Book review: Heather Menzies reconciles stolen land, unconscious racism and healing (2025)

Meeting My Treaty Kin

Heather Menzies | On Point Press

$29.95 | 254pp.

Like many in Canada, the award-winning author, activist, and member of the Order of Canada Heather Menzies is uneasily aware she lives on stolen Indigenous land. In her case, the connection between her family and the dispossession and cultural genocide that built the Canadian state is very personal.

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Her own Scots ancestors, driven off their Highland farms by 19th century enclosures, came to Canada and bought land in southern Ontario from the Canadian Land Company, land that had been stolen from the Indigenous nations that lived, and still live close to what settler cartography labels Lake Huron.

The theft was accomplished through a duplicitous treaty, one of many agreements that the Indigenous viewed as generous arrangements to share the land with the new arrivals from Europe. The settlers preferred to see these treaties as full surrender of land and its resources and moved aggressively to push the original inhabitants of the land onto postage-stamp sized “reserves.”

Even these tiny allotments were often not respected. Too often they were further infringed upon.

One of these infringements saw land allotted to the Nishnaabe peoples at Aazhoodena — Stony Point — along the shores of Lake Huron, taken by the federal government to create a military base, Camp Ipperwash, during WWII. The appropriation came with a promise that the land would be returned to the people.

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In 1993, with that promise still unfulfilled, some Nishnaabe, led by a Second World War veteran, Clifford George,went home to the stolen reserve and refused to leave. A long and public stand off occurred until a botched raid by Ontario Provincial Police led to the death of one of unarmed occupiers, Dudley George, in 1995

Menzies came to Aazhoodena to try to establish a healing relationship with the descendants of the people her family dispossessed. In the end she provided support and facilitation as a group of the descendants created a book, Our Long Struggle for Home: The Ipperwash Story.

But the creation of that book entailed a difficult learning process for Menzies. Despite her years of experience, Menzies had a lot to learn about her own unconscious racism and about the structural racism that pervades the world of book writing and publishing. Meeting My Treaty Kin is her account of that learning process. It is a book with important lessons for anyone living on stolen native land and wanting to advance the difficult work of reconciliation.

While some readers may object to Menzies tone, finding it a shade too earnest, even bordering on twee, many other readers, including this reviewer, will be moved by the author’s honesty and eloquence.

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Highly recommended.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips attos65@telus.net

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