Heritage Is Not a Shield

I was pulled to the front of the class with three other boys for laughing. We were strapped in front of everyone at St. Benedict, the Catholic-run school on Whitefish Lake First Nation #459 (Atikameg) where I grew up. We were told we were only allowed to speak English. Even though the Day School was supposedly closed in 1962, the priest and Grey Nuns still ran the school, taught the students, and imposed their rules as before. I didn’t know any different. It was just what school was.

Then we moved off reserve, and I found out what different felt like. My mother, who was not First Nations and came from New Brunswick, carried her own weight through that move. I was the kid in a provincial school with a heavy native accent, and I got ridiculed for it. I didn’t understand yet what I’d lost. I just knew I didn’t sound like the other kids.

I went on to earn four post-secondary degrees, paid my own way because I could. I went back to work on reserve, not because it was the only teaching job I could find, but because I fell in love with the community and the children. Yes, they had a tough life. None of us played the victim. Not one person I grew up with or worked alongside treated their circumstances as an excuse to stop moving forward.

I tell you this because I keep watching people who share pieces of that story use it for something else entirely.

A specific kind of voice keeps showing up in Alberta’s separatism debate. On March 13, 2026, a speaker at an event in Smoky Lake, Alberta used his own heritage as a credential to argue against the very chiefs who oppose the separation referendum. That speaker is Leighton Grey, a Calgary and Cold Lake lawyer and King’s Counsel who is part of the pro-separation speaking circuit in this province. His own law firm bio describes him as “a status Indian whose great-grandfather was once the Hereditary Chief of the Carry The Kettle or Jack Band,” with a grandmother and great-aunt who survived the Brandon Indian Residential School. The Smoky Lake speech was livestreamed and later posted to YouTube. Watch it yourself rather than take my word for any of it:

From there, the pattern is bigger than any one speaker, and it’s the pattern I want to talk about. People who can point to a Status card, a great-grandparent’s chieftainship, a family member who survived a residential school, use that ancestry as a credential to speak against the very chiefs currently standing against the referendum. They say it in a particular shape: my family didn’t play the victim card, and look at me now, a lawyer, educated, successful, and I can say this because of who I am.

What that framing leaves out is everything that made the difference between their story and the one still being lived on-reserve today.

Ancestry is not in dispute here. What is in dispute is the leap from having ancestry to having lived the legacy. There’s a chasm between claiming a bloodline and living under the Indian Act’s daily restrictions, growing up in a community where the federal government has spent a century underfunding basic health and water infrastructure, and carrying the direct, present-tense weight of what residential schools did to family structure and language. I lived enough of that chasm myself to know it’s not rhetorical. It’s the difference between a story you tell about your heritage and a life you’re still inside of.

Speeches like this one lean on numbers that don’t hold up. A claim that only about one percent of Albertans are First Nations or Aboriginal people, and that only about forty percent of those live on reserve, gets used to argue the chiefs meeting with the King over the referendum represent only a small, disconnected fraction of the province. Check the 2021 census yourself. First Nations people alone make up roughly three and a half percent of Alberta’s population, well over three times that figure, and Indigenous people as a whole, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit combined, make up 6.8 percent. The on-reserve number runs the opposite direction, too. In Alberta specifically, sixty percent of Status Indians live on reserve, not forty, meaning the majority, not a minority, live under direct Indian Act jurisdiction on the land the treaties set aside. And even for those living off reserve, a chief still speaks for them. Band membership and treaty rights travel with a person; they don’t stay behind on the reserve boundary. Distance from the reserve does not dissolve a treaty relationship.

Speakers in this vein also list statistics on addiction, incarceration, homelessness, domestic abuse, and government dependency among First Nations people, framing “First Nations” as something that should be “Last Nations.” The numbers cited are largely real. Indigenous adults are incarcerated in Canada at roughly nine times the rate of non-Indigenous adults, and nearly a quarter of Indigenous people live in poverty compared to about thirteen percent of non-Indigenous people. What gets left out is why. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings tie those exact outcomes to the abuse, family breakdown, and loss of language that residential schools caused. Eighteen of the Commission’s ninety-four Calls to Action target the justice system specifically because of that documented link. Asking why the Indian is “addicted to this dependency,” as this kind of speech does, without ever answering with the history it claims to know so well, is not truth-telling. It’s a setup.

And that’s the part that actually matters, more than any statistic. Treaty rights are not temporal. They are not tangential to some larger political argument about who gets to be aggrieved. Promises were made and signed, generation after generation, and broken more often than kept, but the treaty holds regardless of who is currently living where or how far anyone has moved from the reserve their family was pushed onto. A treaty is not a mood. It doesn’t expire when someone gets a law degree.

People quoting these misused numbers know exactly who is listening. No shortage of Albertans are ready to hear “get rid of the reserves” and “stop giving them my money.” It isn’t their money. First Nations funding in this country comes overwhelmingly from resource revenue, oil, gas, and forestry, negotiated and owed through treaty and land use, not handed down from general tax dollars as a gift. But that correction rarely makes it into the rooms where these speeches get applause.

Call this what it is. This isn’t just bad math or a strong opinion about self-reliance. It’s fuel. Piikani Nation Chief Troy Knowlton said it plainly after sitting face to face with Premier Danielle Smith: that fuelling this separatist movement gave every bigot in Alberta permission to stand on a First Nations person’s doorstep and say they hate First Nations. He pointed to a wave of AI-generated racist content now targeting First Nations leaders, and said the movement has put a target on his own back. That is not a hypothetical downstream risk. That is a sitting chief describing what is already happening to him and to people he represents, in direct response to the same rhetoric this kind of speech supplies with numbers and a friendly, credentialed face.

What troubles me most isn’t that these speakers are wrong about the numbers, though they are. It’s that they use their own hard-won distance from a hard life as license to tell people still living that hard life that their chiefs don’t speak for them. I know what that distance cost to cross. I also know it doesn’t buy you the right to hand someone else’s struggle back to them as evidence they were never really struggling at all. Watch the speech. Check the census yourself. Then decide who’s twisting the legacy here.

None of us played the victim. That was never the same thing as pretending the harm wasn’t real, or that the treaty stopped mattering once we found a way through.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.