Invitations from the land and waters: Lessons from the Peace of Fort Garry

Abstract

This paper offers critical perspectives on engaging Indigenous Peoples land-based practices in the city. Using Winnipeg as its case study, this research identifies Winnipeg and the Red River area as a major pre-settler Indigenous population centre. Through an examination of the making of a peace treaty between the Great Sioux Nation, the Métis, and the Saulteaux at Fort Garry as a moment for exploring the land and waters as sentient entities inviting Indigenous Peoples to gather and engage in political activities. This work provides insights into the way the land and waters convey invitations to other beings, and explores what political values and activities those invitations have the power to encourage. What follows contributes to the ongoing scholarship of reclaiming urban geographies as Indigenous spaces, and challenging the reserve-rural-remote world as an Indigenous space, and the urban as a non-Indigenous space. By thinking about Indigenous politics in the city through the framework of what the land and waters invite, readers will be opened to the potential to transform contemporary inter-Indigenous political and cultural activity in places like Winnipeg.