call, not a meeting, not a word. He told me they’ve sent letters to the premier requesting a sit-down to discuss the impacts of the legislation on their rights — those letters went into a void. The federal government? Same story — letters sent through the prime minister’s office returned nothing but a form acknowledgement. Where is the Government of Canada in all of this? First Nations are taking the lead and fighting for rights enshrined in the Crown’s own documents, and Ottawa can’t find the time to pick up a phone.
The silence from Ottawa is its own kind of answer.
A Spectacle to Everyone Else
Meanwhile, the rest of the country seems to be treating this whole thing like a political spectacle. Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told CTV News Monday that this is a joke — and he has the receipts to back that up. He called it flat out: “It’s not a real referendum. To have a referendum in Canada, you need a question that is approved by Parliament of Canada. This is the law of the land, it’s the bill I passed when I was prime minister” — pointing to the Clarity Act, which he passed in 2000 following the near-miss of the 1995 Quebec referendum. The Clarity Act requires that any referendum question receive parliamentary approval and command a clear majority. Alberta’s isn’t even close to meeting that bar. So yes — it’s a joke. But for the First Nations involved, the damage is already done.
Mercredi said the debate over seceding from Canada is actively inciting racism against Indigenous people in their communities — people being harassed on highways, receiving abuse online, targeted for standing up for their treaty rights. The Blackfoot Confederacy put out a safety warning to their community members last week. Chiefs are receiving threatening emails. This isn’t abstract anymore — it’s real, it’s raw, and it’s here.
The Treaty 8 open letter reiterated on June 3rd: “Treaty No. 8, signed in 1899, predates the province of Alberta by six years. Alberta was created in 1905 as a creature of Confederation. It entered Confederation subject to existing Treaty obligations, not above them.”
Not above them.
And yet here we are.
Chief Sunshine told me they’re ready for what’s coming. He’s made peace with what comes next.
Whatever happens with this referendum in October — whether it passes or fails, whether the courts intervene again or don’t — the fuse has already been lit in Alberta. What’s burning now isn’t just a political dispute or a constitutional debate. It’s generations of broken promises, stolen resources, ignored rights, and a government that’s decided it can keep pushing until someone pushes back hard enough. The chiefs are telling you, loud and clear, that moment has arrived. Whether anyone in colonial power is listening is another question entirely. But one thing is certain: this province will never be the same after this, no matter how October ends.
Brandi Morin is an award-winning Indigenous journalist, author and storyteller. Of French, Cree and Iroquois descent, she has reported from frontlines across Canada and around the world. Indigenous Insider is where she goes beyond the headline.
Sources:
Global News — Civil disobedience an option if Alberta referendum proceeds: First Nations chiefs
https://globalnews.ca/news/11891055/alberta-separatism-referendum-first-nations-civil-disobedience/
Global News — Alberta’s Smith says the law will be enforced if separation vote spurs civil disobedience
https://globalnews.ca/news/11894640/albertas-smith-says-the-law-will-be-enforced-if-separation-vote-spurs-civil-disobedience/
CTV News — ‘It’s not a real referendum’: Former PM Chrétien on Alberta separation question
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/former-pm-chretien-not-too-worried-about-alberta-separation-referendum-cautions-against-complacency/
CBC News — Court hearings begin as First Nation fights to halt Alberta separation referendum
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alta-separation-injunction-9.7154600
CBC News — Alberta premier says law will be enforced if separation vote spurs civil disobedience
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-law-civil-disobedience-separation-9.7225524
CBC News — Chief vows First Nations will ‘look at all avenues’ in fight against Alberta separatist referendum
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/treaty-8-first-nations-letter-danielle-smith-alberta-separation-9.7223461
Assembly of First Nations — National Chief Calls for Federal Review of Natural Resources Transfer Agreement
https://afn.ca/all-news/press-releases/national-chief-calls-for-federal-review-of-natural-resources-transfer-agreement-in-response-to-alberta-referendum-proposal/
Alberta Native News — Treaty 8 chiefs warn independence vote could result in ‘civil disobedience’
https://www.albertanativenews.com/treaty-8-chiefs-warn-independence-vote-could-result-in-civil-disobedience/
JURIST — Canada’s Treaty 8 First Nations: Alberta must immediately cease all separation activities
https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/06/canadas-treaty-8-first-nations-alberta-must-immediately-cease-all-separation-activities/
Between the Lines Canada — Alberta Wants to Leave Canada. The Land It Wants to Take Was Never Fully Its to Give.
Every person in Alberta that is against separation needs to stand with the Chiefs and First Nations people. If they put up blockages we need to join them. This isn't just an Indigenous fight people. Wake up.
Skoden!!!!! Much love and light to all.