First Nations leaders are gathering with Prime Minister Mark Carney and the country’s premiers in Ottawa today for a day of ceremony ahead of a historic meeting on Monday, the first such gathering since the Kelowna Accord talks of 2005.
The ceremonies in Ottawa bring together knowledge keepers, elders, First Nations leaders and community members before Monday’s closed door meeting. National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak said it was important to start the meeting with ceremony, to ensure all participants enter with the right frame of mind, grounded in First Nations spirituality.
Why Monday matters
Monday’s meeting will be the first gathering of its kind since 2005, when premiers and then prime minister Paul Martin met with Indigenous leaders to discuss ways to close the socioeconomic gaps in their communities. More than two decades later, the same gaps in health, housing, education and economic opportunity remain at the centre of the relationship between Ottawa and First Nations.
First Nations will be represented in Monday’s closed door meeting largely by regional chiefs from the Assembly of First Nations. The Privy Council Office has not said which premiers will attend, although Quebec Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith have both said they will be absent. Their absence will be noted, but it does not change the significance of a table that has not been set in this form for 21 years.
Ceremony before business
The decision to begin with ceremony rather than communiques is itself a statement about how this meeting is meant to work. It puts relationship before agenda, and it recognises that the history between First Nations and the Crown cannot be set aside for a day of talks and then picked up again afterwards.
As The Canadian Press reported, the ceremony comes first precisely so participants enter the room in the right frame of mind. What follows on Monday will be judged not by the warmth of today’s ceremony but by whether it produces commitments with dates, funding and accountability attached.
For communities that have heard promises across many governments, the test is concrete: will this meeting close gaps, or will it join the long list of meetings that described them? Today’s ceremony is the opening. Monday is the answer.
