Ground Rules

If we are to survive long term, we need to give the land back, first, to Yethi’nihstenha Mother Earth herself, to her rules and practical laws, and, second, to Indigenous governance and ways of proceeding, which were fashioned within the framework of her rules. To do this, we need to align our laws, as Indigenous people have been telling us all along, with earth’s laws, with what Onondaga naturopathic doctor Johanne McCarthy calls Mother Earth’s house rules, her “ground rules.” Western legal systems cannot give the land back to its own ground rules because they are grounded in a foreign and inappropriate set of basic philosophical assumptions about what land is and what its laws are. As Onondaga leader Oren Lyons wrote back in the 1980s: “it is important to understand that when a government develops laws to rule the people, it must develop those laws in accordance with the natural law; otherwise, the laws will fail” (12). The PCBs collecting in the rivers and mothers’ milk at Akwesasne, the sewage in Hamilton’s Chedoke Creek, constitute their own judgment, regardless of what courts or city councils decide. These pollutants are handing out sentences to fish and algae, lake grass and white pines—and to humans. Already people have been forced to move their habitations, businesses, farms, and fisheries to other places, out of immediate range of toxified watersheds. There are no loopholes, no exceptions, no pardons, bail, nor parole. The true sovereignty of land itself remains non-negotiable.

And it is Indigenous understandings of land as animate, sovereign, reasoning and reasonable that can challenge and reorient the damage caused by the assumptions carried within the Western sailing ship. We need to reassess the culture, beliefs, and laws that have steered us so far off course, causing us to smear the living skies, lakes, and rivers with deadly chemical sludge. Perhaps, as the extent of our predicament grows upon our awareness, we will reach for our end of the Covenant Chain, asking our disregarded allies of the Indigenous canoe for their help to address the self-made threat to our own—as well as their—way of life. Perhaps, we will begin to ask: what are the laws of this land whose sovereignty we ignored? What, in fact, is land, in the first place?—and what is it “for”?

Listening to Indigenous ways of thinking might open us to the sentience of earth, to what Anishinaabe-Haudenosaunee philosopher Dr. Vanessa Watts calls “place-thought.” “Place-Thought,” she explains, “is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.” Hearkening to the teachings contained in her ancestors’ creation stories, of the Sky Woman who fell to earth where sentient waterbirds and animals conferred about how best to sustain her, Watts illustrates by contrast the Western tendency to split off thinking and brain life (epistemology) from being and body life (ontology). How the delusion of human exceptionalism which grew from the idea that humans are the only ones who think has lifted us off of the ground on which we live, leaving us both groundless and ungrounded. In her ancestors’ teachings, by contrast, Watts shows how the land’s many beings are understood to express intelligence, place-thought:

Where waters flow and pool, where mountains rise and turn into valleys, all of these become demarcations of who will reside where, how they will live, and how their behaviours toward one another are determined. Scientists refer to this as ecosystems or habitats. However, if we accept the idea that all living things contain spirit, then this extends beyond complex structures within an ecosystem. It means that non-human beings choose how they reside, interact and develop relationships with other non-humans. So, all elements of nature possess agency, and this agency is not limited to innate action or causal relationships.

Understanding place and land as animated with spirit and agency informs civic, political, and legal relationships, as Watts goes on to explain: “Thus, habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement. Non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society. The very existence of clan systems evidences these many historical agreements between humans and non-humans.”

Watts quotes Cree attorney, Sharon Venne, on the implications for Indigenous understandings of sovereignty. Whereas Western concepts of sovereignty conceive of absolute power vested in human institutions (think of Hobbes’s monarchial Sovereign), Venne explains, “For us absolute power is in the Creator and the natural order of all living things; not only in human beings… Our sovereignty is related to our connections to the earth and is inherent. The idea of a nation did not simply apply to human beings. We call the buffalo or the wolves, the fish, the trees, and all are nations. Each is sovereign, an equal part of the creation, interdependent, interwoven, and all related.”

Understanding the earth’s own sovereignty demands that we who have usurped the idea of authority and power need to return the land back to itself, to its set of laws, its own requirements and orders. Its ground rules.

Because, in the end, ground rules.

To reorient the sailing ship’s culture, beliefs, and laws requires polishing the chain, reanimating the peace, good-mindedness, and respect laid out in the Two Row agreement, to reground our norms by learning from our allies in the canoe. In this sense, it is in all of our best interest—Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike—to support the resurgence of Indigenous people’s knowledge, culture, science, art, and languages, and the lifeways that emerge from them. Colonialism tried to destroy so many of these things, and it succeeded in separating many Indigenous people from the knowledges and values their ancestors had held. Now we need these teachings—all of us do. The renewed ground rules will require us all to foster the conditions in which current generations of Indigenous youth can re-encounter their Elders, learn their languages, participate in their ceremonies, spend time in their traditional lands, so that they can re-ignite the hearths where their traditions have been maintained.

While this reorientation undoubtedly constitutes a major and profound shift in our own Canadian culture, beliefs, and laws, it is not impossible to do. As Watts puts it, it simply requires us to listen to and follow the advice of those whose “ears … remain open and low to the ground.”

*Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant* by Daniel Coleman (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

About Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant:

Grandfather of the Treaties shares Coleman’s extensive study of Haudenosaunee wampum agreements with European nations. It was written in close consultation with many Indigenous scholars and shows how we can chart a new future for everyone living in what we now call Canada—Indigenous, settler, more recent arrival—by tracing wampum’s long-employed, now-neglected past. The Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty tradition models how to develop good minds so that we can live peacefully together on the river of life that sustains us all. It is a philosophy, an ethical system, a way of learning to live as relatives with our human and more-than-human neighbours. This covenant has been called the “grandfather of the treaties,” and is also considered the grandmother of Canada’s Constitution.

More about Daniel Coleman:

Daniel Coleman is a recently retired English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He taught in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He studies and writes about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented in by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.

Daniel has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has published numerous academic and creative non-fiction books as an author and as an editor. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006; winner of the Raymond Klibansky prize), In Bed With the Word (2009), and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).