Contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit writers return again and again to one question: who gets to decide? Who decides what a community's children learn, which language its laws are written in, whether a road crosses its land, or who counts as a member. Sovereignty, self-determination and self-government are the words used to talk about that question, and you cannot follow a novel, an essay, a speech or a news story about it until you can tell the three apart. They overlap, but each one answers a slightly different question.
Three words that are not synonyms
| Term | What it means | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty | The authority of a people to govern itself and its territory, without that authority coming from somebody else | Where does the power to govern come from? |
| Self-determination | The right of a people to freely choose its political status and pursue its own economic, social and cultural development | Who has the right to choose the future? |
| Self-government | The actual institutions — councils, laws, courts, schools, services — through which a people runs its own affairs | Who runs things day to day, and how? |
Inherent means not granted
An inherent right is one a people holds because it was already a self-governing nation, with its own laws, land and ways of making decisions, long before the Crown or Canada existed. The key idea is direction. A right that is granted flows down from a government and can in principle be taken back. An inherent right is recognized, not created: governments can acknowledge it, negotiate how it works alongside their own laws, or fail to respect it, but the right does not depend on their permission. When a text insists that a nation's authority was never given to it by Ottawa, this is the argument it is making.
Where these rights are recognized
- Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, and defines those peoples as including the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples. It recognizes rights that already existed rather than creating new ones.
- In 1995 the federal government adopted a policy recognizing the inherent right of self-government as an existing right within section 35. Self-government is then worked out through negotiated agreements.
- The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007. Article 3 states that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination, and Article 4 connects that right to autonomy or self-government in their internal and local affairs.
- Canada voted against UNDRIP in 2007, one of four countries to do so along with Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Canada later endorsed it, and in 2021 Parliament passed a law to implement it.
- The Indian Act band council is not the same thing as self-government. Elected band councils are a system the federal government set up under the Indian Act. Many First Nations also have traditional or hereditary governance that is much older, and in some nations the two hold different positions on the same question.
- There is no single model. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has its own long-standing system of governance; Métis governments such as the Métis Nation of Ontario represent Métis citizens; and Inuit regions have taken different routes. Treat each nation's arrangement as its own, not as an example of one Indigenous system.
Tracking these themes through a text
- Who makes the decision in the story? Notice whether decisions about a community are made inside it or by outsiders, and how the text makes you feel about the difference.
- Land as more than property. A text may present land as a relationship and a responsibility, so a threat to the land becomes a threat to law, family and identity at once.
- Language as governance. Characters who speak, teach or refuse to give up a language are often enacting self-determination, because the language carries its own ways of naming relationships and obligations.
- Naming and renaming. Who has the power to name a place, a person or a nation? A return to an original name is frequently a claim about authority.
- Refusal. A character who declines a form, a label, a program or a deal is often asserting that someone else does not get to decide for them.
- Imposed versus chosen structures. Watch for tension between institutions created from outside, such as the Indian Act, and ones a community built or kept for itself.
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Write the specific nation, not a general category
In an analysis, name the nation or people a text is about — Inuit in Nunavut, the Nisga'a, a particular Haudenosaunee community — and the specific form of authority involved. 'Indigenous people want sovereignty' tells a reader almost nothing. 'The narrator frames the community's language school as proof that its authority over education never came from Ottawa' is a claim you can support with evidence.