Meeting My Treaty Kin

How one woman came to understand her relationship with colonization through conversations with Indigenous people.

Can Indigenous and non-Indigenous people live in a treaty relationship despite over two hundred years of social, cultural, and political alienation? This is the challenge of reconciliation as well as its beautiful promise. Twenty-five years after the Ipperwash crisis, writer and social activist Heather Menzies showed up in Nishnaabe territory in Southwestern Ontario, near where her forebears settled, hoping to meet her would-be treaty kin. She was invited to help document the broken-treaty story behind the crisis, as remembered by Nishnaabe Elders and other community members involved in reclaiming their homeland at Stoney Point. But she soon realized that even the most sincere intentions can be steeped in a colonial mindset that hinders understanding, reconciliation, and healing. In Meeting My Treaty Kin, Menzies shares her journey. Her thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced account shows how a settler, through respectful listening, can learn what being in a treaty relationship might mean, and what changes—personal and institutional—are needed to embrace genuine reconciliation.

Heather Menzies is an award-winning author, activist, and adjunct research professor in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. In 2013, she was appointed to the Order of Canada for her contributions to public discourse.