This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Karen Restoule, September 30, 2025
Today’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation must go beyond the state and church interventions that left Indigenous peoples with trauma, graves, and apologies. It should also be about understanding the sharp turn Canada made away from its original promise—and ultimately finding our way back to that shared path.
Before residential school policy was introduced in 1883, there was another vision for our shared home: one of peace, friendship, and, most importantly, coexistence. This vision was set forward 120 years earlier, on the shores of the Niagara River.
Looking back
In the summer of 1764, more than 2,000 chiefs representing 24 Indigenous nations from across eastern and central North America assembled with the Crown’s representative, Sir William Johnson, to further discuss the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and restate the relationship in what has become commonly known as the Treaty of Niagara.
Through this diplomatic engagement, Indigenous nations and the Crown set forth a vision of two peoples standing side by side: each respecting the sovereignty of the other in a shared home built on trust and mutual responsibility. It was, at its heart, the creation of a diplomatic vision for how two distinct peoples could live together on the same land.
As legal scholar John Borrows explains, “The two row wampum belt illustrates a First Nations/Crown relationship that is founded on peace, friendship, and respect, where each nation will not interfere with the internal affairs of the other.”
The treaty was ratified through wampum belt, binding the parties into what is often referred to as the “Covenant Chain”. Its creation also marked a promise to continually renew the relationship, or “polish the chain” when it grew dull.
The Treaty of Niagara set out a relationship of coexistence—not dominance.
This covenant should have been the foundation of what we now call Canada. Instead, the Crown—and later the Canadian state—opted for a different course. Over the decades that followed, the treaty’s principles were slowly abandoned. In 1867, the British North America Act formed the Dominion of Canada. Then, the 1876 Indian Act imposed a relationship of control over Indigenous Nations: centralizing power in Ottawa, restricting movement with the reserve system, making cultural practices illegal, and stripping away self-government. Instead, a legislated chief and council model was imposed, which, to this day, relies on Ottawa for final signing authority.
At its core, the controlling Indian Act was the very opposite of the Niagara treaty.
Further amendments to the Indian Act enabled one of its most destructive legacies: the residential school system. In 1883, officials were empowered to remove children from their families, eventually making attendance mandatory. What began as a covenant of peace on the shores of the Niagara River mutated into a vast, well-oiled assimilatory system aimed at erasing Indigenous identity.
Moving forward
What followed is well known today. Families were fractured. Languages were nearly lost. Today, survivors carry with them wounds that should never have been inflicted on any Canadian child. But even in the face of more than 150 years of persecution, Indigenous Peoples endured. Our cultures and traditions, though tattered, survived. Our families and nations continue to rebuild.
This is why Sept. 30 matters.
It is not just about the sorrow of what has been done. It’s also about the resilience that has carried us through, and about the chance to return to the promise that existed at our shared beginning.
When Parliament created the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in 2021, it was in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #80. The purpose of the holiday was to honour survivors, their families, and communities, and ensure public commemoration of the history and legacy of residential schools remains a vital component of the reconciliation process.
But commemoration without the full truth is not remembrance, it is denial dressed up as virtue. And the truth is, we already have an example to follow. The Crown entered into a covenant with Indigenous Nations on the shores of the Niagara River in 1764, but then chose to walk further and further away from it.
Reconciliation must mean more than apology. It must mean reminding and recommitting ourselves to the promises that gave birth to this country. That treaty in Niagara offered a vision of coexistence and mutual respect. That covenant never expired. It binds us to this day.
Sept. 30 is a day of remembrance, but it should also be one of resolve. We honour the survivors. We pray for the little ones who never made it back to their families. We acknowledge the families fractured by generational interference caused by wicked federal policy, enforced by state and church with ferocity. But we must also acknowledge these harms were not inevitable—they flowed from Canada’s choice to abandon its first promise.
When looked at through this lens, reconciliation is not about inventing a new path. It’s about finding the courage to return to the one we began together on the shores of the Niagara River 262 years ago. If reconciliation is to mean anything, it must be this: honour those who bore the residential school experience and all its wickedness not only with words, but by restoring that promise and living as partners once more, side by side, sovereign and strong, in a shared home.
Karen Restoule is Senior Advisor at Oyster Group, where she counsels leaders on complex public affairs challenges, and Director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, where she leads policy work at the intersection of Indigenous, industry, and government. She is Ojibwe from Dokis First Nation.
