First Nations Chiefs in Alberta are preparing to fight Alberta’s nascent separatist movement with every tool available to them, with some seeing the Danielle Smith government’s referendum as an importation of Trump style politics. 

On Sunday, June 14, roughly 250 people — Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous allies alike — gathered at Mohkinstsis (aka the Confluence in Calgary, AB), the Blackfoot name for the place where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet in the heart of the city, for a Treaty Unity rally called by the Blackfoot Confederacy. The event opened the way these gatherings have for generations: with a pipe ceremony, chiefs and allies seated together in a circle on the grass. 

The timing wasn’t an accident. It came a week before National Indigenous Peoples Day, and just days after Premier Smith’s government filed its appeal of a court decision that quashed the petition behind her promised fall referendum on separation. 

Chiefs from Treaties 6, 7 and 8 took turns at the microphone, and what emerged was less a defence of the status quo than a warning: that the politics now driving Alberta toward the ballot box this fall are the same politics that have spent a decade corroding public life south of the border — and that it now falls to Treaty people, Indigenous and settler, to stop them.

Piikani Nation Chief Troy Knowlton set the tone early. Knowlton described sitting face to face with Smith and telling her plainly that the separatist road she’d opened is “nothing more than a political fantasy,” one with no exit given the Treaties and Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 — the provision that recognizes and affirms the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada. 

But he reserved his sharpest words for the rhetoric accompanying that push. He pointed to Donald Trump’s 2015 campaign launch. “President Trump came down the escalator,” Knowlton recalled, and “the first thing that came out of his mouth” was that Mexico was sending “their criminals, their drug dealers, and their rapists.” That moment, Knowlton said, handed “every racist, bigot and white supremacist” permission to say out loud what they’d once kept to themselves. 

He told Smith she’d done the same thing here: that fuelling a separatist movement gave every bigot in Alberta permission to stand on a First Nations person’s doorstep and say, “I hate First Nations.” The backlash, he said, has been real — pointing to a wave of AI-generated racist content targeting First Nations leaders — and the movement has “put a target on my back.” 

However, he framed the rally itself as the answer: a platform Treaty Nations have built for “every Albertan, regardless of who you are, where you come from, and the colour of your skin” to stand against that hate.

Siksika Nation Head Chief Samuel Crowfoot picked up the legal thread in his remarks. The recent ruling by Court of King’s Bench Justice Shaina Leonard, who found the province had failed in its duty to consult First Nations before letting the referendum petition proceed, was, he said, a reminder that the Treaties “have always been in effect” and “are still powerful today,” not relics with no place, as he put it, “in the days of social media likes and aura farming.”

But Crowfoot was just as blunt that the Treaties remain under sustained attack, and have been since the ink dried on Treaty 7 in 1877: the right to travel freely through Blackfoot territory was stripped almost immediately, language and ceremony were outlawed, and the state asserted the power to take Indigenous children from their families via the residential school system. He drew a straight line from that history to the present — noting that within days of Leonard’s ruling, Smith floated pursuing a constitutional amendment to Section 35 rather than negotiating. 

“I’m not surprised,” Crowfoot said: Treaty rights have been under attack since September of 1877. 

His message to the premier was direct — “Danielle, call me. Talk to me.” He also pointed to how Treaty rights are being hollowed out even where they remain legally intact: federal consultation periods for major projects have shrunk from 24 months to 90 days, he said, and Crown land available for hunting has shrunk by more than 90 per cent. 

“Pretty soon,” he warned, First Nations won’t be asking to exercise their rights — “we will have to be asking for compensation for loss of treaty rights.” His answer was what he called decolonization: building Indigenous institutions, grounded in Articles 4 and 5 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to take jurisdiction back rather than wait on the province. He also singled out Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s recent rebuke of Smith as a moment of pride, calling it proof that “there’s power in knowing your culture.”

That call for unity across Treaty areas ran throughout the event. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, a Treaty 8 nation in northern Alberta that has been at the front of the legal fight against the referendum, is led by Chief Sheldon Sunshine, who took the province to the Court of King’s Bench in Edmonton earlier this year seeking an injunction to halt the separatist petition — one of several First Nations actions across Treaties 6, 7 and 8, alongside the Blackfoot Confederacy and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, that culminated in Justice Leonard’s May ruling quashing the petition’s approval. Smith called that ruling “incorrect in law and anti-democratic” and her government is now appealing it.

At the rally, Sunshine told the crowd the original Treaties were agreements to share the land, not surrender it — “to co-exist in peace, not be pushed aside.” Any government that legislates without consulting First Nations, ignores their jurisdiction, or treats land and water as resources rather than relatives, he said, is breaking that bargain. Nations across Treaties 6, 7 and 8 are “rising together,” he said, to show Alberta “something stronger than legislation” — unity, sovereignty, Treaty Nations and their allies standing as one.

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi also spoke at the rally — using the language of kinship. Over the years, Treaty 7 elders have given Nenshi ceremonial names, including Etia (“always ready”), bestowed by the family of Tsuut’ina Head Chief Ellery Starlight, and Apist Totsist (“clan leader, he who moves camp and the others follow”), given by the late Kainai elder Pete Standing Alone. He’s also a war bonnet holder — a responsibility, he recalled an elder telling him, reserved for warriors, and one he was charged to carry “for our people and for all peoples.” 

Standing near Mohkinstsis, where Niitsítapi people have gathered for thousands of years, Nenshi noted the rally fell almost exactly 149 years after Treaty 7 was signed at Blackfoot Crossing, with the 150th anniversary — and a gathering of “thousands of Calgarians” — approaching this fall. Even 18 months ago, he said, he wouldn’t have bet that defending “the colonial government” could be the thing to unite every First Nation and chief in Alberta. But the legal fights First Nations have waged against the referendum have done exactly that. Now, he told the crowd, “that fight is a fight that every single one of us has to take up.”

Tsuut’ina Head Chief Ellery Starlight returned to the Trump warning, and put it in the starkest terms of the day. He reiterated the threat Knowlton had named at the outset, then turned it into a direct address to the province. “Alberta, wake up. Wake up!” Starlight said. “Because if you don’t, Donald Trump is waiting for you.” His call wasn’t only to First Nations — it was to settler Albertans too. “Wake up, fight with us. Ensure that your homeland is secure. And we’ll stand and fight with Canada for our treaties.” 

Starlight also reached back to why Treaties were made in the first place: to secure peace and open up trade between nations — a relationship, he said, the Crown undercut almost immediately by imposing the Indian Act, which shut Indigenous people out of that commerce. “But today we’re strong,” he said. “Today we’re able to make our own paths.”

The rally also landed just over a week after Smith said the law would be enforced if First Nations communities responded to the referendum with civil disobedience — including, she pointed out, the province’s critical infrastructure law, which imposes added penalties for obstructing highways, railways and pipelines. 

The comment followed a warning from Treaty 8 Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi that First Nations might get in the way of industry, or take their fight to the highways, if Alberta proceeds without their consent. Now, having spent months pushing to lower the threshold for citizen-led referendums, Smith’s government is appealing Leonard’s ruling too, arguing the judge made 14 errors and that the referendum process never triggered a duty to consult at all. 

Meanwhile, as CNN reported this year, citing Financial Times reporting, separatist organizers under the banner of the Alberta Prosperity Project have met repeatedly with U.S. State Department officials, and floated asking Washington for a U.S. $500-billion line of credit to bankroll “the transition to a free and independent Alberta” — prompting Prime Minister Mark Carney to publicly urge Trump to respect Canadian sovereignty. 

For the chiefs gathered at the Elbow, their point was simple: a politics that has already normalized open hostility toward Indigenous people in Alberta, and now threatens to enforce the law against the very communities whose Treaties underpin it, is at the same time actively courting the administration that built its brand on division and contempt for Canada’s sovereignty. 

Their answer, delivered again and again from the stage, was that Treaties — not separation, not annexation — are the foundation everyone in Alberta, Indigenous and settler, actually stands on, and that defending them is no longer optional for anyone who lives here.