Resilience, Resurgence, and the Path Forward
Resilience, Resurgence, and the Path Forward
Learning Goal: I can describe at least two specific examples of Indigenous resilience or cultural resurgence happening in Canada or Saskatchewan today. I can explain what self-determination looks like in practice for a First Nation and connect the course content to questions about the future.
Every colonial policy in this course, from the Indian Act to residential schools to the Sixties Scoop, aimed at the same target: cut Indigenous nations off from their own governance, language, and land so they would stop existing as distinct peoples. That project failed. Cree, Saulteaux, Dakota, Nakoda, and Lakota nations in the File Hills Qu'Appelle region are still here, still governing themselves, and still teaching their languages to children. Survival describes what happened when a people outlasted an attack. Resurgence describes something different: a nation choosing, on its own terms, to rebuild the political structures, ceremonies, and knowledge that colonization tried to erase. Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes resurgence as Indigenous peoples generating their own political, cultural, and intellectual life rather than waiting for the settler state to grant permission. Two examples from Saskatchewan show what that looks like in practice.
In October 2012, the federal government introduced Bill C-45, an omnibus bill that changed the Indian Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, and environmental assessment rules without consulting the First Nations those changes would affect. Jessica Gordon of Pasqua First Nation, Sylvia McAdam of Big River First Nation, and Nina Wilson of Kahkewistahaw First Nation began emailing Sheelah McLean, a third-generation settler from Treaty 6 who taught anti-racist education at the University of Saskatchewan, about the bill. Their conversation became a Facebook page and a name: Idle No More. On November 10, 2012, the four women held a teach-in at Station 20 West, a community centre in Saskatoon. Within weeks, round dances filled shopping malls across the country, including one at the Cornwall Centre in Regina on December 17. The movement spread to the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond, and it pushed the federal government into a meeting between the Prime Minister and the Assembly of First Nations in January 2013.
Idle No More did not end when the media coverage faded. The movement later supported the family of Colten Boushie, a young man from Red Pheasant Cree Nation, after the jury verdict in his case exposed problems in the justice system you studied in Lesson 18. Nina Wilson said in a 2017 interview with CBC News that the movement changed what young Indigenous people expect for themselves: clean water, clean land, and a say in what happens to both. Sylvia McAdam put it more directly. She said Canada would never look at treaty and Indigenous sovereignty the same way again.
Resurgence does not always look like a protest. The File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council runs the Great Plains Culture & Language Gathering, an annual event that brings together Language Keepers, Knowledge Keepers, Elders, and youth from its eleven member nations. FHQ Tribal Council represents five distinct linguistic and cultural groups, Nehiyaw (Cree), Saulteaux, Dakota, Nakoda, and Lakota, which the council describes as the most cultural and linguistic diversity of any tribal council in North America. The Gathering organizes its work around five areas: culture, language, lands, food systems, and history. Sessions on the differences between Cree and Saulteaux beadwork sit alongside sessions on how to say the word for sweetgrass in each language.
The Gathering insists on using its own experts. Facilitators come from FHQ member nations whenever possible, and organizers only bring in outside knowledge when no one inside the council can fill a specific gap. That choice matters. A language program run by FHQ citizens, for FHQ citizens, answers to the nations it serves rather than to a government department in Ottawa or Regina. It treats language loss as a problem the nations themselves are equipped to solve, using knowledge that already exists among their own Elders and Language Keepers.
Key Idea: Resurgence is Indigenous peoples rebuilding their own political, cultural, and language life on their own terms rather than waiting for the settler state to act. Idle No More and the Great Plains Culture & Language Gathering show two different versions of the same principle: nations using their own people, their own knowledge, and their own leadership to answer colonization.
The Canadian Encyclopedia. "Idle No More." https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/idle-no-more
Idle No More. "About the Movement." https://idlenomore.ca/about-the-movement/
CBC News. "5 Years after Idle No More, founders still speaking out." December 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/idle-no-more-five-years-1.4436474
File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council. "Great Plains Culture & Language Gathering." https://fhqtc.com/gpclg/
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. "Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance." Studies in Social Justice, 2017. https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Simpson-2016-IndigenousResurgenceCoresistance.pdf