Student Feature - Theory in Action: Indigenous Perspectives and the Buffalo Treaty

On September 22, 2019, the E-International Relations Student website published an article by Jedd Corntassel and Marc Woons on Theory to Action: Indigenous Perspectives and the Buffalo Treaty. Below is the beginning of the article.

You can read and download the article on Student Feature here.

“There is an emerging scholarship on Indigenous international relations that challenges state-centric expressions of sovereignty and self-determination. As Anishinaabe scholar Hayden King (2015, 181) states, ‘in our political worldviews the state and sovereignty melt away’. Indigenous nations have expressed solidarity with one another through the establishment of new confederacies, treaties and agreements that promote peace, friendship and new strategic alliances. Indigenous international relations are enduring and sacred, and making treaties with foreign countries has not prevented Indigenous nations from continuing their own diplomatic relations with one another. For example, the Treaty of Peace, Respect, and Responsibility between the Heiltsuk Nation and the Haida Nation (Crist 2014) was the first peace treaty between these two nations since the 1850s and was premised on the assumption that ‘there are greater troubles facing our lands and waters and depletion of resources generated from forces outside of our nations’.

The Treaty was enacted between the two Indigenous nations through a potlatch ceremony and sought to challenge a common threat posed by the state- sanctioned commercial herring fishery in Heiltsuk waters. In 2014, another historic treaty was initiated between Indigenous nations living along the medicine line (the United States-Canada border).

Iiniiwa, which is the Blackfoot name for bison, have a deep, longstanding relationship with the land, people and cultural practices of prairie ecosystems. When discussing the role of the bison on their homelands, Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear (2014) pointed out that [a]cting as a natural bio-engineer in prairie landscapes, they shaped plant communities, transported and recycled nutrients, created habitat variability that benefited grassland birds, insects and small mammals, and provided abundant food resources for grizzly bears, wolves and humans.”