The Loyal Crickets

When their own structure is threatened, the chiefs find their voices. Let a province float a question they dislike and they go to court; let a pipeline cross a line on a map and they mobilize lawyers and statements and the full machinery of grievance. They invoke the duty to consult, a doctrine invented by judges in 2004, not written into any treaty, not handed down at any council fire, and they wield it with precision whenever the arrangement that employs them comes under pressure. The Alberta petition was only the latest: three hundred thousand people asking whether the question of leaving could even be asked, a question about whether to ask a question, killed before it could be put. On that, they were loud. They are always loud, when the noise serves the structure.

But when the Supreme Court ruled that the Crown holds underlying title to all Indian lands, that the King, in the end, owns the ground beneath our feet and we hold only a right of use upon it, there was no court challenge organized, no day of action, no statement that mattered. (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, [1997] 3 SCR 1010 - Tsilhqot'in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44)

Crickets.

The clearest proof is the one no one organized against. The doctrine is that the Crown holds the underlying title and ours is only a burden upon it, a right to use what is, in the final accounting, the King’s ground. British Columbia looks like the exception: most of it was never surrendered, so a title claim there still has teeth, and in 2025 a court found exactly that, calling the Crown’s grants in Richmond defective.

But the Maritimes is the rule. There the Wolastoqey never ceded a thing either, the old Peace and Friendship treaties surrendered no land, and still the courts struck their title claim over private ground, and still the Supreme Court let that ruling stand. The strongest kind of claim, on unsurrendered land, and the Crown’s title held anyway. That is the whole arrangement laid bare: at the end of the chain, the ground is the King’s, and ours is a permission. And on the one fact that governs every other, who actually owns the land beneath us, there was no day of action, no national fight, no statement that mattered.

Crickets.

The single largest fact about who owns this country was settled against us and the leadership had nothing to say, because saying something would have meant a fight they could lose, and the consultation economy does not reward fights you can lose.

When Ottawa passed gun laws that reach onto the trapline and into the hunting cabin, laws that touch a treaty right to harvest more directly than any pipeline ever did, where was the duty to consult then? C-21 sailed through. No chief stood in the doorway.

Crickets.

The same doctrine that can kill an Alberta petition apparently cannot inconvenience a federal firearms bill, and the difference is not legal. The difference is who benefits.

When our kids are taken, present tense, today, in numbers that dwarf the residential schools at their worst, the leadership administers the very child-welfare agreements that keep the apprehensions flowing. In Manitoba, more than nine thousand children sit in care and ninety-one percent of them are ours. That is not a colonial relic. That is a current arrangement, funded and signed and managed, and the people managing it are not in Ottawa.

Crickets.

Because the funding flows through the band, and you do not bite the file that feeds you.

When the second generation gets cut off, when a woman who married out has a child, and that child has a child, and that grandchild is told by a membership code that they are no longer Indian enough to belong, the chiefs who control those codes do not march. They wrote the codes. They decide who is in and who is out, who gets a house and who gets a denial letter, and the further you live from the reserve the less voice you have, until the majority of status people, the ones who live off-reserve, have no real say at all in the governance that claims them.

Crickets.

Because every name struck from the list is one more share of a finite pie that stays with those already at the table.

You can run the pattern as far as you like and it never breaks. The First Nations Financial Transparency Act asked only that salaries and audits be posted so band members could see where the money goes; the leadership fought it, gutted it, let it lapse. Boil-water advisories outlast governments while the housing rots and the waitlist stays in council’s gift. Band elections get contested and the appeals go nowhere. Resource revenue arrives and the per-capita accounting never quite does. Every one of these is a place where the loud voice could have been turned inward, toward accountability, and every time the volume drops to nothing.

The tell is consistency. A leadership that was actually fighting for sovereignty would be loudest exactly where our rights are most directly stripped, land, harvesting, children, membership. Instead it is loudest precisely where a threat to its own structure appears, and silent everywhere else. That is not the behavior of a sovereignty movement. It is the behavior of a management class defending the arrangement that employs it.

A constitutional crisis is the only thing in a century and a half that could have reopened 1876, and the leadership killed it at the earliest possible stage, because a reopened deal is a deal where they might not be the ones holding the pen.

So when you next hear the chiefs raise their voices, ask the only question that matters: who is the noise for. If it is for us, you will know, because it will be aimed at the people taking our land and our children and our names. If it is silence you hear instead, that is your answer too. I would rather be one of the activists they ignore than one of the chiefs they pardon.

Darren Grimes