Quick preface: this is my opinion, shaped by my own life and family, and it’s not an attack on anyone I mention, including the officials I talked to. I have ADHD, and conversations like this one get weird for me in the moment, my brain jumps around, connecting things other people might not connect right away. So this piece is me working through my own thought process out loud. I’m not claiming the final word on any of this, and I’m open to feedback.

I sat down with two elected Métis officials recently and got told, flat out, that I’m not Métis, doesn’t matter that my mom and her parents and grandparents before her were too. What matters, apparently, is that I’m also Cree, status under the Indian Act, and MN–S’s rules say I can’t be both. “That’s your choice,” one of them told me.

I’ve been sitting with that line for the better part of today, and I want to say plainly: it’s wrong. I was born who I am. My dad is Cree, my mom is Métis, and I didn’t pick either one of them. Nobody hands you a form at birth asking which side you’d like to keep. Our people didn’t build the Indian Act, Canada did. Registering under a law we never wrote isn’t a “choice” about who I am. It’s paperwork filed with the Government of Canada.

My dad’s Cree, my mom’s Métis. I grew up knowing both sides, both families, both communities, connected to Métis politics as a kid. I got my grade 12 through the Dumont Technical Institute, then went through SUNTEP, a university program for Métis teachers, and took real pride in the Métis part of me the whole way through. I’m just as proud to be Cree.

Here’s the part that complicates things even more: I wasn’t raised by either of my parents. I came to my identity a little sideways, piecing it together myself. And that’s exactly why this conversation worries me beyond my own case. Kids reconnecting right now, separated from their families by this same kind of oppressive legislation, are going to hear conversations like the one I had and get scared off. If reconnecting means getting told to prove you’re the right kind of Indigenous, or pick one half of yourself over the other, we’re doing those kids, and ourselves, a massive disservice.

When I registered as status, entitled to it through my dad, MN–S made me hand my card back. Their citizenship application makes you declare you’re not registered under the Indian Act, and if you register later, you lose the card. And notice what’s already happening here: we’re reducing identity down to who gets to carry which card.

My own kids are recognized by MN–S as Métis, through me. So the Métis connection is legitimate enough to pass through me to another generation, but somehow makes me personally ineligible the moment it’s mine to claim. The blood is good enough for my children to inherit, but not good enough for me to keep.

And here’s something worth sitting with, since it’s basically the title of this piece. Under federal law, I’m registered as an “Indian,” the label Canada slapped on me. By Ottawa’s definition, I qualify, full stop. By MN–S’s definition, I don’t. Somewhere in between those two systems, neither of which I built, I’ve become the disqualified Indian, not disqualified from being Indigenous, just disqualified from being counted as Métis, by a Métis government using a word Canada invented to strip that same identity from people for generations.

There’s something ironic going on here

I want to be fair. MN–S can point to their citizenship policy and say I don’t qualify right now, and that’s true, it’s written down in black and white. But being true and being right aren’t the same thing. There is an uncomfortable irony in Indigenous governments allowing a colonial statute to become the dividing line for Indigenous belonging. That’s literally what’s happening here. MN–S uses the Indian Register, a tool built by Canada to control and count us, to decide who’s Indian under their own definition.

If you’re on that register, you’re removed from theirs. This isn’t me guessing, CBC News reported back in 2021 that MN–S has an actual partnership with the Indian Register, specifically so they can cross-reference applicants and screen out anyone who shows up on it. (Screenshot below.) You can also read the article here.

Let that sink in for a second. MN–S has a working partnership with the same federal registry that was built to control and count us, and they use it efficiently enough to cross-check citizenship applicants against it. Funny how that kind of cooperation with Ottawa comes so easily, while cooperation with their own families does not. Maybe if they put half that energy into figuring out their own people instead of leaning on Canada’s paperwork, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.

I don’t see how relying on that register is self-determination. It looks more like outsourcing the hardest question we have, who belongs to us, to a document Canada wrote for its own bureaucratic convenience.

And this isn’t some small, shrinking edge case. From what I’ve heard, MN–S has already been losing citizens over exactly this, people taking status and getting cut loose. That number’s only going to grow. Bill S-2 is moving through Parliament right now, and if it passes, it expands who’s entitled to register under the Indian Act, undoing some of the old discriminatory cutoffs that kept people out for generations. But it also means a lot more Métis people are about to end up standing exactly where I’m standing, entitled to status, and told by their own Nation that taking it costs them their citizenship. And I’ve heard people say it outright, casual as anything: “they’re not Métis anymore.” Pardon?

The boxes were never ours

For generations, Canada imposed rigid categories on Indigenous families. Indian. Non-status. Métis. Treaty. Non-Treaty. Registered. Unregistered. Bill C-31. Band member. Non-band member. Those classifications had enormous consequences for real families. People lost status, got it back, lost it again, fought court cases for decades just to be recognized as who they already were.

Now, as Indigenous nations rebuild their own governments, we have a real opportunity here. We get to ask whether we want to keep the same underlying assumption Canada built into all of this: that Indigenous identity has to fit neatly into mutually exclusive administrative boxes. Because a lot of our families don’t fit that way. Mine certainly doesn’t.

Think about what that actually means at the family level. Two siblings, same mom, same dad, can end up on opposite sides of this line, one recognized as Métis, the other disqualified, not because their ancestry is different, it isn't, but because one of them registered under the Indian Act and the other didn't. Same blood. Same parents. Same childhood, probably. Different outcome, based entirely on a policy.

“You chose this” doesn’t even make sense

A new identity isn’t invented when people become registered. I was registered under a system I was already entitled to, through blood that was already mine, under a law I didn’t write, run by a government that spent over a hundred years deciding, badly and repeatedly, who counted as “Indian” and who didn’t. Parliament had to keep fixing its own mess through Bill C-31, then C-3, then S-3, because it kept discriminating people out of their own families based on sex and marriage rules nobody asked for. And it’s still not finished, Bill S-2 is moving through Parliament right now, trying to close the gaps those three bills left behind.

And here’s a question nobody in that room had a real answer for: what’s the plan once the Indian Act is gone? Are they going to start demanding citizenship lists from First Nations directly, overriding those nations’ own data sovereignty just to keep running their exclusion policy? Because that’s the only way this keeps working without Canada’s registry doing the job for them. And if that doesn’t pan out, and there’s no reason it should, First Nations don’t owe MN–S their citizenship rolls, best of luck asking a bunch of sovereign nations to hand over their lists so a different government can use them to disqualify people. And now a Métis government wants to use my registration under that same broken, colonial ledger as proof that my mother’s side of me isn’t real?

My Métis ancestry did not disappear when Canada put my name on the Indian Register. My mother did not stop being Métis. My relatives did not change. My family history and ties to what it means to be Métis did not rewrite itself. The only thing that changed was my legal classification under a piece of federal legislation. That’s it. That’s the whole change. Everything else about who I am stayed exactly the same.

We’ve done this to ourselves before, too. Look at cows and plows, the current issue when the promise of land and cattle turned into fights over who really belonged on a band list, right when money and promises were on the table. Some of that was a real question. A lot of it was blanket suspicion aimed at each other, while Canada, the one who actually built the whole mess, just sat back and let us do the sorting. We know what it looks like when we pick up the tools that were used against us and turn them on our own people. I don’t think the officials I talked to see themselves that way. Most people doing it never do. That doesn’t change what it is.

First Nations is the big bad wolf

You’ll hear it all the time, casual as anything: “oh, I’m Métis and German.” “I’m Métis and Ukrainian.” “I’m Métis and whatever.” Nobody blinks, and MN–S doesn’t either, that person still qualifies for citizenship, no extra hoops, as long as they meet the regular criteria. It’s only when the other parent is First Nations that the tone changes, and the rules change with it. That’s apparently the big bad wolf, the one combination that opens the door to real discrimination, because First Nations comes with its own political weight, and suddenly I owe somebody an explanation. I get that there’s a real nationhood question buried in here when it comes to First Nations. Fine. But a real question isn’t the same as a settled answer, and “you have to pick one Indigenous nation” gets treated like a settled answer when nobody’s actually made the case for it.

And here’s the part that gets me the most. I don’t have two First Nations parents. I’m not fully Cree, trying to also claim Métis on top of it. I have one Cree parent and one Métis parent, full stop. I want to be proud of exactly what that makes me, both, at the same time, without either side getting reduced away like it doesn’t exist. Nobody should have to shrink their own family down just to be legible to a citizenship form.

About that treaty

Here’s where I get openly critical, because somebody has to say it. MN–S wants to talk treaty with Canada. Fair enough, Métis people are named right in the Constitution alongside First Nations and Inuit, and there’s real value in that conversation happening. But from what I understand, MN–S was reportedly ready to initial something at Batoche Days with concerns raised behind closed doors, and several chiefs saying afterward they didn’t even know it was happening. The AFN already called out the Manitoba Métis Federation for pulling something similar without First Nations at the table.

So don’t tell me I’m “Treaty, not Métis” in one breath, and then go pursue your own treaty relationship with Canada in the next, one you apparently didn’t think required talking to the actual Treaty people sitting right beside you. If you want a seat at that table, you don’t get to treat First Nations people like outsiders to your nation while gatekeeping us out of it too. Pick a lane.

And here’s my bigger problem with it, honestly. Treaty used to mean something. It wasn’t just a signature on a piece of paper, it was spirit and intent, relationship, obligation, something meant to last generations. That word carried weight. And it feels, to me, like this government is starting to throw that word around a little too loosely, using it as a headline before they’ve even sorted out who their own citizens are. You want to sit down with Canada and talk nation to nation, spirit and intent, the whole thing? Fine. But figure your own house out first. Figure out why your citizenship rules force people like me to disown half our own family before you go asking Canada to take your nationhood seriously. You can’t ask to be treated as a full nation on one hand while running a membership system that can’t even hold onto its own mixed families on the other.

The real reason, dressed up

Eventually their real concern came out of these conversations: services . The worry that I’d access programs as a status person and Métis programs. Say that part louder, because that’s not an identity argument, that’s an administration issue that is easily solvable. It’s lazy. Governments solve overlapping eligibility all the time, you write a policy that says a dual citizen doesn’t double dip on the same benefit through two Indigenous governments. Done. That's not radical, that's literally just good policy. One you have more than enough public service staff to deal with. And it’s not even new territory for MN–S. Their own self-government agreement already says becoming an MN–S citizen doesn’t cost someone their rights and benefits as a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. So layered citizenship clearly isn’t some impossible idea they can’t handle. They’ve already built that plumbing once. The line they’re actually drawing isn’t about services. It’s about not wanting to share political membership with another Indigenous nation. Just say that, if that’s what it is. Don’t hide it behind a benefits argument.

And for some of us, identity was never about services in the first place. I’m a tax-paying Canadian, status and all. I own a business. I own a home. I’m not sitting around waiting on a program. I know there are people out there trying to double dip, and yeah, that’s crappy, I won’t pretend otherwise. But building your whole citizenship policy around that fear, treating everyone with mixed ancestry like a suspect, is such a dumb, lazy argument. Write a policy for the double dippers. Don’t punish the rest of us for existing.

Their government doesn’t get the final word on belonging

I want to say this plainly too, because it matters beyond just my situation. MN–S is not the end all, be all of who belongs to this land, this culture, this family line. It’s one “government,” with one set of rules, and those rules can be wrong. And we’ve already seen what it looks like when a body decides it alone gets to draw that circle, elected representatives suspended from the table, groups of people banned outright, disagreements settled through exclusion instead of actual conversation. And that's not some rare exception, it's the pattern showing up again and again. If belonging becomes a hot potato, something you can lose the second you’re inconvenient or don’t fit the paperwork anymore, we’re not protecting our nations, we’re running the exact playbook that was used on us for generations. Deciding who counts and who doesn’t, then enforcing it with suspensions and bans, is colonial behavior. It doesn’t stop being colonial just because an Indigenous government is the one doing it instead of Ottawa. We, of all people, should recognize that pattern the fastest, because we lived through it.

This government has suspended women from their own table before. Banned citizens from attending their meetings. If the people representing this government right now can’t recognize how exclusionary that history makes them, if they can live through it and still turn around and do it to someone else, we have a real problem. That’s not leadership. That’s just repeating the pattern with a different name on the door.

And I know that pattern firsthand, because I’ve lived it too. This same government banned me, and several others. That was the moment I knew for certain, this Nation isn’t ready to sit down and talk treaty with anybody. Not while it’s still playing modern day colonizer with its own peoples identities and their sense of belonging and rights.

Not everyone in this system operates that way, and I want to say that clearly before I close. My own regional representative has never made me feel like a rulebook gets to define me. She’s never excluded me. She’s accepted me, knowing full well my kids are her citizens, without making me prove anything more than what I already am. That’s the actual work of belonging, done quietly, without a policy forcing her into it. Thank you for that. It shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the standard.

What I’m actually saying

I’m not saying MN–S has no right to define its own citizenship. It does, and I’m not trying to take that away. What I’m saying is that a rule forcing people with both Cree and Métis blood to renounce one to keep the other doesn’t reflect how our families actually work, how kinship actually works, or how identity is different from a benefits card. What is that rule even protecting? It isn’t protecting my kids’ connection to their Métis side, they’ve got that, through me, no questions asked. It isn’t protecting the treaty relationship, MN–S is out there pursuing one on its own terms, either.

So here’s where I land, and I’m not softening it. I’m Cree. I’m Métis. Both. I didn’t ask permission to be born this way and I’m not asking permission to keep being it. MN–S doesn’t get to hand me an identity and take it back like a loan. I gave away enough time fighting to be unbanned from participating in their space. I’m not giving anything else back. Take your citizenship. Keep your card. You still don’t get to tell me who I am.

If the people running this Nation can’t sit with a mixed family without reaching for a federal registry written by the same government that tried to erase all of us, they have no business calling themselves leaders, and they have no business calling what they’re chasing with Canada a treaty. A treaty is supposed to be built on relationship, not on gatekeeping. Fix your own house before you go knocking on anyone else’s door.

Love, your friendly neighbourhood disqualified Indian,

— Jenn

What stayed with me wasn’t the dispute. It was watching, up close, how wide the gap is between what most citizens understand about their own governments and what’s actually happening inside them. I already had years of education and experience in this field going in, so I wasn’t learning governance for the first time. What I was learning was how much that gap gets exploited when citizens don’t have the same grounding. I kept landing on the same conclusion: Indigenous self-determination depends on Indigenous governance literacy. We cannot meaningfully hold our governments accountable if we don’t understand how they actually work, and far too many of our people have never been given the chance to learn that, through no fault of their own.

This piece is going to be raw (fair warning). I don’t need a lecture on advocacy, and I’m not here to tell you criticism doesn’t matter, because it absolutely does. What I am telling you is that I already know some people will read this and decide it’s an exemption ticket for chiefs and councils. It isn’t, and I’d ask you to sit with it a little longer than that first reaction before deciding. Every community’s story is different, every nation’s history and current reality is different, and nothing here speaks for all of them at once. What this is, is a different perspective from someone who’s often critical of leadership, publicly and by name when it’s warranted, but who has also spent years working inside this reality, close enough to see what actually shapes it. I’m not telling anyone to stop criticizing. I’m saying we’re often our own worst enemies too, and that deserves the same honest look we give leadership. I’d rather spend my time understanding where a system actually broke down than just slamming chief and council because it’s the easier target. That’s not the same thing as letting anyone off the hook, I just think we get further talking about how to fix something than we do just attacking it.

I still believe in holding power accountable, and I still believe citizens deserve real answers on a lot of issues (we’ll get there, hold on). But if I’m willing to go to bat against a government when it fails its people, I have to be fair on the other side of that too. When I do choose to name a government publicly, it comes with real time spent understanding as much as I can first, not just reacting to whatever’s in front of me. That’s also why I refuse when people ask me to fight their government for them. I’ve never once posted about or advocated against a First Nation. I’ve spoken about political organizations, but MN-S was the first time I ever named a specific government directly, and it wasn’t a random cause I picked up along the way. It’s the government that represents my own family, one I carry real knowledge of, not an outsider’s opinion about.

Rage always wins, and I’m not exempt from that

Here’s how it usually starts. Someone posts that their chief is stealing, or that council is corrupt, or that band members don’t get any help. No details, no explanation of how anything actually happened, just the accusation. Within an hour there are a ton of comments. By morning it’s all over Facebook, half of it shared by people who don’t even live in that community, into groups they found through a friend of a friend. Somewhere in there, someone posts a screenshot. Nobody’s asked a single question yet, and the verdict is already in.

Rage moves faster than explanation, every time. Post that a government is corrupt and watch it fly. Post the actual breakdown, here’s the gap, here’s what created it, here’s what it would take to fix, and watch it sit there with a fraction of the reach. I’d be lying if I said I was above that pull myself (I’m not). Being aware of it doesn’t make it disappear, it just means I have to keep catching myself, especially on the days I’m tired or frustrated, which lately feels like most days.

You can see it in my own videos. The ones with a little more attitude, a little humour, land right in the feeling before the brain catches up, and those travel. The ones where I actually explain how the process works get a tenth of that reach, maybe less. I still make both, because the slow ones are where the real work happens, and it’s just as important to actually sit with those.

Why it hits different in our communities

A post accusing a stranger of corruption in some random city council gets scrolled past. A post accusing your own chief, in your own community, where you know their kids, where you’ll see them at the store next week, doesn’t get scrolled past. It gets felt. And feeling travels faster than facts ever will.

Part of that is the money itself. Most band funding comes through agreements shaped by decades of chronic underfunding, program by program, with restrictions on what can be spent where. When a community doesn’t have enough for housing or roads or mental health supports, most citizens have no way of knowing whether that’s mismanagement or a funding envelope that was never enough to begin with. Scarcity looks exactly like corruption from the outside, and almost nobody’s ever walked citizens through the difference. Behind the scenes, leadership is playing tug of war with Canada over reports on how the money’s spent, and whether they’ll satisfy Canada or risk clawbacks.

Part of it is the intimacy of small communities, which cuts both ways. Real accountability is possible in a way it isn’t in a big anonymous city, you can walk up to your chief at an event. But every conflict is personal by default too. There’s no abstract “government” to be angry at, there’s your cousin’s husband, your auntie’s old friend. That closeness makes disagreement feel like betrayal, and makes a public callout feel like the only weapon available, especially when we lack tools like conflict resolution or safe spaces to disagree in.

And underneath it all sits a distrust of authority that didn’t come from nowhere. Residential schools, the Indian Act, decades of external control over daily life, that history is real. The problem is the wariness doesn’t always find its way to the actual source. It gets redirected sideways, at the leader standing closest, instead of upward, at the government and legislation that created the scarcity in the first place. That’s not a character flaw in our people. It’s what happens when the system responsible is too big and too far away to yell at, and your chief and council are standing right there.

What people see the most is a moment of frustration, even from me. What they don’t see is the years behind it, formal education, years of working around funding agreements and governance structures, years learning the history of why any of this exists. My hope is that this lands somewhere useful rather than just as a vent, and that includes leaders, not just citizens. Understanding has to move in both directions or it isn’t really understanding at all.

Ask exactly how

Almost every time someone tells me their chief and council is corrupt, or that someone’s stealing, I ask them to explain exactly how. Not what they feel, what actually happened. I’m not defending anyone’s government, and I’m not telling anyone to calm down. If we want to hold power accountable, we need to know precisely what we’re holding it accountable for. Vague accusations get dismissed. Specific ones stick.

That question gets me one of three answers. Sometimes it blows the doors open on a real gap, no policy, no process anyone bothered to write down. Sometimes it surfaces a legitimate issue that’s been allowed to continue for years because the voter base let it slide election after election. And sometimes it’s just misinformation, spread by someone with their own political motives. Watch that third group closely. A lot of the loudest voices, plenty of accusation and zero specifics, end up running for election themselves not long after. That doesn’t prove bad faith on its own, but it usually means the accusation was never really about accountability. It was about redirecting power.

I want to be blunt, because I’m not interested in softening this: some people are just bad faith political actors, and they won’t tell you that, because the strategy depends on you not knowing it. They don’t need to lie, they just need to not correct anything and let the noise do the work for them. I’ve watched this happen so many times in First Nations spaces I could set my watch to it, and a lot of the time our own people are being treated as currency ahead of the next election, which should anger you just as much. If there’s a real concern for me to be angry about, I will be, loudly. But I don’t want to be angry just because someone on social media told me to, and I’d encourage anyone to learn an issue before agreeing with it.

I will give you an example, here. A band member from a community commented on one of my old posts just the other day, accusing me directly of creating discriminatory policy that eliminates off reserve members. That’s factually incorrect, I don’t create policy on how funding agreements can be spent, Canada does. When I asked for specifics, they replied, “that’s what I heard” (no actual policy, nothing I could trace). These conversations tend to go one of two ways: a deflection to some other argument, or, if I’m lucky, a moment of clarity where the person realizes I don’t play the role they thought I did, and that their own nation is probably just following a policy tied to a funding agreement they feel attacked by. None of that is something I created or deserve to be blamed for. But that’s the trap. Governments aren’t to be blamed for everything, and neither am I.

Governments aren’t vending machines

There’s an idea floating around that governance exists purely to deliver services, and if those services are slow or unclear, people read it as their government not caring. I understand where that comes from, the wait feels personal every time. But an Indigenous government is supposed to be a foundation for something much bigger than a service counter. It’s supposed to hold up community and continuity, a people who get to keep being a people, generation after generation, in their own institutions.

Take housing, since it’s the one I hear about most. “My chief isn’t building us all houses.” Behind that sentence is a chain most people never see. A housing manager has to work with ISC just to access money, and ISC won’t fund new builds without proper asset management already in place, maintenance schedules, condition reports. A chief can’t just call ISC and ask for a cheque. The same is true for roads and water systems. When that groundwork is missing, the delay looks like a leader who doesn’t care, when it’s actually a system that was never built to move this fast.

I saw a similar thing play out on a First Nations off reserve group online recently. Someone asked whether other members felt like they got nothing from their chief and council, and the replies filled up with people saying their band gets money for them but they personally see nothing except attention at election time. Prevention budgets from ISC, for example, are tied to members ordinarily residing on reserve, meant to build programs, family support, early intervention, the kind of infrastructure that keeps kids out of care. It isn’t designed to cover someone off reserve’s rent every month. That’s an unfortunate reality some will hate me for saying, but it’s still the reality, and one ISC will hold nations accountable for.

Service delivery matters. It’s part of the job. It was never meant to be the whole job, and there’s a real conversation to be had about personal responsibility too, one I’ll save for another piece.

Not every nation starts from the same place

Someone will point at another nation with flourishing businesses, a strong own source revenue stream, and ask why their own community can’t look like that. Fair question, usually asked without the context that explains the gap.

Own source revenue isn’t equally accessible to every nation. It’s often built on decades of early investment, geography, proximity to a city or a resource, and just as much, on the level of trust band members were willing to extend to leadership to hold money back and invest it instead of distributing it right away. You can’t operate strictly off ISC transfers, program by program, and also invest in long term wealth. Those two things don’t come from the same pool of money.

That trust piece is where a lot of nations get stuck, and I understand why. There’s so much history of money disappearing or never being explained that band members are often unwilling to let any money sit held back at all. Everyone wants their share now, which is completely understandable. But a nation actually generating its own revenue doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because at some point, a community trusted its leadership enough to invest in something that wouldn’t pay off big for years, sometimes a whole generation.

This ties back to something older too, the legacy of programs like cows and plows, where the federal government’s version of economic development for our people was handed down instead of built up, one size fits all, with no regard for what a specific nation actually needed. The nations doing well today are generally the ones that broke from that model entirely and built something of their own, with their own community’s buy-in. That’s not something you get to demand from a nation that’s never been given the trust, the geography, or the runway to try.

Governing systems, not just people

Chief and Council are meant to govern the people and the system. They aren’t meant to run it day to day, and screenshotting pieces of me saying that to fit whatever narrative someone’s attacking me with doesn’t change that. Council sets policy and strategic direction, hires and evaluates senior administrators, finance and band managers among them, and holds them accountable for how the government runs. Those administrators manage the staff who deliver programs. When Council starts directing individual employees or getting personally involved in day to day operations, that’s the exact thing governance research warns against, though it’s 100% common when a system is already broken.

People also skip the part that would actually have to break down for a “chief is stealing” story to be true. A finance manager, not the chief, is supposed to handle day to day financial management and reporting. Internal reporting, audits, the funding agreement’s own reporting schedule, financial statements Canada reviews, all of it sits between leadership and the ability to take money undetected. And if none of those systems are actually in place, that’s usually decades in the making, not something a newly elected chief built in their first year. Staff aren’t absolved of wrongdoing either, and it happens more than people think, we just rarely hear about it, because it’s easier to put a face to an elected leader than to a department. The same shows up when people say band members are being left behind. Chief and council don’t organize programming, that was never their job. Their fiduciary duty is making sure program dollars are used properly, a duty shared with the finance manager and whoever’s responsible for reporting. If programming is falling short, look first at who’s actually running it day to day.

There’s a real exception worth naming, though. Chiefs and councils under the Indian Act sign the funding agreements with Canada, and that signature carries legal responsibility for compliance, not just a political mandate. So when leadership steps in over mismanaged funds or lapsed compliance, that’s fiduciary duty, not political interference. A lot of the public frustration comes from what happens next, chief and council often can’t explain what’s going on without breaching confidentiality, a personnel matter, an HR process, something under legal review, so citizens see a leader who looks evasive when they’re actually bound not to explain themselves. In a perfect world full transparency would always be possible, but confidentiality, HR policy, and legal process are real constraints, not excuses. I’ve worked with leaders who couldn’t access their own nation’s financial records without a fight, elected to lead a government they weren’t given full visibility into.

None of this is radical, a municipal council hires one CAO and doesn’t supervise staff directly, the same way a school board oversees a director of education and not individual teachers. This is what I want young people to sit with: policy that survives a change in leadership is the proof of sovereignty, not a limit on it. But continuity is supposed to protect good systems, not shield bad ones, and staff facing zero accountability can outlast a dozen chiefs and councils without ever answering for how they’ve run things. I know this from both sides. Before this work, I was a federal public servant, and yes, that’s the actual word, servant, there to work for the people same as an elected official or band office staff, just with different duties and mandates.

One person can’t fix a system

I do this work as a technician. I go into nations trying to help build policies and processes that let fairness mean more than a word on a letterhead. I build tracking systems and data systems that work alongside the funding agreements a nation already has, and I write and apply for funding myself, and do it well. This is the unglamorous side nobody screenshots, the policy drafts, the systems built quietly so a nation has something real to stand on.

And I get attacked for it, regularly, sometimes by the very people I’m trying to help. Being public makes it worse, when someone builds a narrative against me it gets attention it wouldn’t get from anywhere else. I’ve made my peace with most of that cost. What I haven’t made peace with: picking up the phone at ten at night because a prevention staffer needs to talk through a concern before it turns into something bigger. Weekends away from my own family securing funding for a kids’ tournament that has nothing to do with me, except somebody had to do it. Dropping a family member off at treatment, sitting in my car in one of the heaviest moments of my year, and opening my phone to a screenshot from someone who’s never known me, deciding in one sentence that everything I’ve built amounts to being a content creator who doesn’t actually care. My nervous system would say otherwise, but okay.

I’m still a human being, whether anyone wants to admit that or not, and frankly, that says more about you than it does about me. I am not the system, and I am not the elected official. I am a technician who will offer whatever support I’m able to, within my abilities, for as long as leaders want it, but I won’t be bullied into silence, and I won’t apologize for wanting to see stronger communities. That’s not up for debate.

I don’t come into this work detached from reality either. There have been communities where my own mental health took a real hit, and I want to be honest about that instead of pretending this costs nothing. That’s not because I’m weak, it’s because I actually care, and caring like that leaves you exposed. It guts you when you know exactly what’s happening but can’t say it, and you watch a manufactured narrative run wild anyway.

There’s also a real gap between the work I can do, the work I’m actually allowed to do inside a given nation, and whether that work gets implemented at all. Most people watching from the outside collapse those three into one. A band staffer who doesn’t like me can tell the broader public I take a lot of money and do nothing. What doesn’t get said is that I’m typically funded through funding streams that already exist for this kind of work, running a business with real infrastructure behind it. I don’t get paid holidays, benefits, or a secure paycheque. Communities get flexibility when hiring me, and I get disregarded the moment I’m not needed. None of that travels as far as “she’s overpaid and she’s the reason for our issues,” but it’s the truth.

The machine doesn’t just burn the person it’s aimed at. It burns the people willing to serve. Good leaders and competent technicians watch what happens to the last person who tried, and quietly decide it isn’t worth it, while people acting in bad faith learn exactly how to work the machine, because outrage doesn’t check credentials before it spreads.

No single advocate, consultant, or outspoken critic fixes a governance system alone. I can build a framework and hand someone a better tool, but I can’t force a nation to pick it up and use it the way it was meant to be used. I keep building anyway, because somebody has to keep offering better tools, even knowing most will sit unused and I’ll take the blame for the ones that don’t work exactly right. Nobody building anything at all is a far worse outcome than one more consultant absorbing heat she didn’t fully deserve.

I’ve seen the real thing too

Don’t get me wrong in any of this. I’ve seen real wrongdoing. Organizations that know damn well something’s gone wrong and still take zero accountability for it, because somewhere along the way the actual mandate got lost, and it became easy to excuse behaviour that should never have been excused. Chiefs who are genuinely disengaged, checked out, coasting on a title instead of doing the work it requires.

And I’ve seen the opposite too. Leaders with their hands completely tied, doing everything they can and still facing incredible lateral violence from their own people, their own staff, sometimes their own family. The reality behind the scenes, in both directions, is so far from the public narrative it’s almost hard to put into words. That’s exactly why I keep coming back to explain exactly how, not to excuse the ones who deserve none, but because lumping every leader and every situation into the same story does a disservice to the citizens trying to tell the difference.

What advocacy actually asks of you

If you’re going to bring cynicism and criticism, bring a solution with it. Tell us how, and be specific. That’s what I’ve tried to do with my own advocacy, around MN-S and elsewhere: not just opinions about what was wrong, but offers, ideas for what real representation could look like. Criticism without a proposed fix is just noise.

There’s another risk sitting underneath all of this, and it doesn’t get talked about enough. When we’re not careful with our advocacy, we don’t just hurt the person or government we’re aiming at. We hand ammunition to people who have no real understanding of how our systems work, and no real interest in learning either. Every uninformed pile-on becomes proof, to the wrong audience, that Indigenous governments are chaotic or corrupt by nature, when what’s actually happening is citizens without the tools to understand their own systems reacting to conditions that same audience, and the ones who came before them, helped create in the first place. That’s not a reason to stay quiet. It’s a reason to be precise.

I don’t think the answer is telling people to stop being angry. Anger is often exactly the right response to real failures, and there are plenty of those. The answer is slower. Ask exactly how before sharing. Understand the difference between scarcity and theft before assuming the worst. Remember the person in front of you isn’t always the source of the shortage you’re angry about, even when they’re the only one close enough to yell at.

But I also want to end this somewhere more useful than just asking people to be careful. Community is exactly that, a community, and we’re all responsible for making it better, not just the people we elect. If you’re mad at your chief, offer a solution instead of just the anger. Ask for a safe, structured way to sit down, bring in an elder if that’s what makes the room feel honest instead of hostile, and have the actual conversation. If you’re frustrated with a program, that’s worth raising directly with the people running it, program managers could do a lot more to explain what exists, who it’s for, and why, through the same social media and community campaigns that spread everything else so fast. Most of what fuels this cycle isn’t malice, it’s silence where an explanation should have been. We can close that gap ourselves, in either direction, without waiting for a crisis to force the conversation. I am a communicator by nature, and I can offer my advice in this area, but I am not elected and can’t force it on anyone. I can just hope that advice lands and is used.

That’s where I want to leave this piece, not with a villain and not with a victory lap, but with the young person out there still deciding whether any of this is worth it. It is. Our nations were never meant to run on whoever shouts loudest. They were built to outlast all of us, if we build them right, and building them right starts with every one of us doing our part, not just the ones with a title.

Almost a year ago, it started with a tweet about a suspended regional director. Then it turned out four women had been pushed from the table, all of it allegedly tied to one CEO. I got a cease and desist that included a ban. A year of protests followed, and at one point security even threatened to call the cops on me at an assembly. Finally, in May, a letter showed up rescinding it all, careful to note that rescinding it wasn’t an admission they’d done anything wrong.

That’s the story. What follows is what a year of watching this up close taught me, even though a fair amount of it, if I’m honest, is disappointing to admit out loud.

Real governments need people to speak on issues

I’m sure some elected officials within this body hate this line, but it’s the truth, whether they want to admit it or not. Some of them like to act like they’re playing high-level politics, “politics 101,” as they’d call it. But some of us actually paid our dues. Years of formal education in this field. Years more spent learning what political theory, and more importantly its history, tells us about governments that go unchecked.

There’s a myth worth killing here. Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that dissent is the enemy of good governance. It isn’t. Legitimate governments cannot function without criticism, because criticism is part of what keeps them honest and keeps power in check. That’s exactly why provincial and federal governments in this country build official oppositions directly into how they operate, not because opposition is a nuisance to be tolerated, but because it’s structurally necessary. A government with no real, protected space for criticism isn’t a mature government. It’s an echo chamber with a fairly large budget.

I want to be careful with that comparison, though. I’m not saying MN-S should copy a provincial or federal opposition bench, or that Indigenous governance needs to mirror colonial structures to be legitimate. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. Métis governance and Métis rights aren’t borrowed concepts. They’re older than this specific institution by a long shot. But the reason accountability mechanisms exist elsewhere is still worth paying attention to, because it points at something true no matter which government you’re talking about: nothing survives long term without some real, built-in way for power to be checked. MN-S can build its own version of that, rooted in traditions that predate it, instead of borrowing someone else’s model. What it can’t do is skip the function entirely and call that self-determination.

And there’s one accountability mechanism already available to every democracy, Indigenous or otherwise: the people themselves. Citizens who ask hard questions, who show up, who refuse to look away, are doing exactly what an opposition bench or an ombudsperson is meant to do in other systems. That’s not a threat to sovereignty. It’s one of the only mechanisms sovereignty actually has to lean on until better ones get built.

That’s the standard I hold MN-S to, and it’s the standard I think it should hold itself to as it keeps building.

The pattern, not just my story

I want to be careful here. This isn’t really about me, and it’s not really about one CEO. It’s about what happens when a young government still figuring itself out runs into internal conflict, and chooses control over accountability.

What follows isn’t just a list of things MN-S got wrong. It’s what a year of watching this up close taught me about what good governance actually depends on: accountability, transparency, integrity, courage and legitimacy that’s earned rather than assumed.

1. Accountability: governments run by humans make human mistakes, and the failure is in refusing to admit it. No institution is immune to getting things wrong, especially one still forming its own norms and precedent. That’s not scandalous on its own. What’s damaging is when an organization can’t say “we made an error” without also implying the people who pointed it out were the real problem.

2. Integrity: the people who benefit from a broken system are rarely the ones who’ll admit it’s broken. I’m not talking about ordinary citizens who trust the process but haven’t seen the information they need to make a decision. I’m talking about people who land in positions of real financial and political power, sometimes without the credentials, the track record or even a clean past that would get them hired anywhere else, and who have every incentive to keep things exactly as they are, because the status quo pays well and integrity sometimes doesn’t.

3. Courage: a lot of people already knew, and almost none of them were willing to say so out loud. Once the story became public, my DMs turned into something close to a whistleblower hotline, with staff, former staff, and citizens all describing the same dysfunction from different angles. Almost none of them would go on record, because fear is an incredibly effective governance tool, whether or not anyone designed it that way on purpose.

4. Commitment: people love the fight, but almost nobody loves the work. Everyone wants the villain, the vindication, the moment leadership gets caught. Very few people want to sit through the slow, unglamorous work of actually building something: an ombudsperson, an independent audit process, real whistleblower protection. Differing ideas about how to get there turned out to be more divisive than the original scandal.

5. Legitimacy: suspending elected officials is not a neutral act. McLennan and Gervais were re-elected by their own regions while still banned from the meetings those regions elected them to attend, and you can call that a lot of things. “Respecting the democratic will of citizens” is not one of them.

6. Transparency: vagueness is their strategy, not an accident. Listen to how they talk. Look at the language their lawyers use. It’s a common theme, vague word salad and high-level slop, that they hope gets taken as gospel. “Alternative approaches.” “Other mechanisms.” “Not an admission of liability.” This is the language of an organization that has learned exactly how much it can say without saying anything.

7. Good faith: reconciliation requires someone to actually go first. MN-S President Glen McCallum’s statement talked about “relationship-building, dialogue, and mutual understanding” going forward, and I believe those things genuinely matter. But polished dialogue without any real acknowledgment isn’t dialogue, it’s damage control with proofread vocabulary, and you can’t rebuild trust with people you still won’t admit you wronged.

8. Integrity, again: words like sovereignty and self-determination carry weight, and you don’t get to hide behind them. This one might be controversial, but as someone who has spent years studying and trying to build up and revitalize Indigenous governance, I’ll say it anyway. As Indigenous governments, we can’t hide behind accountability, and we can’t use words that carry real meaning, sovereignty, self-determination, to do it either. Reaching for a lawyer and a cease and desist one week, then reaching for the language of self-governance the next, isn’t practicing sovereignty. Stepping in and out of colonial tools whenever it’s convenient isn’t how this works. Those words mean something, and they come with responsibilities attached.

The locals need to be more engaged

This isn’t just a story about leadership at the top. The local structures inside MN-S, the regions and locals that are supposed to be the closest point of contact between citizens and their government, have their own problems. A lot of citizens don’t feel represented by them either, and I don’t think that’s a small or simple issue to fix. It’s tangled up in decades of history, in how these locals were built, who built them, and who they were built to serve. I’m not pretending there’s an easy answer here.

What I do know is there isn’t time to wait this out. MN-S is in the middle of negotiating a modern treaty, a process that will shape self-governance and rights for generations of Métis people in this province. That negotiation is moving forward whether or not these representation gaps get fixed first. Big changes are coming, with or without the internal structure ready to handle them responsibly, and that should worry every citizen this government claims to represent, not just the ones already paying close attention.

None of these lessons are complicated on their own. Put together, they add up to a simple test: does a government treat its citizens as the check on its own power, or as the threat to it? MN-S failed that test more than once this year. Whether it keeps failing it is still an open question, and one worth watching closely.

This isn’t just about MN-S, either. It’s about how we build better, and what our own role actually is in that process. Not all loudness is advocacy. Some of it is just noise dressed up as commitment, and part of what this year taught me is how important it is to know the difference, in others and in myself.

That’s Part Three. See you there.

Quick bit of context if you’re new to this story. Métis Nation-Saskatchewan, or MN-S, is the government representing more than 26,000 registered Métis citizens in the province, including my own children and a good chunk of my family on my mom’s side. It has a president, a provincial council, a legislative assembly of local presidents, staff, and a large budget mostly funded by the federal government, essentially all the machinery of a government, because it’s supposed to be one. It’s also young, still figuring out its own rules as it goes, and I mention that only because it matters for what happened next.

It started with a thread on Twitter, nothing dramatic, at least I didn’t think so at the time. What I’d actually heard first was that Sherry McLennan, a regional director for my area who sits on the Provincial Métis Council, had been suspended from the table. Anytime an elected representative gets suspended from the body their own citizens voted them onto, that should be treated as one of the most serious things that can happen inside a government, so I started asking about it, out loud.

It didn’t take long to learn Sherry wasn’t the only one. Eventually I learned that four women in total had been pushed out in some form, all of it allegedly tied back to the CEO, and all of it framed around the idea that he was owed an apology before any of them could return. This was a man who, from what I could tell, had spent his career working for the federal government in Ottawa and living somewhere in Ontario or Quebec, honestly, who really knows at this point, before becoming the top non-elected employee of this government, and eventually, also a Métis citizen of Saskatchewan.

I hit send and went on with my day.

Within a very short time frame I received a notification on my phone. An email had landed in my inbox, dressed up in the letterhead of a corporate law firm out of British Columbia, the kind designed to make you feel small before you’ve even read the first line. A cease and desist, an indefinite ban, effective immediately, from meetings and from any part of the governance process for Métis people in this province.

I read it twice, just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what was in front of me, and I wasn’t. I called my lawyer before I’d even finished processing it.

That day I had a choice, and honestly, it wasn’t as hard as you may think. I could cower in the face of a legal threat, or I could take my voice, and everything I believed in that had built it, and fight like hell. I picked the second one. My lawyer didn’t just push back informally. She sent a formal response challenging the entire basis for what they’d done. On what authority, exactly, did MN-S believe it could impose an indefinite ban and a legal threat against anyone, but in this case, a political commentator raising public questions about a government body? Beyond that, she pointed out that this kind of restriction runs straight into constitutionally protected political expression, and that there had been no procedural fairness here at all, no explanation, no process to contest it, nothing but a letterhead and a threat. We asked them directly to clarify the legal grounds they were relying on.

We never got an answer. Not a rebuttal, not a clarification, not even an acknowledgment that the question had been received. Just silence, and honestly, that told me plenty on its own.

Here’s something I already knew going in, because I’ve done this work for years. When you’re a political commentator, a legal threat is always a risk sitting somewhere on the horizon, since you’re challenging power, and power doesn’t like being challenged. That’s not a surprise to me, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who does this kind of work honestly. What I’ve also learned, over and over, is that power tends to go unchecked or simply unheard when nobody with any reach is willing to say something, and that having a nationally known voice at the table can actually move the needle, especially when that voice comes in with a real community already behind it. I didn’t build my platforms overnight. I spent years building that base as an Indigenous woman, one post and one hard conversation at a time, long before any of this started, and that mattered here whether some want to admit it or not. It also proved to be widely underestimated by a select few in this government.

Apparently I’ve been a topic of conversation on more than one occasion, in their rooms that I was never invited into. In fact, none of them actually had a conversation with me. Even to this day. From what’s made its way back to me, some of them actually had to sit down and figure out how I operate, because the assumption seems to have been that nobody pushes this hard unless there’s something to gain from it. I think my favourite rumour is that they somehow thought this was a federal political party plot. There isn’t, and there never has been. I’ve never been paid a cent to advocate for any of this. If anything, it works the opposite way for me. I’m neurodivergent, and my brain is wired, genuinely and biologically, to go after issues like this the second I see them. On top of that, I’ve simply never been able to stomach institutions of power acting like they’re untouchable.

I want to be clear about why this matters to me, too. I didn’t work this hard to build a voice for myself. I worked this hard to build one for the people who don’t have one, the citizens who don’t have a lawyer ready to go, a public platform, or years of relationships to fall back on the moment a government decides to come after them.

Here’s a wrinkle worth mentioning up front. I’m Métis through my mother and First Nations through my father, and because I hold status under the Indian Act, MN-S citizenship isn’t something I currently qualify for. It’s a longer story for another day, but it hasn’t stopped me from caring, or from asking hard questions, about a government that says it represents Métis people across this province.

In the midst of all of this, the CEO reportedly received a $500,000 payout and eventually “transitioned out” of the role almost a year after all of this began. Both suspended women were later re-elected by their regions, and both remained banned from attending in-person meetings anyway until Spring 2026 and after the CEO made his departure. These issues aren’t just rumours either. They’re simply the shape of what happened.

It wasn’t the only time I got treated like more of a threat than a commentator either. When I tried to test their legal threat and showed up to the Métis Nation Legislative Assembly in the fall of 2025, their hired security threatened to call the police on me, not because I’d done anything threatening in that moment, but because of who I was. I’ve spent years working in federal politics, and I have real relationships, built over a long career, both provincially and federally. I existed as a former public servant with the federal government under security clearance. Being welcomed into rooms at that level while a security guard at an Indigenous-led assembly treated me like a criminal didn’t make me look like the problem. It made them look desperate, and I treated it as such.

And it went further than the assembly floor. At one point during all of this, I was told that some top employees were allegedly getting desperate, even going as far as calling other contacts of mine in the space in Saskatchewan to tell them not to share my commentary. Then, imagine my surprise, when the very top of the organization, the president himself, called a member of my husband’s family. Not my lawyer. Not me directly. A mutual connection, in what can only be read as an attempt to get me to back off. A serious institution doesn’t need to go through a mutual connection, or any of your family members, to have a conversation, and for a government using plenty of legal resources elsewhere, it’s funny they didn’t reach for them this time.

So I protested. I stood outside with a small group of people while some drivers slowed down just to tell us to keep up the good work. Some of the elected ones looked at us like we were criminals instead, windows rolled up, too scared to say a word either way. For a long time it felt like shouting into a closed room, and then the movement kept going, the questions kept coming, and a government that thought it was untouchable started to unravel.

I got my rescission letter this May. So did eleven other people: academics, philanthropists, researchers, lawyers, commentators, and citizens who genuinely care about their government and who have spent years inside this system trying to make it better. The letter, from a Vancouver law firm, says the bans are lifted. It also says, almost in the same breath, that lifting them “is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing.” Instead, it says leadership is exploring “other mechanisms” to deal with people like us.

Read that again, because they un-banned twelve people and then used the very next sentence to suggest they might still have been right to ban us in the first place. That’s not even remotely close to an apology. That’s a government trying to have it both ways, and honestly, it’s incredibly unbecoming of anyone trying to be taken seriously as a government.

Make no mistake about why it happened when it did. The decision to rescind the bans and restore the women to the table wasn’t made because anyone got magically humbled. It happened because the noise got too loud, because every news story about MN-S started carrying the same caveat, that this is a government riddled with controversy. That’s what moved them. Not conscience. The negative, yet entirely realistic, coverage.

That’s how it started, and how the letter finally landed. But a year fighting something like this teaches you more than just the surface level of what happened. It teaches you what an institution actually looks like underneath the resolutions and the legal threats, who was really in this for the people, and who was never really a leader at all.

Good governance depends on scrutiny. It depends on citizens, commentators, and elected officials being able to ask hard questions without facing legal threats or exclusion for doing so. That principle is at the center of everything I've worked toward in this space, and it's exactly what was tested this year.

That’s Part Two. See you there.