“Sacred Trust”: Rethinking Late British Decolonization in Indigenous Canada

This article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward, especially in contexts where the goal of a discrete nation-state was unattainable. Canada's Indigenous peoples were one such group. In 1980, in the face of separatism in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to renew the Canadian Confederation by bringing home the constitution, which was still retained by the British Parliament. But many Indigenous leaders feared that this final separation of powers would extinguish their historic bilateral treaties with the British crown, including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that guaranteed Indigenous sovereignty in a trust relationship with Britain. Indigenous activists thus organized lobbying campaigns at Westminster to oppose Trudeau's act of so-called patriation. This article follows the Constitution Express, a campaign organized by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 1981. Maneuvering around the nuances of British political and cultural difference, activists on the Constitution Express articulated and exercised their own vision of decolonization, pursuing continued ties to Britain as their best hope for securing Indigenous sovereignty in a federal Canada.