Southern Blackfoot visitors to a nêhiyaw community, for example, would announce their desire to enter the territory by placing a stake with a tobacco offering on the border. Nêhiyaw law governed matters such as relationships toward other beings and other nations. In the safety and secrecy of the land, McAdam’s great grandparents and grandparents taught their children, including McAdam’s mother Juliette, who gave McAdam permission to share her knowledge, and Francis McAdam, McAdam’s grandfather, who she remembers saying: “We are not a lawless people.” Treaty 6 was not a real estate deal, wherein settlers took ownership of a piece of land it was an agreement for two groups to act as kin, or “cousins” for all time. This includes members of McAdam’s own family. Knowledge of nêhiyaw law was preserved by children whose parents carried them away into the bush to protect them from Indian agents intent on forcing them into residential schools. Groups such as these law keepers were forced to meet in secrecy and many, including the nêhiyaw women law keepers, stopped meeting entirely. Only they had the authority to “speak about the land and the water.” In the 19th and 20th centuries the Canadian government outlawed most First Peoples’ spiritual societies. The women law keepers formed a society who met together in solitude for ceremonies but also arbitrated disputes, decided community strategy and led ceremonies. Putting her shoulder to one specific reconstruction project, the nêhiyaw legal system, McAdam demands: “in the spirit and intent of Indigenous sovereignty and treaty … non-Indigenous people must begin supporting and encouraging Indigenous laws and teachings, in every aspect, and by whatever means possible.” According to McAdam, based on interviews she conducted with a variety of elders, the nêhiyaw received laws given specifically for this land at Alberta’s Cypress Hills, with the instruction that women would be the law keepers.
Songs, political arrangements, legal systems and the thousand other edifices that once upheld each of the First Nations must be recovered and restored. She explains in clear English what every news story on the topic has failed to communicate-that before colonial reconciliation can happen in Canada, worlds must be rebuilt.
In Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, she offers an unprecedented look at nêhiyaw (Cree) law and, in doing so, lays plain why she was destined to start a movement that could change a country. Sylvia McAdam is one of the four lawyers who began the Idle No More Movement in 2012.
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