There is a stepped granite wall in Trillium Park, Toronto, with moccasins carved into the stone. Ahead of it, a low flat stone carries four words: walk gently on the land. I found them after coming back to Canada, something simple and true, and I have not been able to walk past that stretch of path the same way since.
Tkaronto is a Mohawk word. It means the place in the water where the trees are standing, the place of the fish weirs. Long before it was a city of glass towers, it was a crossing point, a place nations travelled through to trade, to meet, to make alliances, and to marry into one another’s families. Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, the Mississaugas of the Credit, Chippewa bands: many nations, many languages, moving across the same ground for reasons that had nothing to do with any one of them owning it. The city sits today under Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit and under the Williams Treaties, signed by multiple Mississauga and Chippewa bands. Underneath the streets are trails that predate the streets, carrying knowledge the pavement never asked about.
A land acknowledgment, done properly, isn’t a formality read off a card before a meeting starts. For Indigenous peoples it is an assertion of sovereignty, of treaty rights that are not history but current law. For everyone else, it’s an invitation into a different kind of belonging, one built on knowing exactly where you’re standing and what it cost to get to stand there. I think of the languages this land has had. I think of how much of that knowledge survived underneath four centuries of pressure to forget it. Reconciliation starts with that: telling the truth about the place first, together, before anything else gets decided about it.
Here is what gets decided about it now and how.
A stamp. A signature. A line added to a preamble that almost no one outside a law office will ever read. That is how land changes hands in this country most of the time. Not an army crossing a field. A designation made in a boardroom, in a language built to sound reasonable.
In June 2025, the Building Canada Act received royal assent. It lets federal cabinet name a project “in the national interest” and fast-track it past the reviews that would normally apply, including the consultation process owed to the Indigenous nations whose land the project sits on.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak has said First Nations rights holders were shut out of the process that produced the law. Senator Paul Prosper stood in the Senate chamber and called it a betrayal of reconciliation.
By February 2026, fourteen First Nations had joined a court challenge against it and against Ontario’s parallel legislation, arguing the Crown had failed its constitutional duty to consult.
I did learn this in the news. I learned to notice it because of a course.
Advancing Re(al)conciliation, offered free until August 31, 2026, through First Nations University of Canada, walks through the history of colonization in this country plainly enough that patterns start to surface elsewhere once you’ve seen them named once.
The Indian Act, written in 1876, is still the law of the land. Settler colonialism, the course explains, isn’t only a historical event. It’s a way of thinking about land, heritage, belonging, and power that gets inherited whether or not anyone chooses it on purpose. Once you know the shape of that thinking, you start to see it wearing different clothes.
From the Doctrine of Discovery to “the National interest”
Centuries ago, the Doctrine of Discovery gave European powers religious cover to claim land already lived on, on the reasoning that the people living there weren’t Christian and therefore the land was legally empty. In Canada, that doctrine had a second life: residential schools, run substantially by churches under state contract, existed to finish the job the doctrine started, erasing the relationship between a people and their land by erasing the people’s language, family structure, and childhood. Same institution, two different tools, one continuous project.
Bill C-5 doesn’t cite the Doctrine of Discovery. It doesn’t need to. “National interest” does the same legal work “empty land” used to do. It’s the phrase that lets a decision get made before the people it affects are properly in the room. The vocabulary changed. The mechanism, a designation that overrides consent, did not.
This is where the course's central point about land actually lands
Indigenous nations on this continent generally held a shared understanding of the land as something to be in relationship with, something you have obligations to, not something you hold. Colonial governments arrived believing the opposite: land as asset, as commodity, as a resource to be extracted and expanded into.
Those two frameworks were never going to sit comfortably together, and four centuries later, the argument hasn’t been settled. It’s just been rewritten into legislation that presumes the second framework is simply how a country runs.
Chelsea Vowel, the Métis lawyer and writer, got tired of debating what the word “settler” means and republished her own definition to end the argument: the non-Indigenous people living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority. Not an insult. A description of a position. People resist the word anyway, and the resistance is worth sitting with rather than arguing past, because the flinch is often doing the same work the word is naming: keeping the position comfortable by keeping it unnamed.
It’s worth being precise here, because precision is part of the respect. The Indian Act applies to status First Nations people specifically. It has never covered Métis or Inuit peoples, who hold distinct legal and constitutional relationships with the Crown. And it doesn’t extend to unceded territory outside reserve lands, which is most of British Columbia and large stretches of the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario. When Bill C-5 was amended to promise it wouldn’t override the Indian Act, that promise protected far less ground, literally, than it sounded like it did.
Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said something in a 2013 talk in Williams Lake, recorded by the Orange Shirt Society, that I haven’t been able to stop turning over. He described sitting in classrooms alongside non-Indigenous kids who were never sent to a residential school and never needed to be, because the public school curriculum was teaching them the same hierarchy from the other direction. While Indigenous children in residential schools were taught they were less than, their non-Indigenous classmates a few streets over were being taught, just as thoroughly, that they were more than. He said he still sees some of those classmates today, grown, successful, and unable to imagine trading places with him, not because they mean any harm by it, but because the belief was installed too early and too well to notice it’s there. That, he argued, is exactly why reconciliation can’t be treated as an Indigenous project that non-Indigenous Canadians occasionally support. It’s their story too. It was written into them on purpose.
That's the piece that tends to get skipped.
Learning the history feels like the finish line. It isn’t. It’s the minimum.
Chelsea Vowel didn’t write a book so people could quote a definition at dinner parties.
Sinclair didn’t spend six years collecting seven thousand survivor testimonies so the report could sit as a citation. The action the Truth and Reconciliation Commission actually called for was legal and structural: full adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.
Parliament passed that framework into law in 2021.
CBC’s own tracker of the Commission’s ninety-four Calls to Action still lists that one as in progress, not complete, five years later. Bill C-5 is one reason why.
What could be your personal act of reconciliation?
None of this requires you to become a policy expert overnight.
The course was clear that the personal register matters as much as the political one, maybe more, because it’s the register everyone actually has access to.
Learn the colonial history of the place you live, not just the country’s.
Learn the Indigenous history of your specific watershed, your specific street.
Buy from Indigenous-owned businesses when you have the choice.
Build a real relationship with an Indigenous colleague instead of a symbolic one.
Say the true version of the story out loud to your own family, even when it complicates the version they grew up with. None of that is extravagant. All of it is a choice, repeated.
You can have the willingness to be uncomfortable with the fact that Indigenous Peoples are still facing persistent barriers when accessing health and dental care, safe drinking water, and emergency services!
The land is still there. It was there before the doctrine, and it will be there after the bill numbers are forgotten.
What changes, generation to generation, is only ever who gets asked, and who gets told after the fact what was decided about the ground under their own feet.
You are not required to fix four hundred years by Thursday.
You’re required to know your part of the story, tell it accurately, and stop letting “national interest” do the work “empty land” used to do without anyone in the room saying so.
